Course Correction
Perry Glanzer on Why Religion Departments Aren’t Exactly Religious
I have come to the conclusion that teaching religion is useless and religion departments should be renamed. I say this as someone who was trained in a religion department and occasionally teaches religion courses.
When I teach a religion course, I like to ask a series of questions in the first class. “What do professors try to teach you to be in history classes?” One of my bright-eyed students chirps up, “To be a historian.”
I continue, “What are they trying to teach you to be in a psychology class?” An aspiring psychology student understands the game: “A psychologist.”
“What are they trying to teach you to be in a biology class?” Everyone now gets the pattern and answers, “To be a biologist.”
Not Religious
“ Okay, what are we trying to teach you to be in a religion class?” The students pause, because they sense the trap. “Are we trying to teach you to be religious?” I ask. On most college campuses, even religious ones, to be called “religious” remains an insult.
A muffled but audible series of denials escapes from their mouths. They sense what history professor C. John Sommerville, author of The Decline of the Secular University, notes: Teaching religion “is rather like learning Language without learning any particular language.”
“What, then, are we trying to do?” My students stumble through some answers: “To learn about the Bible”; “to learn about the historical and literary context of the Bible.” To these answers I respond, “Why not just put this course in the history, classics, or literature department? It sounds like we’re merely trying to make you historians or classicists.”
Indeed, many religion classes at universities really belong in another department. Their subject matter is the Bible or the Christian tradition, but little distinguishes what they do with the Bible from the work of the historian or classicist, or the anthropologist or sociologist, for that matter. Even when I talked with a student from a local seminary, he told me his Bible course was actually an ancient history and literature course. It left me asking him, “Do they talk about God in the course as something more than Israel’s tribal deity?”
At the end of my series of questions, I usually follow up with one promising line of thought. “Are we teaching you to be Bible scholars, and should the religiondepartment instead be called the Bible department?” (which, in its early, some would call unenlightened, days, it was called at our university).
Perry Glanzer is an Assistant Professor in the School of Education at Baylor University and the author of The Quest for Russia?s Soul (Baylor University Press). He attends First Baptist Church in Woodway, Texas.
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