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Why Study Religion?
Why Study Religion?
R IC HA R D B. M I L L E R
1
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Miller, Richard Brian, 1953– author.
Title: Why study religion? / Richard B. Miller, University of Chicago.
Description: New York, NY, United States of America : Oxford University
Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021035214 (print) | LCCN 2021035215 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197566817 | ISBN 9780197566831 (epub) |
ISBN 9780197566824 | ISBN 9780197566848
Subjects: LCSH: Religion—Methodology. | Religion—Study and teaching.
Classification: LCC BL41 .M545 2021 (print) |
LCC BL41 (ebook) | DDC 200.71—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021035214
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021035215
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197566817.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
To humanistic intellectuals in the study of religion—and beyond.
Today there are plenty of modest and worthy laborers among
scholars, too, who are happy in their little nooks; and because they
are happy there, they sometimes demand rather immodestly that
one ought to be content with things today, generally—especially
in the domain of science, where so much that is useful remains to
be done. I am not denying that; the last thing I want is to destroy
the pleasure these honest workers take in their craft: for I approve
of their work. But that one works rigorously in the sciences and
that there are contented workers certainly does not prove that sci-
ence as a whole possesses a goal, a will, an ideal, or the passion of a
great faith.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
One of the many curious facts about academic life in America is that
very few people who work in the humanities ever think about them.
—Geoffrey Galt Harpham, The Humanities and the Dream of
America
We should not try to define “the humanities” by asking what the

humanities departments share which distinguishes them from the
rest of the university. The interesting divide is, instead, one that cuts
across departments and disciplinary matrices. It divides people busy
conforming to well-understood criteria for making contributions to
knowledge from people trying to expand their own moral imagin-
ations. These latter people read books in order to enlarge their sense
of what is possible and important—either for themselves as individ-
uals or for their society. Call these people “humanistic intellectuals.”
One often finds more such people in the anthropology department
than in the classics department, and sometimes more in the law
school than in the philosophy department. . . . When they apply for
a leave or a grant, they may have to fill out forms about the aims and
methods of their so-called research projects, but all they really want
to do is read a lot more books in the hope of becoming a different
sort of person.
—Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
I . A C R I SI S O F R AT IO NA L E
1. On Justifying the Study of Religion 3
2. The Ethics of Religious Studies 18
I I . A R E G I M E O F T RU T H
3. Interpretation, Comparison, and the History of Religions:
On the historian of religion, Jonathan Z. Smith 45
4. Scientific Rationality and Causal Explanation: On the
naturalism of Donald Wiebe 71
5. Existential Symbolism and Theological Anthropology:
On the Protestant theologian, Paul Tillich 95
6. Embodied Practice and Materialist Phenomenology:
On the sociologist of religion, Manuel A. Vásquez 127
7. Genealogy, Ideology, and Critical Theory: On Russell
T. McCutcheon, Timothy Fitzgerald, and Saba Mahmood 147
8. Philosophy, Normativity, and Metacriticism: On the
philosophers of religion, Stephen S. Bush and Kevin Schilbrack 191
I I I . P U R P O SE S , D E SI R E S , A N D
C R I T IC A L H UM A N I SM
9. Religious Studies and the Values of Critical Humanism 239
Epilogue: Critical Humanism as a Vocation 303

Notes 307
Bibliography 331
Index 349
Acknowledgments
This book is about theory, method, and purpose in the study of religion,
arguing for a course correction in the priorities and ideals that animate the
field. In developing this work, I have benefited from conversations with nu-
merous friends and colleagues in the study of religion and the humanities
more widely, along with invaluable institutional support. Indiana University
provided research leave during the initial phase of this project in 2013–
2014, and I am grateful to the IU College of Arts and Sciences and to former
colleagues there, especially Aaron Stalnaker and Michael Ing, for their
feedback on the earliest iteration of this project. Soon after arriving at the
University of Chicago, I presented a draft of chapters 1 and 2 at the annual re-
treat of the Divinity School faculty and was helped by input from colleagues
there, especially my respondent Kevin Hector. Sarah Fredericks and Margaret
Mitchell also provided thoughtful commentary on that material and the
project as a whole. I presented a draft of what became chapter 3 at Boston
University at the invitation of David DeCosimo and I am grateful to him,
his colleagues, and students the Department of Religious Studies and School
of Theology for their input during my visit in November of 2016. Chapter 8
could not have been conceived without a conversation with Dana Logan, who
urged me to engage moral theory and philosophical criticism more exten-
sively during a conversation at the annual meeting of American Academy
of Religion in 2014. Kathleen McHugh of the School of Theater, Film, and
Television and the Department of English at UCLA provided me with office
space and support during a visit to Los Angeles in the spring of 2016, ena-
bling me to draft portions of chapters 6 and 8. During a visit to the University
of Georgia in 2018, at the invitation of Melissa Seymour Fahmy and Robert
Foster, I had the benefit of extended conversations with Joshua Patterson that
broadened my sense of the project’s audience and reach. Courtney Campbell
and Amy Koehlinger, along with students and colleagues at Oregon State
University, provided a forum to discuss a draft of c hapter 9 and the overall
project in March 2017. Ellen Muehlberger pressed me to think expansively
about voices in the field, and Maria Antonaccio made suggestions about
liberal education and the humanities that enriched the book’s argument
x Acknowledgments
considerably. Kevin Schilbrack and Richard Rosengarten read a previous

draft of the manuscript and made numerous thoughtful suggestions for
improvement. David Brakke, Diana Fritz Cates, DeAne Lagerquist, Tal
Lewis, Terence Martin, Kelsey Mulcahy, Carol O’Dea, Doug Ottati, William
Schweiker, Charles Wilson, and Jeff Wolin contributed valuable ideas and en-
couragement as the project unfolded. Cynthia Read received the manuscript
enthusiastically and enlisted ideal readers who offered feedback that grasped
the project’s critical and constructive aims and modeled how a careful review
process should be carried out. Over the past several years, Wendy Doniger
has regularly provided knowledge, levity, and a seasoned outlook on the field
that has no peer. I extend heartfelt thanks to these friends and colleagues for
their generous suggestions, queries, and encouragement.
Barbara Klinger and Matt Miller have been tireless in their support for this
work; words cannot suffice to express my gratitude.
—Chicago, April 2021
***
An early draft of Chapter 3 was published as “Normativity and Social
Criticism in the Study of Religion,” by the Boston University Institute of
Culture, Religion, and World Affairs at https://www.bu.edu/cura/files/2016/
11/paperforweb.pdf.
I
A C R ISIS OF R ATIONA LE
1
On Justifying the Study of Religion
1.1. Fraternal Weberian Twins
Can the academic study of religion be justified? Should it be included in the

curricula of higher education? Do good reasons exist that could motivate
scholars to take up the study of religion as a profession?
These questions were fundamental to debates about developing the study
of religion in American higher education during the 1960s and 1970s,
but decades later they have yet to receive a convincing reply. In this book
I will answer them in the affirmative and argue for that answer. Doing so
requires us to see why scholars of religion actually deny themselves reasons
for tackling these questions directly. Determining whether the academic
study of religion can be justified, whether it belongs in college curricula, and
whether reasons exist to motivate scholars to study religion means that we
must resolve uncertainties in the guild about whether such questions can be
answered.
To be sure, doubts about whether the academic study of religion is justified
are not unique to scholars of religion. Nor are they new. In his 1917 lecture,
“Science as a Vocation,” Max Weber asks whether disciplines in the modern
university provide a basis for taking them up as a career. His answer, briefly
stated, is that they cannot, and his reason sheds important light on the jus-
tificatory status of the study of religion.1 Science—by which Weber means
not only the natural sciences but also the historical and cultural sciences—is
unable to explain why its practitioners should enter the academy. In Weber’s
diagnosis, modern science has become more specialized and continues to
extend the reach of rational investigation into new, uncharted terrain. But
the increasing specialization of scholarly inquiry cannot provide grounds
for the academic pursuit of knowledge and address broader questions about
value and existential commitment. Although scientists doubtless have their
own subjective reasons for choosing their profession, they must remain
staunchly value-neutral in their work to ensure reliable results in their re-
search. Otherwise they impose value-laden commitments that bias what
Why Study Religion?. Richard B. Miller, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197566817.003.0001
4 Why Study Religion?
should be an objective point of view. According to Weber, research regarding

the physical universe, as well as human values and religious traditions, must
proceed in a disinterested way.2 He writes: “It is one thing to state facts, to
determine the mathematical or logical relations or the internal structure of
cultural values, while it is another thing to answer questions of the value of
culture and the question of how one should act in the cultural community
and in political associations. These are quite heterogeneous problems.” To
the question why both types of problems should not be addressed together
in the classroom he replies: “Because the prophet and the demagogue do not
belong on the academic platform.”3
Thinking about premodern science helps sharpen Weber’s point. Previous
reasons for practicing science—to know God’s design or to discover the basis
for human happiness, for example—have fallen away as grounds for under-
standing science’s contribution to human knowledge because the universe
is no longer seen as speaking to such matters. “The fate of our times,” Weber
writes, “is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above
all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’ ”4 Modern science is thus now
largely instrumental and utilitarian. It enables us to acquire greater mastery
of the world, improves our methods for the training of thought, and adds
clarity about how best to achieve our ends and give an account of our own
subjective convictions.5 As Weber sees things, “science today is a ‘vocation’
organized in special disciplines in the service of self-clarification and know-
ledge of interrelated facts. It is not the gift of grace of seers and prophets
dispensing sacred values and revelations, nor does it partake of the contem-
plation of sages and philosophers about the meaning of the universe.”6
To be sure, Weber grasps that science is not without its own
presuppositions. The scientist “presupposes that the rules of logic and
method are valid” and, for that matter, believes “that what is yielded by sci-
entific work is important in that it is ‘worth being known.’ ” But herein lies
the rub for Weber: this latter presupposition “cannot be proved by scientific
means.”7 Science cannot speak to individuals who are considering whether
to become scientists; instead, it must presume its own importance. Deciding
to embark upon a profession is a value question to which science as a value-
neutral enterprise declines to answer.
As a result, Weber concludes, modern science lacks reasons to account for
itself or to motivate scholars to take it up as a career. Whatever reasons one
might have for joining the academy would have to be subjective and idiosyn-
cratic. Distinguishing between facts and values thereby urges upon scholars
On Justifying the Study of Religion 5
a kind of epistemic abstinence toward ensuring that scientific research is

carried out according to value-neutral procedures. Indeed, the commitment
to value-neutrality is what Friedrich Nietzsche, a key influence on Weber,
describes as an “ascetic ideal”: the aspiration to attain an impartial, disem-
bodied, impersonal point of view, detached from one’s emotions, contexts,
and desires.8 According to Nietzsche, the ascetic ideal articulates itself across
a range of practices—art, medicine, psychology, and philosophy—in the ef-
fort to acquire a vantage point that rises above human mortality, finitude,
and embodied desire. As a form of “intellectual stoicism,” it is the offspring
of religious selflessness and self-denial, an exercise of self-abnegation that
imposes on modern life expectations of impersonal and “unegoistic” know-
ledge of “the visible order of things.”9 Echoing these ideas, Weber insists that
the academic conscience should be constrained by the imperative of disinter-
estedness, one that sharply distinguishes between fact and value, reason and
emotion, impartial procedure and personal calling.
One of Weber’s signature claims, then, is that science should be an austere,
dispassionate, value-neutral enterprise, requiring a hermeneutics of absti-
nence that is stripped of desires and commitments that would bias a scholar’s
thought. “Whenever the man of science introduces his personal value
judgments,” he insists, “a full understanding of the facts ceases.”10 Yet there is
a second important idea in Weber’s lecture that can be easily missed, namely,
the idea that science produces knowledge that is instrumental and utilitarian.
By enabling us to acquire greater mastery of the world, he observes, science
is increasingly tethered to economic, pragmatic, and occupational aims. The
work of the modern scientist, on Weber’s description, provides fuel to the
university as an engine of the economy. Weber thus connects two ideas to
describe the ethos of the modern academy: value-neutrality and pragmatic
utility. Ironically for Weber, value-neutrality is anything but value-neutral. It
motivates a form of knowledge production about how to extend our control
over the natural and social world and advance the promise of social progress
and economic growth. Epistemic detachment and pragmatic utility are fra-
ternal Weberian twins.
Much of the contemporary study of religion has internalized and normal-
ized Weber’s heroic ideal. It generally conforms to his description of modern
science insofar as it is an increasingly specialized discipline that aims to
extend rational inquiry into new frontiers of culture, thought, and society
in a dispassionate, value-neutral way. Like Weber’s view of science, it often
presumes its own self-justification and, at the theoretical level, concentrates
on matters of research methodology. Although religions are saturated with

values, Weber would urge scholars of religion to be value-neutral so as to en-
sure objective results in their work. And generally speaking, scholars of reli-
gion, especially theorists of religion, abide by Weber’s mandate. The idea is to
insist upon studying religion in ways that are disinterested, free of normative
interrogation and evaluation. Scholars can thus let religious practitioners
(and their cultural documents) speak for themselves, from within their own
contexts, and in their own languages—uncluttered by evaluative commen-
tary by those who study them. If values do motivate a scholar’s work, they are
often introduced as autobiographical and personal matters but not in ways
that are intersubjectively proffered and defended within a space of reasons.
Weber would quickly observe that scholars of religion, like other modern
academics, thus find it hard to defend the value of their work or to commend
it to present and future generations of students and potential specialists. It
should come as no surprise, he would add, that they have tremendous diffi-
culty saying why their work has merit and addressing the questions I identi-
fied at the outset of this chapter.11
1.2. An Overbearing Conscience
What a Weberian diagnosis might have us overlook, however, is a unique

feature of the academic study of religion that renders a justificatory ac-
count even more difficult to provide. Religious studies is unusual because,
unlike other disciplines, it has reasons to be wary about championing its
merits. As I will discuss in chapter 2, the guild has grounds for being reluc-
tant to account for itself—to justify itself—as important. That reluctance is
not simply a function of the limits of carrying out science according to the
requirements of dispassionate value-neutrality. It is also the function of prin-
cipled concerns about self-justification. Scholars in the field may well refrain
from commending the study of religion not merely because they think they
must abide by the ascetic ideal but also because moral doubts exist about the
very practice of justification itself. In religious studies there are reasons of
conscience to remain reticent about the value of studying religion that are
tied to reservations about being one’s own judge and jury.
Why Study Religion? aims to diagnose why the academic study of religion
is unable and unwilling to justify itself and show how it can overcome what
I will describe as the guild’s overbearing conscience about voicing its merits.
It aims to break the spell under which so much of the study of religion con-
tinues to operate with its preoccupation with theory and method. To that
end, in the pages that follow I will identify core features of the guild’s oper-
ating procedures, expose its hermeneutics of abstinence, and offer a correc-
tive to its ascetic idealism. We will learn why the academic study of religion is
preoccupied with developing theories about the proper methods of research
absent reference to justificatory goals of scholarly work, and why such a pre-
occupation leads nowhere. In my view, the future of religious studies, de-
pendent as it is on attracting new scholars to the guild, will turn on how well
it can articulate its ends as a basis for making sense of itself. This book is de-
voted to making a case for doing so.
I will develop this argument, both critical and constructive, first by
examining six methodological paradigms in the field. I cast them as ideal
types and will examine the supporting ideas of their most visible and in-
fluential proponents. They are the Interpretive- Comparative Method
(Jonathan Z. Smith), the Scientific-Explanatory Method (Donald Wiebe),
the Theological-Anthropological Method (Paul Tillich), the Materialist-
Phenomenological Method (Manuel A. Vásquez), the Genealogical-
Ideological Method (Russell T. McCutcheon, Timothy Fitzgerald, and Saba
Mahmood), and the Philosophical-Evaluative Method (Stephen S. Bush and
Kevin Schilbrack). Each of these methodological programs has its own spe-
cific logic to organize ways of investigating religious phenomena. They all
draw from, and build upon, broad concepts that lie strewn across the aca-
demic landscape: comparison, hermeneutics, naturalism, existentialism,
phenomenology, ideology, materialism (of different sorts), genealogy, post-
structuralism, empiricism, and pragmatism. Although each model presumes
a distinctive picture of rationality for studying religion, they all draw from a
wider lexicon in the academy to produce a matrix of cross-cutting concepts
and distinctions that enable us to put them in dialogue with each other.
When their proponents fail to fully repress values and commitments in their
arguments, they do so largely unaware or in undisciplined, haphazard, and
quixotic ways. I will devote a chapter to each of these methodologies by iso-
lating and comparing their defining features, foils, and core claims on the
way toward identifying what I judge to be their strengths and weaknesses.
Those chapters are followed by a full-throated corrective to the guild’s
ascetic ideal— the constructive part of the argument. Religious studies
can account for itself as contributing to a larger project that I call Critical
Humanism. As I will describe it, Critical Humanism offers a distinctive way
of knowing that is held together by several values. It involves habits and

pleasures of mind that go beyond conforming to well-understood criteria
for making contributions to knowledge by aiming to inform and expand the
moral imagination, and it articulates a set of purposes according to which the
study of religion can account for itself. I will identify and defend fundamental
humanistic values, pleasures, and habits of mind in the concluding chapter of
this book. With those ideas in hand, scholars of religion can relax their com-
mitment to ascetic idealism and avow the values of studying religion. And
they can provide a counter-theory to the grim seriousness of value-neutrality
and marketplace utility that conspires to shape much of modern higher edu-
cation today.
Briefly stated, Critical Humanism aims to make available information
about, as well as tools for, critically examining human aspirations; sources
of authority, power, and domination; and different visions of the good
life, among other matters. The core idea is that human beings are persons
with depth, dependent on and capable of critically exploring their received
notions of what is true and good as the basis of human decision and action.
Along with that is the idea that we are brought to self-consciousness through
the awareness of an other—that knowledge, self-knowledge, and recogni-
tion are all coeval and interdependent. The goals of Critical Humanism are
to understand the processes, idioms, authorities, and contexts of human
thought and agency as evidenced in various cultural texts, social locations,
and artifacts. And it does so, I will argue, by offering what Geoffrey Galt
Harpham calls “an awakened understanding of oneself as a member of the
human species, a heightened alertness to the possibilities of being human.”12
Moreover, Critical Humanism can create and test new imaginaries according
to which we can describe, explain, and evaluate ourselves. The academic
study of religion can conceive of itself as one area of research and teaching
within this larger orbit of humanistic inquiry. In that way it can find a raison
d’être. With that proposal in mind, I will frame how religious studies can jus-
tify itself and contribute to broader currents in the humanities. The overall
aim is to identify the intellectual excellences that can animate what I call the
religious studies project and remove the blinders that prevent scholars of re-
ligion from seeing those virtues along with the challenges and opportunities
that they provide.
It is also the case that Critical Humanism seeks to uncover the intellec-
tual commitments that enable scholars to render religion amenable to schol-
arly inquiry. As a self-reflexive enterprise, Critical Humanism can help us
become aware of aspirations that motivate the study of religion along with
the hermeneutics of abstinence that currently works to shape it. It will reveal
a pattern of thinking and a form of power/knowledge in religious studies—
what Michel Foucault calls an episteme or a “regime of truth.” A regime of
truth, Foucault writes, is a set of “ordered procedures for the production,
regulation, distribution, circulation, and operation of statements” according
to which “the true and the false are separated and specific effects of power
[are] attached to the true.”13 Such a regime is an intellectual force field that
regulates “the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true;
the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and
false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and
procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who
are charged with saying what counts as true.”14 Equally important, a regime of
truth is not the possession of any single person or agency. It is widely diffuse,
coursing through a network of mutually enforcing practices, institutions,
and modes of inquiry.
Critical Humanism offers an optic for exposing and critiquing the regime
of truth’s objectifying gaze in the study of religion.15 And it can offer a way
to ease the overly demanding conscience under which the guild has labored
for the last several decades. The value of disinterestedness and its ascetic
ideals are anything but value-neutral, and there is no reason to accept their
imperatives as settled doctrine. The ideals they instantiate will undergo a rad-
ical reordering and constructive transvaluation in the chapters that follow.
Religious studies has been disabled by an ascetic ideal that prevents it from
championing its merits and providing motivating reasons for studying it.
This ideal, as a form of power/knowledge, “traverses and produces things,
it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse.”16 As a result,
scholars of religion are often tongue-tied when asked to describe the value
of their work to other scholars, university administrators, and the public
at large. With Weberian disinterestedness as their home, they find them-
selves with an enfeebled language of value and thus with few resources to
resist pressures to explain their work according to economic and practical
benefits. Not unlike other disciplines, the study of religion is far more voluble
about matters of method than about justification.17 If, on the other hand, the
guild can relax its commitment to ascetic idealism, it will be in a position to
offer good reasons for present and future generations to grasp the virtues of
studying religion, advocate for religious studies, and resist the demands of
value-neutrality and market utility.
1.3. The Argument’s Structure
I have organized the book in three parts. In chapter 2, “The Ethics of Religious
Studies,” I show why the study of religion has been given reasons to refrain
from championing itself by pointing to an influential self-study that delib-
erately sidesteps the effort to provide a theoretical justification for the field.
That fact helps explain a related point, namely, that the study of religion finds
itself preoccupied with matters of method, detached from concerns about
its ends. I also provide a way of understanding various conceptual currents
that shape the field and how the study of religion triangulates across three
points: data, concepts, and method. With those ideas in mind I then turn
to a critical assessment of the six methodologies that I identified earlier for
studying religion today.
Chapters 3–8 separately focus on a specific methodology for studying re-
ligion. These chapters are philosophical and metacritical, taking stock of six
paradigms that dominate the landscape of theory and method in religious
studies. As I noted, I will focus on the work of Jonathan Z. Smith, Donald
Wiebe, Paul Tillich, Manuel A. Vásquez, Russell T. McCutcheon, Timothy
Fitzgerald, Saba Mahmood, Stephen S. Bush, and Kevin Schilbrack as impor-
tant proponents of the methodologies I identified. I isolate these paradigms
on the basis of a threefold criterion of selection: each (1) articulates a free-
standing and comprehensive theory; (2) aims to guide the study of religion
across a wide range of practices, contexts, and beliefs; and (3) has visibility
and influence in the field.
Endowing in various ways the regime of truth that supervises work in the
guild, these theories typically advance an account of human knowledge or
human nature (or both) on the way toward offering a method for studying
religion. In chapters 3–8, I will lay out their core claims and recruit ideas
from Critical Humanism to identify how and why these paradigms are
deficient—and in some instances fatally flawed—when it comes to defending
their organizing ideas and commitments. I will thus put Critical Humanism
in dialogue with each of these methods to identify their allures and strengths
along with their liabilities, blind spots, and contradictions. I will do so not
only because such problems weaken the method in question but also because
such errors can affect the actual practice of academic work. Insofar as these
methods play an influential role in how scholars imagine how good work
is to be done, establish hiring priorities, launch job searches, carry out an-
nual evaluations, engage in graduate recruitment, conceive of conferences
and symposia, and form judgments about the intellectual value of their peers’
teaching and research, their palpable bearing on the real lives of scholars,
students, and administrators cannot be overstated.
I hasten to add that my focus on meta-discursive work in c hapters 3–8
is not an inquiry into what has been described as forms of abstract philo-
sophical discourse that instantiate a social hierarchy.18 Rather, as Stephen
Toulmin makes plain, recurrent attention to matters of theory and method in
a discipline is symptomatic of a fundamental fact, namely, a discipline’s lack
of an agreed-upon goal to which research can account.19 This need for an
organizing goal describes the study of religion, and the absence of such a goal
enables us to see why theoretical debate in the guild is, as Toulmin writes in
his description of conceptual debates in science, “methodological and phil-
osophical; . . . directed less at interpreting particular empirical findings than
at debating the general acceptability (or unacceptability) of rival approaches,
patterns of explanation, and standards of judgment.”20 Preoccupation with
matters of method pervades the religious studies project, and that preoccu-
pation cuts across the range of different accounts of knowledge—scientific
or hermeneutical, Enlightenment or pragmatist, materialist or idealist—that
underwrite theoretical work in the guild. Toulmin enables us to understand
that we can deliver ourselves from rehashing arguments about method not
by making deflationary pronouncements about theory but by attending to
matters of the field’s purpose.
In chapter 9 I will provide my account of Critical Humanism and the
commitments that inform it. This means that I will turn away from specific
methodological programs to describe a broad framework for thinking about
any such program. In this lengthy section of the book, I will describe the
kind of knowledge that Critical Humanism imparts and the values that it
can express. Those values are post-critical reasoning, social criticism, cross-
cultural fluency, and environmental responsibility. In this respect Why Study
Religion? is fortified by ethical concerns, focusing on matters of justification,
moral value, and human subjectivity. Critical Humanism’s moral values en-
able us to see what humanistic thinking offers to knowledge production and
how we can make sense of the religious studies project. They also help us
grasp what religious studies can contribute to humanistic learning, and how
we can think properly and in normative terms about religious beliefs and
practices. I will conclude that chapter by identifying several exemplary works
in the field, works that broaden the moral imagination and approach their
subject matter through a “diverse array of theoretical vocabularies,” none of
which aims to apply a particular methodology or proclaim a set of superior

epistemic credentials.21 In the Epilogue I will bring my argument together,
making a case for Critical Humanism as a vocation and distinguishing it
from the regime of truth that aims to supervise work in the guild.
1.4. An Example
To help grasp the episteme I have in mind, consider a widely known inter-
vention in the field, Bruce Lincoln’s “Theses on Method.” Originally thumb-
tacked on his office door in the 1990s; reprinted on his syllabi for his graduate
and undergraduate courses; later published and republished in Method and
Theory in the Study of Religion; and included in a collection of his essays,
Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars: Critical Explorations in the History
of Religions, Lincoln’s thirteen theses identify a series of assumptions that
should guide the history of religions and distinguish religious from scholarly
discourses.22 According to Lincoln, scholars should be clear that history is
a method and that religion is the object of study (#1); that these two nouns
exist in a tense relationship (religion being a discourse that is, among other
things, about transcendent and eternal matters; history being a discourse
that speaks of things that are temporal and terrestrial) (#2); that reverence is
a religious and not a scholarly virtue (#5); that scholars should not confuse
the dominant factions of a culture with that culture itself (#8); that scholars
should be mindful of the challenges and rewards of studying ideological
operations (#10, #11); and that when scholars fail to distinguish between
“truths,” “truth claims,” and “regimes of truth,” they cease to function as
historians or scholars (#13). One of Lincoln’s aims is to clarify an important
distinction for organizing the critical study of religion—to make plain that
the historian of religions “resists and reverses” the orientation of religious
discourses by insisting on the “temporal, contextual, situated, interested,
human, and material dimensions of those discourses, practices, communi-
ties, and institutions that characteristically represent themselves as eternal,
transcendent, spiritual, and divine” (#3).23
While doubtless useful when teaching students how to handle materials
that have functioned (or that function) as forms of religious discourse and/
or religious authority, Lincoln’s “Theses on Method” is a textbook example
of the guild’s regime of truth, a plain exercise of power/knowledge that
symptomatizes the study of religion’s preoccupation with methodology.24

Noting that there are some for whom “religion is a matter of commitment
rather than an object of disinterested and/or critical study,” Lincoln identi-
fies his basic assumptions about history as a method of inquiry.25 Those for
whom religion is a matter of commitment “focus on that which they take
to be eternal, transcendent, ineffable, sacred, absolute, and sublime,” while
historians share a perspective “that is determined—and consistent with—a
different regime of truth.” This latter group, Lincoln writes, “study human
subjects: finite, fallible mortals who occupy specific coordinates in time and
space as adherents (and advocates) of particular communities.”26 But in the
course of stating these claims, Lincoln overlooks a basic question: On be-
half of what broader purposes are such procedures justified?27 What larger
orbit exists that can provide the scholarly context for the historian’s methods?
“Theses on Method” presents us with guides for research that are modal and
strategic. Championing disinterestedness and value-neutrality, it eschews
questions about scholarship’s aims and overall purposes.28
Yet equally telling is Lincoln’s avowal of normative commitments.
Reflecting on how societies can use rituals to create in women a willingness
and ability to assume traditional roles as described in his book, Emerging
from the Chrysalis: Studies in Rituals of Women’s Initiation, Lincoln states
that he considers “immoral any discourse or practice that systematically
operates to benefit the already privileged members of society at the expense
of others, and I reserve the same judgment for any society that tolerates
or encourages such discourse and practices.”29 While I applaud Lincoln’s
avowal of gender equality, it is unclear how one can square that claim
with his commitment to disinterested scholarship. One searches Lincoln’s
ouerve in vain for normative sources that underwrite his commitment to
egalitarianism—the ideas according to which he can say that privileging
some members of a society at the expense of others is immoral. Strikingly,
Lincoln’s ethical and social commitments find no place among his “Theses
on Method.” Lincoln’s statement illustrates an undercurrent, repressed in
the academic study of religion, of strong yet undefended normative claims.
As we will see in the chapters that follow, these two voices—that of disinter-
estedness and that of avowed commitments—sit together awkwardly and
uneasily in the study of religion’s regime of truth. Their coexistence ensures
the quixotic if not internally contradictory character of theory and method
in the study of religion.
1.5. On Ethics and Studying the Study of Religion
I’ve mentioned Critical Humanism’s ethical values, and here we do well to

ask what kind of contribution ethics can make to a study of the study of reli-
gion. How will ethics inform the analysis, critique, and constructive account
in the chapters that follow? That question seems natural given that ethicists
(including religious ethicists) show little interest in the academic study of
religion; for the most part they seek to ascertain the ethical implications of
religious beliefs and practices, often presuming the priority of religion to
ethics and thus conceiving of religion as providing resources that support an
ethical disposition, outcome, or norm. Religious ethicists have done little to
take stock of the guild that provides the institutional and intellectual contexts
within which they carry out their scholarship. Indeed, their work echoes the
silences that pervade the guild regarding its merits. Why Study Religion? aims
to break through that wall of silence and, drawing on moral philosophy, does
so in light of four ideas about how ethics can contribute to studying the study
of religion.
First, ethics enables us to describe and evaluate human action as good and
bad, right and wrong, and desirable and undesirable. It has us think nor-
matively, and it provides criteria for doing so on the premise that human
actions arise from human choices—from the exercise of human agency.
Without denying the complexity and ambiguity of the moral life or the fact
that human agency is constrained and dependent upon social, psycholog-
ical, environmental, and historical factors, ethics presupposes that human
agents are causes of action, and it presupposes the existence of reasons as
providing purposes for such action. Ethics views human beings as standing
within a space of reasons that help them define and, if necessary, redefine
their purposes. Those purposes provide a horizon according to which we can
understand and assess how human beings realize their goals, and in light of
which we hold each other morally accountable. To be sure, we can evaluate
the means of action independently of the goals they help us achieve, but such
methods make no sense apart from the ends to which they are connected and
according to which human beings order their conduct. Purposes provide the
motivational wellsprings of human behavior and render it legible as human
and not as something else.
Second, ethics provides methodological frameworks, or schools of
thought, for interrogating human agency and action. One school focuses on
human action’s proper ends as the basis of its moral assessment. It is called
teleological because it has us examine the teloi, or purposes, that an agent

should seek as a necessary condition for assessing her actions, and it often
makes reference to moral excellences, or virtues, that she should exercise in
the course of pursuing her goals. In that respect teleological ethics enables
us to focus on the formation and expression of moral character and how to
address the question, How should I live? Teleological thinkers thus view the
good as prior to the right. They first identify goods (or purposes) toward
which human action must direct itself and then ask whether a particular ac-
tion, or a kind of life, is ordered toward or away from those goods as a basis
for judging it.
An alternative school has us focus on human conduct in terms of the bal-
ance of pleasure over pain, or happiness over unhappiness, organizing our
thinking in terms that are called utilitarian. This school has us assess human
action by asking whether it maximizes utility and whether it produces
the greatest good for the greatest number when the relevant variables of
a problem or situation are brought into view. Like teleological thinkers,
utilitarians view the good as prior to the right, but they think about the good
not in terms of human purposes or the good life but with an eye to whether
an action’s or policy’s proposed benefits outweigh its burdens.
Yet another school positions itself against the assumptions of both tel-
eological and utilitarian modes of thinking. It has us evaluate an agent’s
intentions and the means of her action apart from the quality of the ends
that her action produces. In this way, it organizes our thinking in terms
that are called deontological. Exponents of this school ask about the moral
obligations, norms, or rights that should constrain an agent’s intentions and
the methods of her conduct. Bracketing judgments about the outcomes of an
action, deontologists see right or wrong action as a matter of principle. They
thus view the right as prior to and independent of the good. Aristotle, John
Stuart Mill, and Immanuel Kant are classic teleological, utilitarian, and deon-
tological thinkers, respectively.
Central to the critique I lodge in this book, drawing on this ethical nomen-
clature, is the idea that the study of religion is preoccupied with questions
about the means of research absent reference to its ends. In ethical terms, it
concentrates on matters that are, broadly speaking, deontological—having
us think about the right as prior to and independent of the good. Working
against that trend, Critical Humanism avows a set of purposes and, as I noted
earlier, includes a set of values that can render the study of religion desir-
able. As a mode of teleological reasoning, it has us place the good prior to
the right, entirely reversing the logic that shapes the episteme of theory in
the guild. In this respect, Critical Humanism argues on behalf of a radical
transvaluation of value in the study of religion. As matters stand, however,
methods for studying religion lie outside any context to render them intel-
ligible to those who are not predisposed to favor them. The study of religion
is a social creation, a cultural artifact, whose strategies of inquiry currently
stand apart from any framework that would enable us to fully assess their
merits and their promise. Connecting the study of religion to the purposes of
Critical Humanism can correct for that fact.
In addition to providing methodological frameworks, and third, ethicists
theorize about sources of normativity. This locution, given currency in re-
cent moral theory, refers to fundamental reasons according to which eth-
ical concepts acquire their authority—their capacity to obligate us to act in
one way rather than in another.30 Sources of normativity provide concepts
and theories that fortify one’s more specific moral commitments; they estab-
lish the foundations of one’s morality. Such sources make plain why a cer-
tain value or cherished ideal is one that both you and I both ought to have,
and they aim to offer reasons to accept and act on it. That is to say, sources
of normativity provide reasons that obligate us, reasons that are shareable.
Moreover, sources of normativity have a motivational component. They ad-
dress the question, Why be moral? Sources of normativity do not explain
why we act but give us justifications for acting. They thereby enable us to
evaluate human practices—to think about human actions, dispositions,
communities, and institutions in normative terms. The study of religion has
denied itself such justificatory reasons. In the pages that follow, I will show
how that is the case as a step toward proposing a remedy for that fact.
I also aim to expose those instances in which normative commitments do
manifest themselves in discussions of theory and method in the study of re-
ligion, commitments that find expression in ad hoc and fragmentary ways.
I will do so by using the language of conscience. Herein lies the fourth way
in which ethics can contribute to the study of the study of religion. It has us
attend to the internalization of shared standards of self-assessment and prac-
tical reasoning along with its effects on human well-being and motivation.
Conscience is not only a personal and individual matter; it also informs how
political, professional, and other forms of subject formation are nurtured
and reinforced. With its demands of value-neutrality, theory and method in
the study of religion fortifies an overbearing professional conscience, and it
creates a stumbling block to providing a robust vindication of the religious
studies project. Hence the central idea of this book: providing a justification
can lighten the burdens of conscience; liberate scholars to champion the im-
portance of their work to their students, colleagues, and the public at large;
and offer a language and set of values for doing so.
These four ideas about human agency, moral methodology, sources of nor-
mativity, and self-evaluation should make clear what ethics is not: the prac-
tice of moralists. Moralists presume to judge and sometimes seek to regulate
the behavior of others, typically through admonishment, pronouncement,
and censure, as well as by making appeals to authority. They assign a privi-
leged status to themselves on the way toward finding a perch from which to
proclaim their views. Typically, moralists apply the norms and values that
organize their more familiar associations and relationships to the practices
and beliefs of other people, without dialogue about or due consideration of
their judgments and sources of normativity. That is to say, they fail to occupy
a space of reasons beyond those guaranteed by their own local attachments
and affiliations. Ethicists (and others) can lapse into moralism when they es-
chew more general reasons to size up matters of social life and public culture.
More routinely, however, ethicists separate themselves from moralists by
carrying out their work within an intersubjective space of reasons to justify
their normative claims and proposals to others.
****
With this sketch of the argument in place, I now turn to ask: Are there reasons
specific to the study of religion to help explain why it forgoes ways to justify
itself?
2
The Ethics of Religious Studies
2.1. A Tragic Silence
In 1971 Claude Welch published a landmark report on the academic study of

religion, Graduate Education in Religion: A Critical Study.1 Based on an exten-
sive survey launched in the fall of 1969 under the auspices of the American
Council of Learned Societies and funded by the Henry Luce Foundation,
Welch and a team of researchers surveyed seventy-five religious studies
doctoral programs and 873 four-year colleges and universities that offered
programs in the study of religion in the United States and Canada. Graduate
Education in Religion is considerable in its aims and achievements, and it
enjoyed the aura of Welch’s authority as the recent president of the American
Academy of Religion. Welch took stock of the quantity and quality of various
graduate programs; compared American with European traditions of doc-
toral training; described the changing demographics of students who were
enrolling in religious studies; and provided extensive data regarding areas
of specialization, time-to-degree in doctoral programs, faculty profiles, and
rates of departmental growth.
In the opening pages of his report, Welch offers two theses to summarize
his findings:
I. The academic study of religion has firmly established its identity.

II. The academic study of religion is going through an identity crisis. (13)
Welch proceeds to argue that both theses are true. In his mind, the tension
between them, far from being a contradiction, provides the parameters for
properly understanding the state of the field.
On the one hand, Welch observes, by 1971 the scholarly study of religion
had become firmly ensconced in US and Canadian colleges and universi-
ties, especially at the undergraduate level. The study of religion had emerged
from prior theological institutional contexts and had been taken up in public
institutions and private, nonsectarian institutions of higher learning. Now (in
Why Study Religion?. Richard B. Miller, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197566817.003.0002
The Ethics of Religious Studies 19
1971), he writes, “the period of emergence of a discipline of ‘religious studies,’

as distinct from theology, is coming to an end” (13). Even in institutions that
retained ties to religious communities, confessional curricula were being
transformed into ecumenical, pluralistic, and inclusive programs of learning.
Although the study of religion was not so valued that its absence in a cur-
riculum would bring “acute embarrassment to any university or college,” it
remained the case that the study of religion had established a secure footing
in the American academy. Welch continues: “Religion has become increas-
ingly to be looked upon as a proper field of study in the liberal arts curric-
ulum, rather than an object so bound up with the confessional interests of
religious groups that it could not be dealt with responsibly and directly in the
academic community” (14). Prestigious graduate fellowships, rising research
standards, clarity about the proper credentials for the scholarly study of re-
ligion, legal rulings, and widening circles of intellectual interest in religions
other than Christianity and Judaism were all converging in salutary ways for
the field. Indeed, so impressive was the breadth and quality of work in reli-
gious studies that there appeared “to be a definite correlation between the ac-
ademic quality of an educational institution and the likelihood of its having a
program in religious studies” (14).
On the other hand, the state of graduate education left Welch with a pic-
ture of the study of religion as uncertain about its aims and future directions.
Hence his second thesis with its language of an “identity crisis.”2 According
to Welch, efforts to establish religious studies in the late 1960s were only
one phase of a three-part narrative. The first phase, reaching from the nine-
teenth century into the 1920s and 1930s, consisted of an approach to religion
that was largely parochial and confessional, aimed at forming moral char-
acter of students enrolled at Protestant and Catholic institutions. The second
phase, after World War II, witnessed the rise of a genuine area of study in
the academy, culminating in his report (18). That phase was giving way to
a third period of considerable uncertainty and indecisiveness, based largely
on the challenge of developing new paradigms of graduate study and culti-
vating undergraduate programs that were better informed by graduate study
in the field.
In Welch’s view, religious studies was at a turning point. The core ques-
tion that motivated the third phase of study was how a “proper coherence”
could be attained in the field, especially at the graduate level (19). In par-
ticular, the question was how a new field of graduate study could arise
that differed from the theological programs of postgraduate, professional
training that dominated the American scene during the first two-thirds
of the twentieth century. Making matters more complicated was the fact
that scholars who had been trained in professional (largely Protestant)
seminaries and divinity schools were being hired to launch new religious
studies programs. Those programs sought to distinguish themselves from
the confessional approaches to religion that characterized a large swath of
seminary education.
Within this indeterminate context for graduate education, two trends
were emerging, both of which Welch found unsatisfactory. The first was
to use the program of study in Protestant seminaries as the blueprint
for religious studies curricula. Religious studies curricula were being
designed around the study of the Old and New Testaments, church his-
tory, and theological doctrine. To this blueprint new programs would
then add “World Religions” to round out the rest of the course offerings.
For Welch, the Protestant orientation and parochialism of such a plan
was obvious. The second trend was to view the study of religion as a
cluster of specializations that included Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism,
Catholicism, and the like to give “equal time” to non-Protestant traditions
in course offerings. While such an approach might help programs transi-
tion to new curricular patterns, it was at best a temporary corrective. On
this latter model, the study of religion was nothing more than a cluster of
area studies that aimed to expose students to a range of self-contained re-
ligious traditions, each often represented by practitioners who served as
spokespersons for “their” tradition. One problem with that arrangement
was that it suggested that religious insiders have a privileged epistemic
access to (and thus special authority regarding) their material, thereby
confusing academic with non-academic criteria for establishing expertise
(16–17). Another problem was that no commonalities existed that could
hold a program together or enable its faculty to learn from each other’s
work. Organizing religious studies as the study of discrete and bounded
religions would forfeit “the possibilities of mutual fructification” in aca-
demic inquiry and would isolate the field “from the method and content
of such disciplines as cultural anthropology and sociology—as well as risk
falling back into the arms of confessional interests” (21).
Welch’s remedy for this identity crisis was not to craft a single method-
ology or monolithic pattern of hierarchically arranged courses to organize
a curriculum. He rather offered a multidisciplinary, pluralistic, and nonde-
nominational account for the study of religion in this way:
One may better liken religion to a broad field of more or less loosely clus-
tered points with multiple interconnections, in which the task of formu-
lating an intelligible program of study is that of encompassing related
groups of points in their actual interconnectedness, for the purposes both
of understanding something about the whole field and of an intense explo-
ration of a definable cluster. Thus new patterns and groupings of study need
constantly to be allowed to emerge. (26)
The central aim of this vision is to facilitate intellectual interaction among

scholars and to ensure that religion would be studied within a matrix that
allowed inquiry from a variety of angles.
To advance this new picture of graduate training in religion, Welch pro-
posed a prescription that was practical rather than theoretical. The identity
crisis facing the scholarly study of religion did not call for a “new ideology
for the study of religion.” In his mind, “the basic difficulties are less theo-
retical questions about what sort of identity ought to be realized than prac-
tical problems of how the self-understanding can be adequately expressed
and implemented” (23). As he surveyed matters, Welch observed four trends
along practical lines that could shape new patterns of graduate study and
overcome the field’s lack of confidence.
First, graduate studies in religion must proceed more robustly in cross-
cultural terms, producing “a significant understanding of more than one
religious tradition.” The basis for cross-cultural examination is “the illumina-
tion” that comparison can bring to “the special problems being investigated.”
Second, the study of religion should involve a plurality of methods. Several
approaches—which Welch loosely clustered into “historical (and textual),
philosophical (and theological), and social- scientific”—were needed if
scholars were to envision the study of religion as including more than the
interpretation of religious texts. There exists, he writes, the need to deal with
“the actual ways in which people act and believe and are motivated” (25).
Third, the study of religion must develop alliances with cognate areas. For
self-interested reasons (religion being a relatively small program of study)
and for intellectual reasons connected to the promise of multidisciplinarity,
scholars of religion would do well to seek collateral work outside their fields
of specialization. This would mean, for example, establishing requirements
in related areas in the humanities and social sciences to gain fresh angles of
insight and greater methodological dexterity for studying religion. Fourth,
the study of religion needed to become more mindful of the reasons for
studying religion at the graduate level and to understand the potential of un-
dergraduate programs for providing the initial breadth and depth of know-
ledge necessary for students to pursue more specialized training in religious
studies. Welch surmised that professional seminary programs would have
less potential to provide that initial training and urged his colleagues to de-
velop undergraduate religious studies programs as good in their own right
and for cultivating students for the next level of education (25–26).
2.2. The Firewall
I begin this chapter by referring to Welch’s 1971 report for two reasons. On
the one hand, I find his fourfold prescription for new patterns in graduate
education to be remarkably prescient. It defined the terms for developing or
revising religious studies departments and programs in a number of colleges
and universities subsequent to its publication. Welch’s emphasis on the
value of carrying out cross-cultural comparison, deploying multiple angles
of interpretation to study religion, developing collateral relationships with
scholars interested in religious phenomena, and strengthening connections
between graduate and undergraduate instruction clearly articulated a vision
for programs seeking to forge a way of studying religion that was distinct
from prior theological approaches.
On the other hand, consensus around Welch’s practical recommendations
has had little impact on the identity crisis in religious studies that he identi-
fied in 1971. Indeed, Welch’s comments about the paradox of religious studies
could be written today with few qualifications. Despite massive changes in
higher education and profound developments in religious studies curricula
over the last fifty years, Welch’s two summary theses—especially his second
one—remain profoundly true.3
What accounts for that fact? In the pages that follow, I will proceed on the
premise that Welch’s reluctance to offer a theoretical prescription for future
work in religious studies was a serious omission and exacerbated the iden-
tity crisis that he sought to resolve. Indeed, for Welch to say that “the basic
difficulties are less theoretical questions about what sort of identity ought
to be realized than practical problems of how the self-understanding can be
adequately expressed and implemented” entirely ignores the question about
what principles inform, or ought to inform, the field’s self-understanding
and his way of tackling practical problems. That is to say: addressing the
field’s identity crisis by asking how to resolve practical problems leaves

matters of identity contingent on decisions about curricular implementa-
tion that simply speak to the opportunities and limitations of the moment.
Reinforcing the very problem he aims to address, Welch declines from of-
fering the field a philosophical raison d’être.
Welch’s failure to speak in theoretical terms about the basis for religious
studies betrays a Protestant suspicion about providing a justification for
human behavior—including intellectual work. His training and background
shed important light on this claim. Having earned a bachelor of divinity and
a master of divinity from Yale Divinity School and a PhD from Yale, having
produced scholarship on Reformation and nineteenth-century Protestant
theology, and having secured a Fulbright scholarship to study the theology
of Karl Barth in Heidelberg, Welch possessed impeccable Protestant bona
fides by the time he published Graduate Education in Religion. Indeed, the
parallel between the paradoxical pair of observations with which Welch
begins his report and the style of Karl Barth’s dialectical theology is impos-
sible to overlook. The habits of mind indigenous to Reformation theology
clearly reveal themselves in Welch’s reluctance to take up the challenge of
offering a theoretical justification of the guild. His pejorative description of
a theoretical justification as expressing a form of “ideology” further betrays
his suspicions.4 I consider his failure to offer a theoretical raison d’être of reli-
gious studies to be a tragic silence. Nothing written about the academic study
of religion subsequent to Welch’s report has sought to change that fact. Such
silence helps us grasp why religious studies continues to suffer from an iden-
tity crisis, now fifty years after Welch’s landmark publication.5
Historians and theorists of religious studies routinely call attention to the
liberal Protestant ethos of the field, noting how its basic areas of research, the
interdenominational nature of Protestant seminary training, and a tolerant
if not affectionate attitude toward different religions and scientific thinking
helped launch a nondenominational and pluralistic approach to studying re-
ligion in the United States and Canada.6 Welch’s refusal to provide a theoret-
ical justification is but a piece of this more general orientation in the field’s
developments. What everyone has failed to consider when thinking about
the Protestant genealogy of religious studies is whether an aversion to self-
justification helps us understand the field’s indeterminacy and lack of confi-
dence. In my view, it does. To be sure, I am not arguing that we can establish
a causal connection between Protestant theology and contemporary debates
about theory and method in the study of religion. My point is not to launch
a genealogical inquiry that traces the lineage of Reformation thought, but to

argue that the guild’s commitment to value-neutrality is reinforced by the
aversion to abstract justification that lies at the heart of Welch’s survey. Theory
and method in the study of religion exhibits a silence about matters of theo-
retical justification, one that denies us reasons for avowing the guild’s merits.
Yet, as I indicated in the previous chapter, this silence is inconstant and hap-
hazard, and the pressures it exerts generates a range of tortured and convo-
luted arguments. Indeed, as we will see, normative commitments do find
expression in the ascetic conscience of the guild, as if to make manifest a re-
turn of the repressed. Muffled silence about value exemplifies what Amanda
Anderson, following Jürgen Habermas, calls “cryptonomativism”: the resort
to hidden rather than explicitly articulated and defended commitments in
theory and criticism.7
By referring to an aversion to justification, I am recalling the Protestant
Reformation’s critique of works-righteousness as that critique shaped
the mindset of sixteenth-century Protestant Christianity. Inspired by
Martin Luther and John Calvin, Reformation Christians argued that sal-
vation was secured on the basis of an individual’s sincere and pious faith,
not on the basis of good works that were presumed to earn merit in the
eyes of God. According to Luther and Calvin, Christians were justi-
fied not because of what they did—not because of the good deeds they
performed—but because of their personal fidelity to the saving word of
the Gospel. Christians were justified—“reckoned righteous in God’s judg-
ment”—based on their contrite acceptance of God’s saving Word.8 About
justification, Luther writes: “Therefore it is clear that, as the soul needs
only the Word of God for its life and righteousness, so it is justified by
faith alone and not any works; for if it could be justified by anything else,
it would not need the Word, and consequently it would not need faith.”9
Calvin writes of a “double grace” received from God through Christ, the
first of which is justification. According to Calvin, “justified by faith is
he who, excluded from the righteousness of works, grasps the righteous-
ness of Christ through faith.”10 Luther and Calvin worried that Christians
performed works either to leverage God’s acceptance or to be justified in
the eyes of their fellow believers. These Reformers considered the desire to
earn saving grace as imposing a limit on God’s freedom and sovereignty,
and they judged the desire to be justified in the eyes of fellow Christians as
a form of vanity and hypocrisy. They thus sought to frame justification as
a matter between the Christian’s conscience and God, based on belief and
trust. On this Reformation account, actions carried out to achieve merit

are done in bad faith.
Reformation theology thus conceived of justification as a matter of per-
sonal piety. Justification is to come from God’s free bestowal of grace, not
from fellow believers or religious authorities, and it is based on “faith alone
and not any works.” The Reformers thereby placed a firewall between faith
and ethics by conceiving of the proper path to salvation as a function of one’s
personal belief, not one’s good behavior. Another effect was to provide reli-
gious reasons to place efforts to justify human action under a cloud of suspi-
cion. Because only God justifies, our efforts to justify human action—efforts
at “self-justification”—are expressions of hubris. In justifying human beha-
vior, we put ourselves in God’s stead and make ourselves our own judge and
jury. Placing justificatory practices under a dark cloud of suspicion, and con-
ceiving of religion as distinct from ethics, leaves religion on a pedestal and
provides reasons to seek only a practical as opposed to a theoretical justifica-
tion for its study.
I say that religious studies suffers from an identity crisis not merely be-
cause graduate education lacks a theoretical justification, however, but also
because the field has been stalled over methodological issues—debates about
the concept of religion and methods for its proper study—since Welch’s com-
prehensive survey, with few signs of resolution or progress in sight. The guild
remains riddled by ongoing instability and uncertainty about its mission and
place within the modern academy. I make this claim not on the basis of the
kind of study that Welch carried out, examining as he did a large number
of programs, departments, and curricula through surveys and interviews.
I say this rather on the basis of scholarly literature and debates in the field,
especially as they concern matters of theory and method in the study of re-
ligion.11 Debates about insider versus outsider scholarship, objectivity and
subjectivity, descriptive and normative work, emic and etic perspectives, re-
ligion as reducible or irreducible to other forces, religious studies versus the-
ology, “lived” religion versus “doctrinal” religion, religion as phenomenal or
epiphenomenal, belief versus practice, secularism and postsecularism, mo-
dernity and its alternatives, and localism versus globalism all proceed along
repetitive and predictable loops.12
Offering little by way of resolution to these debates, religious studies is
populated by an array of methodological ideas and proposals that offer no
compelling reasons for accepting them, producing what Charles Long calls
a “chaos of discourse about religion.”13 Taking stock of the field in 1996,
Charlotte Allen summarizes the status quo when she writes that it “may be
a good thing for religious studies to be a shapeless beast, half social science,
half humanistic discipline, lumbering through the academy with no clear
methodology or raison d’être.”14
My view is that lacking a raison d’être is not a good thing insofar as it creates
not only a shapeless, lumbering beast but also a directionless one. With that
idea in mind, I will help us understand the problems afflicting the academic
study of religion and a way to resolve them. One of my central ideas is that re-
ligious studies is hampered by Welch’s tragic silence insofar as it lacks a clear
theoretical justification. Religious studies is constrained by an ascetic profes-
sional conscience, disclaiming reasons that can account for its practices as
worthwhile. It lacks a framework for determining whether the motives that
animate the work of scholars of religion are desirable and worthy of attach-
ment and transmission. For that reason, the study of religion suffers from a
crisis of rationale.15 But that fact is not beyond remedy. It does not mean that
religious studies should be abandoned or that efforts to justify it are hope-
less.16 Quite the contrary: the legitimation crisis to which I am calling atten-
tion can be overcome by identifying how and on what terms we should think
about the field’s purposes. What might those be?
In the pages that follow, I will argue that the goal to which religious studies
can organize itself is the critical humanistic understanding of human beliefs,
ideas, traditions, discourses, art forms, problems, and institutional practices
as evidenced in texts and artifacts, both past and present, and both near
and distant. I call that goal Critical Humanism. It offers a distinctive way of
knowing that is intersubjective, hermeneutical, historical, and motivated by
several values, which I identify over the course of the book and fully describe
in the concluding chapter. Critical Humanism draws on a plurality of goods
each of which can help us see what value religious studies as a humanistic
discipline has to offer. These values are post-critical reasoning, social criti-
cism, cross-cultural fluency, and environmental responsibility. As I will ex-
plain, each of these has much to recommend and, taken together, provide a
suite of values that can justify humanistic scholarship and make a case for the
scholarly study of religion as a contribution to humanistic inquiry.
The central objects of such scholarly inquiry are cultural expressions—
artifacts and texts—of what I will call “moral subjectivity.” The core idea is that
human beings are persons with depth, free and responsible for expressing,
interrogating, and changing their desires against a background of options,
which provide their lives with reasons for action. Attention to human agency
must, of necessity, explore the dynamics of subject-formation—ways in

which human beings come to generate, attempt to understand, and revise
their ways of being, knowing, and acting. I thus stand with Geoffrey Galt
Harpham who writes that an indispensable premise of the humanistic enter-
prise is “that human action is not entirely blind but is informed by arguments
and undertaken for reasons that . . . are not immediately apparent or directly
manifest in the action itself ”—reasons whose irreducible complexity “can
never be grasped by a single principle or explanation.”17 On this view, any
humanistic effort to interrogate human action, including religious beliefs
and practices, must account for the fact that human action is aimed toward
purposes, or ends, and that such ends include their first-personal aspects so
to be human actions rather than merely actions performed by humans. Put as
simply as possible: ends provide reasons for human action.
Such reasons are not necessarily fully clear to the persons who act on
them or who study them—thus the need to interpret them, to reduce their
obscurity, and to ascertain their provenance and the authorities, meanings,
and interests on which they depend. That is, to understand such reasons we
must probe the social formations, relationships, physical spaces, literatures,
arguments, imaginative visions, and normative expectations against which
human agency reposes and on which it relies. These are basic hermeneutical
and historical ideas about human agency theorized by Aristotle and Charles
Taylor, on whose views I rely and embellish upon in subsequent chapters.
Human action on this description is ordered to perceived accounts of the
good, and any critical interrogation of such action that fails to assess it is
not value-neutral. Instead, it blocks out the normative backdrop of human
agency from investigation and it leaves others’ avowed accounts of the good
unquestioned.
Critical Humanism offers a way to examine human action on this critical,
hermeneutical, historical account. Its principles have me insist that efforts
to investigate religion must understand it as tethered to subject-formation
and human agency. Religion contributes to the subject-formation of human
beings and provides them with reasons for action. Moreover, Critical
Humanism understands the project of criticism as including avowed ac-
counts of the good as proper matters of scholarly inquiry. It offers what I call
an “ethics of belief ” that requires us to interrogate a religion’s production of
humanizing and dehumanizing ideas and practices. Power and authority in
religious matters are hardly innocent, and their intended and unintended
effects on human life demand critical assessment. There is thus the need to
establish a conceptual clearing for putting religious forms of power and au-
thority to normative scrutiny. In this way, Critical Humanism can help us
grasp and evaluate the processes, idioms, and contexts of moral subjectivity
as well as the interpersonal, political, and social contexts in which such pro-
cesses take shape.
Critical Humanism, then, is teleological in a twofold, mutually syner-
gistic way. Its subjects (scholars and students) and objects (human agents
in history and culture) are conceived as motivated by basic purposes.
A critical humanist’s goals are to examine the processes, idioms, author-
ities, and contexts of human agents who are themselves pursuing ends to
which they attach themselves. It should come as no surprise that, given
this synergism, a failure to think about the ends of research is typically
mirrored in scholars’ inability to make sense of the practices they examine
as expressions of human agency and reasons for action. The study of re-
ligion, I will argue, should conceive of itself as one area of research and
teaching within the larger orbit of Critical Humanism and, in the process,
attend to the reasons for action that scholars and the subjects of their work
mobilize and express in various ways. With that proposal in mind, I will
frame how religious studies can justify itself and contribute to broader
currents in the humanities.
By the same token, the study of religion can contribute importantly
to critical humanistic knowledge production. It can do so by virtue of
the fact that scholars of religion study how religious ideas, practices,
beliefs, and authorities contribute to the subject formation and agency
of human beings. Religion provides people with resources for developing
and revising their notions of the true and the good. Religious adherents
carry out their practices and express their convictions in part because
they believe that their lives will be better as a result. Religious beliefs
and practices thus provide adherents with resources for social criticism.
Accordingly, religions provide reasons for action along with terms for
evaluating other sources of human subject-formation and moral agency
in history, thought, and culture. One can scarcely make sense of human
history absent the roles that religious beliefs, practices, discourses,
institutions, and politics have played across the vast arc of human experi-
ence. The study of religion makes sense as a contribution to the human-
ities given how it helps us understand what it is about religious ideas,
practices, and beliefs that draw people to them and that contribute to
the formation and embodied expressions of their personal lives, social

affiliations, historical experience, and critical reasoning. Scholars of
religion carry out that work by drawing on paradigms, traditions, and
tools in the humanities and, in the process, shed light on such matters
from within their own disciplinary practices and interests. They thus
contribute to the humanities in a twofold way: by ensuring that religion
is an area to be interrogated and by showing how broader humanistic
traditions and paradigms of inquiry can be informed in light of their
scholarly contributions to humanistic work.
One upshot of my argument will be to insist on what I call a thick
theory of interpretation. By this I do not mean to restate Clifford Geertz’s
idea (following Gilbert Ryle) of “thick description”—the notion that
we should aim at providing dense, intricate, and colorfully detailed ac-
counts of empirical phenomena under scrutiny (although I endorse such
descriptions, to be sure).18 I rather mean to emphasize the importance
of drawing upon what feminist literary critic Rita Felski calls “an ampler
and more diverse range of theoretical vocabularies” in the study of the
humanities.19 Post-critical reasoning, as we will see, leads naturally and
inevitably to social criticism given human reason’s penchant to assess its
social circumstances. That, in turn, requires the skills of cross-cultural
fluency to advance an understanding of humanity in its irrepressibly di-
verse cultural, ethnic, political, religious, racial, gendered, and sexual
manifestations. Such fluency requires an expanding moral imagination,
one that seeks to know and understand within increasingly wider circles
of human experience. The boundaries of those circles, of course, are not
tightly drawn around human communities but include the wider, non-
human contexts and circumstances in which we all dwell. The value of
environmental responsibility is thus an obvious expression of human
curiosity surrounding the facts of human knowing, human agency, and
their many material dependencies. These four axes of value enable us to
shift the ground of debates about the study of religion and move the field
past its preoccupation with theory and method into a broader intellec-
tual and social field. Thinking about religion in light of these values, the
challenges they pose to scholarship, and their implications for human
knowledge requires scholars to interpret phenomena with a diverse set of
questions and scholarly frameworks. Positioned against fossilizing ten-
dencies in the academy, Critical Humanism is the work of a restless mind.
2.3. Routine Work and Metadisciplinary Work
To understand the problems of—and the potential remedies for—the reli-

gious studies project, we must first identify general patterns of inquiry in
the field. The academic study of religion moves along two tracks, what I call
Routine Work and Metadisciplinary Work. Routine Work consists of the on-
going, day-to-day practice of scholars who identify and resolve puzzles in
their areas of specialization. Metadisciplinary Work examines how scholars
of religion practice, or should practice, their scholarship, thereby putting
Routine Work under historical, genealogical, and philosophical scrutiny.
Consider each form of work in turn.
Routine Work aims to solve basic questions or puzzles about religious
belief or practice in human history and culture, and/or to make discov-
eries about how such beliefs or practices manifest (or have manifested)
themselves in human experience. It often operates within a triangle that
connects three points: facts, concepts, and methods. The first point is pre-
mised on the significance of religion as a ubiquitous fact in cultural, histor-
ical, and political affairs. This point has us reject the standard version of
the secularization thesis—the idea that religion is on the wane as the forces
of modernity gain strength in personal and public life. Religion needs to
be examined as a specific area of study because it is a ubiquitous feature
of human history, thought, and culture. And, unlike other commonplace
but more prosaic features of human life, this ubiquity possesses power
and influence that demand scholarly attention. In an early work sur-
veying religious studies programs and departments, Robert Michaelson
writes: “Religion is a fact so elemental, so protean, so rich, and so per-
vasive that its study needs no defense.”20 In Michaelson’s view, “to deny
the fact of religion by ignoring it is to engage in a kind of irresponsibility
which does not befit the proud heritage of the community of learning.
The question, then, is not whether to study religion, but how to study it.”21
Fifty years after Michaelson’s statement, we find a similar affirmation of
religion’s ubiquity and cultural power expressed in the mission statement
of the American Academy of Religion (AAR)—the largest professional as-
sociation in the world devoted to studying religion: “In a world where reli-
gion plays so central a role in social, political, and economic events, as well
as in the lives of communities and individuals, there is a critical need for
ongoing reflection upon and understanding of religious traditions, issues,
questions, and values.”22
The idea here is not to insist that religion is a good thing for individuals or
society, only that religion cannot be plausibly excluded from representations
of history, thought, and culture. Good or bad, religion is pervasive and pow-
erful. It is an intimate feature of many people’s experience of community,
identity, space, memory, and visions of the good life. As a source of motiva-
tion and set of values, religion helps explain interpersonal behavior, social
order, and historical change. The educational implications of religion’s power
and ubiquity are plain. Colleges and universities that exclude the study of
religion from their curricula make a counterfeit claim to offer resources for
understanding the breadth and depth of human experience.
The second point is to provide, or at least assume, a conceptual construct.
Here Routine Work thinks in an abstract way. Note that the need for this
second point is attached to the first. If politics, culture, and society cannot be
plausibly represented without religion, then we must be clear about what we
are looking for when we seek to identify it. How can one assume that religion
is ubiquitous and powerful without some working notion of religion? We
need a concept to mark off religion from other features of human experience,
if only provisionally and heuristically. In the same vein, Routine Work often
draws on a specific concept, for example, pilgrimage, ritual, self-cultivation,
rhetoric, or mythology, to shed further light on religious phenomena.23
It can examine that concept’s principal patterns, pedigree, norms, themes,
political dimensions, or psychological aspects and their importance for un-
derstanding religion. Typically one aim is to see how well a general concept
functions cross-culturally and/or to study various theorists who have shaped
scholarly understandings of the concept in question.24 But using a general
rubric is not a full-blown theoretical enterprise; it typically aims to identify
similarities and differences among religious traditions and adds to our store
of knowledge about religion as a historical, social, and cultural phenomenon.
The third point is to deploy a method for studying whatever is defined as
religion or as religious. Here, too, Routine Work steps back from particulars
and thinks in abstract terms. The need for this third point, moreover, is
spurred by inquiry that is prompted by the second one. If we can identify re-
ligion as a specific object of study, what are the proper methods for studying
it? Is there something distinctive about the subject matter of religion that
requires special scholarly tools? Or should we see religion on par with other
social practices and apply to it what we apply to them in order to understand
it?25 How these questions are answered sets the parameters for the third point
in the triangle of Routine Work in the guild.
Scholarship along the second track—Metadisciplinary Work—takes a step

back from Routine Work and critically interrogates matters regarding the
third point in that triangle, namely, method. In the process, it attempts to
provide an understanding of the study of religion to itself. Here scholarship
proceeds self-referentially. It is a meta-discursive, second-order mode of in-
quiry, turning the study of religion into its own object of study.
Typically work along this track is abstract and overarching, focusing on
the intellectual foundations of studying religion. It aims to provide a broad,
conceptual account according to which scholars of religion can describe
their methods to themselves and others. In this respect, Metadisciplinary
Work aims to clarify theoretical, conceptual, and/ or methodological
commitments that make religious studies a distinct area of study. It aims to
show how scholars of religion render—or should render—religious beliefs
and practices amenable to academic inquiry. Not infrequently, then, schol-
arship carried out at this level aims to inform and sometimes revise work
carried out along the first track.
The distinction between Routine Work and Metadisciplinary Work is
central to my analysis in c hapters 3–8. In those chapters I will focus almost
exclusively on arguments that proceed along the second, Metadisciplinary
track—works that step back from Routine Work to develop broad, free-
standing methodological proposals for studying religion. I will thus not be
discussing the kind of work that introduces concepts or frameworks to guide
a specific research project.26 Rather, I will assess works that self-consciously
and ambitiously articulate comprehensive theories and protocols to guide
the study of religious beliefs and practices.
One aim of my inquiry is to introduce a form of clarifying skepticism into
the picture that scholars of religion have of themselves. I take as my point of
departure the fact that religious studies has a self-image that is the source of
recurrent self-doubt. As I noted earlier, it is a field that has been stalled over
methodological issues and terminological disputes for almost a half-century
with no resolution in sight. There is no reason to think that this situation will
improve until religious studies scholars radically transform how they look at
themselves and at the field more generally.
Changing the subject of scholarly self-understanding is my eventual aim
in this book, in which I will argue that work in religious studies would benefit
from some subversive, counterintuitive thinking. However much scholars in
the study of religion appear to be continuing in a business-as-usual fashion,
the field’s broader second- order methodologies operate within isolable

cocoons, often sealed off from broader, robust avenues of intellectual dia-
logue and engagement. Even though Metadisciplinary Work exists to explain
how religion scholars ought to study their objects of inquiry, there is little
to indicate why they should do so. That is to say, Metadisciplinary Work in
the study of religion fails to address what Jonathan Z. Smith calls “that most
blunt of all questions: ‘So what?’ ” Because scholars of religion avoid that
question, Smith adds, “too much of what we do . . . may be placed somewhere
between show-and-tell and paraphrase. Having persuaded ourselves that,
whatever else it is, religion is ultimately important (or, important because it is
ultimate), we illicitly use that claim to justify anything we happen to study as
being self-evidently significant.”27 As matters stand, no criteria exist to ques-
tion the assumption of the guild’s self-evident importance or to adjudicate
among the rival stories that scholars of religion tell about themselves and
their work—about which I will say more later in this chapter—because those
stories proceed with little, if any, clear connection to intellectual goals. The
stories that scholars of religion tell about their scholarship will remain, in
effect, isolated, repetitive, and sectarian discourses—dependent in no small
way on professional affiliation, patronage, and like-mindedness—until the
academic study of religion becomes consciously teleological and accountable
to a set of purposes.28
But my ennui about the rehashing of the same ideas and debates in the
guild is only one mood and motivation for this book. My more important
and constructive aim is to think about religious studies in hopeful rather
than miasmic terms. That task requires either making explicit the purposes
toward which religious studies is only implicitly aimed or expressing a set of
goods around which the discipline can intentionally organize itself and in
light of which it can account for itself. The absence of an explicit teleology is
both peril and promise for the academic study of religion. It invites us to con-
sider the ethics of religious studies.
2.4. Compact, Diffuse, and Would-be Disciplines
Understanding how disciplines are structured enables us to further grasp

the justificatory challenges facing the religious studies project. Indeed,
one crucial consideration notably absent from debates about theory and
method is whether the field possesses disciplinary status, and if so, what
kind of status it possesses. In his study of disciplinary formation and con-
ceptual change in the natural and behavioral sciences, Stephen Toulmin
provides categories that speak instructively to this question. He also helps
us understand why religious studies is characterized by ongoing concerns
about matters of theory and method—about why Metadisciplinary Work is
so common and extensive in the guild.
In his historical study of conceptual use, stability, and change, Toulmin
argues that disciplines mature when they develop a common goal around
which normal problem-solving activity is organized. But not all disciplines
are equally well organized; they sort themselves out along a spectrum.
Toulmin distinguishes between “compact,” “diffuse,” and “would-be” discip
lines, the first of which constitutes the ideal. According to Toulmin, compact
disciplines have five characteristics:
(1) The activities involved are organized around and directed towards a
specific and realistic set of agreed collective ideals.
(2) These collective ideals impose corresponding demands on all who
commit themselves to the professional pursuit of the activities
concerned.
(3) The resulting discussions provide disciplinary foci for the production
of “reasons,” in the context of justificatory arguments whose function
is to show how far procedural innovations measure up to these col-
lective demands, and so improve the current repertory of concepts or
techniques.
(4) For this purpose, professional forums are developed, within which
recognized “reason-producing” procedures are employed to justify
the collective acceptance of the novel procedures.
(5) Finally, the same collective ideals determine the criteria of adequacy
by appeal to which the arguments produced in support of those
innovations are judged.29
Compact disciplines understand themselves as accountable to an agreed-

upon set of ends. “Diffuse” disciplines, in contrast, lack a common goal or
suffer from underdeveloped institutional mechanisms. “Would-be” disci
plines have the potential to become well-organized areas of scholarly activity
but have yet to do so.30
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Why Study Religion Richard B Miller All Chapter

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Why Study Religion? Richard B.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

We should not try to define “the humanities” by asking what the

Epilogue: Critical Humanism as a Vocation  303

considerably. Kevin Schilbrack and Richard Rosengarten read a previous

1.1. Fraternal Weberian Twins

Can the academic study of religion be justified? Should it be included in the

should be an objective point of view. According to Weber, research regarding

a kind of epistemic abstinence toward ensuring that scientific research is

on matters of research methodology. Although religions are saturated with

1.2. An Overbearing Conscience

What a Weberian diagnosis might have us overlook, however, is a unique

of knowing that is held together by several values. It involves habits and

1.3. The Argument’s Structure

which aims to apply a particular methodology or proclaim a set of superior

symptomatizes the study of religion’s preoccupation with methodology.24

1.5. On Ethics and Studying the Study of Religion

I’ve mentioned Critical Humanism’s ethical values, and here we do well to

teleological because it has us examine the teloi, or purposes, that an agent

2.1. A Tragic Silence

In 1971 Claude Welch published a landmark report on the academic study of

I. The academic study of religion has firmly established its identity.

1971), he writes, “the period of emergence of a discipline of ‘religious studies,’

The central aim of this vision is to facilitate intellectual interaction among

2.2. The Firewall

field’s identity crisis by asking how to resolve practical problems leaves

a genealogical inquiry that traces the lineage of Reformation thought, but to

trust. On this Reformation account, actions carried out to achieve merit

must, of necessity, explore the dynamics of subject-​formation—​ways in

the formation and embodied expressions of their personal lives, social

2.3. Routine Work and Metadisciplinary Work

To understand the problems of—​and the potential remedies for—​the reli-

Scholarship along the second track—​Metadisciplinary Work—​takes a step

the field’s broader second-​ order methodologies operate within isolable

2.4. Compact, Diffuse, and Would-​be Disciplines

Understanding how disciplines are structured enables us to further grasp

Compact disciplines understand themselves as accountable to an agreed-​

Ja peräkkäin astuivat miehet kumisevaa karjapolkua mitään

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Epilogue: Critical Humanism as a Vocation 303

must, of necessity, explore the dynamics of subject-formation—ways in

To understand the problems of—and the potential remedies for—the reli-

Scholarship along the second track—Metadisciplinary Work—takes a step

the field’s broader second- order methodologies operate within isolable

2.4. Compact, Diffuse, and Would-be Disciplines

Compact disciplines understand themselves as accountable to an agreed-