How Political Ideology Is Pushing Religion Out of Religious Studies

Many academic disciplines have gotten “woke” in recent years, especially in the humanities and social sciences. For the most part, this transformation has occurred in plain view as colleges created departments for (and offered degrees in) “Women’s and Gender Studies,” “Black Studies,” “LGBTQ Studies,” “Latino Studies,” and the rest of the intersectionality parade.

One discipline, however, sports an innocent-sounding moniker—“Religious Studies.” Studying religion would seem to be immune to the current trends in higher education, focusing instead on theological concerns.

That impression, however, is inaccurate. Religious studies—one of the most “woke” disciplines on America’s college campuses—is an ideological wolf in sheep’s clothing, luring students, parents, and alumni into a false sense of security.

In the innocuous guise of religious studies, many colleges and universities are promoting a leftist political agenda.

I discovered this recently when a local college invited a “religious studies” scholar to deliver a lecture on faith that turned out to be a Marxist critique of capitalism, with not a single word about God or the Bible. This episode was eye-opening, but unfortunately not an aberration.

To my surprise, the field of religious studies is no longer primarily about religion, but rather a radicalized amalgam of socialism, LGBTQ activism, and identity politics. Hundreds of schools, both private and public, offer degrees in “religious studies,” including many of the nation’s leading universities. No longer the exclusive domain of seminaries, divinity schools, and Bible colleges, religious studies is even taught at most Ivy League schools.

Perhaps because of the limited job market, relatively few students major in religious studies, but it is a popular elective. At Yale, for example, while the volume of religious studies degrees has declined to a trickle, enrollment in undergraduate courses offered by the religious studies department has increased over the past decade. A Yale official admitted that one reason for the increased popularity of religious studies classes is that they no longer focus primarily on Christianity and Judaism, and instead explore “a wide variety of cultural and religious traditions.”

Now, in the words of the Yale Daily News, “there is…no single dominant religious tradition in the curriculum.” The ecumenical—even secular—nature of religious studies is what appeals to students at Yale, one of whom explained that “The field itself really studies people; it studies everything.”

In other words, religious studies has become a potpourri of the latest progressive fads.

That transformation is both recent and profound. Historically, ordained clergy performed religious studies instruction at many colleges and universities, often from an explicitly devotional perspective, typically emphasizing the Bible and Christian doctrine. Even after this practice was discontinued at public institutions due to legal challenges, the perception remained that “religious studies is indistinguishable from religious practice.”

When religious studies was expanded to include other religions, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam, and then reimagined as a secularized comparative approach, it became an inter-disciplinary subject lacking any meaningful religious component. In the process, it became the perfect vehicle for indoctrination. One religious studies scholar admitted that his goal is to “train students to interact with the world in a responsible and informed way.”

This is the state of religious studies in a nutshell: The field is an academic invention with no established tenets, methodological consensus, or fixed pedagogy. A blank canvas disconnected from religion, religious studies has become a free-wheeling gestalt of leftist sociology, economics, history, anthropology, and philosophy. As such, it is the ideal platform for aspiring academics wishing to avoid a more rigorous specialty with recognized scholarly standards.

Religious studies courses are empty vessels ready to be filled with the instructors’ favorite flavor of progressive ideology. Students willing to parrot the professors’ views can bag a few easy credit hours.

Broad generalizations about religious studies must acknowledge that the field is not monolithic. The faculty and curriculum at, say, Liberty University are quite different than those at Yale. Overall, however, the professoriate teaching religious studies is quite skewed to the left, as evidenced by the field’s leading trade association, the American Academy of Religion. Founded in 1909 as the Association of Biblical Instructors in American Colleges and Secondary Schools, the organization sponsors an annual meeting—held in conjunction with Society of Biblical Literature—that it boasts is “the world’s largest gathering of scholars interested in the study of religion.”

The content of the joint AAR/SBL annual meetings, which attract upwards of 11,000 attendees, is very revealing.

In light of the economic populism evident in the Progressive-era Social Gospel movement, one might expect religious studies scholars to exhibit some modestly reformist attitudes, but the field is pre-occupied with radical LGBTQ themes. The annual meetings are organized in large part by AAR committees called “program units,” some of which have an explicit LGBTQ emphasis, such as “Gay Men and Religion,” “Lesbian-Feminisms and Religion,” and “Queer Studies and Religion.” Not surprisingly, the AAR/SBL annual meetings reflect this emphasis.

Religious studies courses are empty vessels ready to be filled with the instructors’ favorite flavor of progressive ideology.
The 2016 meeting featured more than 40 LGBTQ events. The presentations included these topics: “Ruth as Undocuqueer: Re-Reading the Book of Ruth at the Intersection of Queer and Postcolonial;” “Sarah, Sodom, and the Queering of Time in Genesis 18-19;” “Daniel 11:37 and the Invention of the Homosexual Antichrist;” “The Gospel and Acts of the Holy Ghost: Queer Spectrality, Affective Homohistory, and Luke-Acts;” and “Crucifixion’s Idolatrous Resonance: Animality, Slavery, and Sexuality in Pauline Rhetoric.”

The 2017 meeting, held in Boston, was similar, including a presentation on “Queering Martin Luther.” The agenda, however, was dominated by condemnation of President Trump. According to one report, “Trump was named in the AAR/SBL program 27 times. A book of essays, Faith and Resistance in the Age of Trump, was among the hottest sellers at the religion publishers’ exhibition hall…Trump was denounced as a danger to the values of free inquiry, diversity, inclusion and respect.”

The Boston meeting was also noteworthy for featuring a talk by the notorious Palestinian activist Linda Sarsour.

Earlier in its history, when the organization still focused on religion, the annual meetings were quite different. When the un-woke antecedent to AAR met in 1932, the proceedings included a “half-a-dozen addresses with such titles as ‘Recent Excavations in Palestine,’ ‘The Bible and Modern Education,’ ‘A School Principal’s Reactions to the Problems of Biblical Instruction,’ and so forth.” In other words, actual religious studies, focusing on the Bible. But in recent decades, the AAR has taken a hard-left turn, outpacing even the rest of the academy.

In addition to the LGBTQ agenda, religious studies scholars promote a litany of issues that coincide with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party: Marxism/socialism, immigration reform, climate change, criminal justice reform, and identity politics. The ideologues who preach this secular gospel of social justice are supported by a flotilla of sympathetic publications, such as The Immanent Frame, Religion and Politics, the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Sojourners, and Religion Dispatches.

The connection to religion is often very loose, bordering on non-existent. One woke religious studies scholar describes herself this way: “I am a scholar of religion with particular interests in the history of capitalism and labor; religion in the Americas; feminist, queer, and critical race theory; and theory and method in the study of religion.”

On many university faculties, there is overlap between religious studies and, for example, African American studies. At Princeton, Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., a former president of the AAR, chairs the Department of African American Studies while also serving on the faculty of the Department of Religion. At the University of Texas, religious studies scholar Ashley Coleman Taylor describes her interests as “Black Feminism, Black Genders and Sexualities, Pragmatism, Queer of Color Critique, Africana Religions, Puerto Rican Studies, Atlanta Studies.” She is on the faculty of the Department of Religious Studies but also teaches in the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies. The disciplines are seemingly interchangeable.

Two decades ago, historian D.G. Hart called religious studies a “field in search of a rationale.” Hart opined further that religious studies, when unmoored from religious practice, became “rudderless, a discipline in search of an identity.” Sadly, in today’s woke academy the field has found a purpose—camouflage for progressive activism.

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No Child Left Behind by Coronavirus Closures

Now that we are months into quarantine for COVID-19 with no immediate end in sight, school districts across the nation have begun accepting the reality that they won’t be returning this year. As of April 26th, 43 states, along with 4 U.S. Territories, and the District of Columbia, “have ordered or recommended school building closures for the rest of the academic year, affecting approximately 45.1 million public school students.” These sudden and mass closures have forced schools to reevaluate everything.

As with other sectors of society, the deregulation that has come to education out of necessity proves that much of the centralized way our government controls education is unnecessary. The best example of this is doubtless the mass abandonment of high-stakes standardized testing that has come as a result of COVID-19.

When states decided to close schools for nearly a quarter of the year, one of the first problems that required a solution was grading students. How can teachers and administrators ensure that students are meeting educational standards? More importantly, how can schools ensure that graduating students should be eligible for a diploma?

Since the Bush administration passed No Child Left Behind, high-stakes state testing has been the bedrock of our educational system. Rather than empower teachers and local administrators to do what's best for their students, this system relies on a one-size-fits-all approach to measure educational achievement. In short, such policies have been an abysmal failure, favoring centralized control over a student-first model. While some states have already begun to rethink their approach to high-stakes testing, it seems that the COVID-19 closures may have been the straw that broke the camel's back for this outdated system.

In some states, like Texas and Florida, the Governors have already waived state testing for the 2019-2020 school year, with several others considering the same. In doing so, these states have vested the local school districts with the responsibility of determining their own standards for grading and graduation, empowering the local governments. School districts have taken various approaches, but nearly all have placed the decision in the hands of those who know their students best: teachers, counselors, and school administrators.

In San Angelo, Texas, where I attended K-12, the San Angelo Independent School District has established a new system of grading policies that is centered around treating each student as an individual. Students who were passing at the end of the third quarter, and regularly attend online classes during the fourth quarter (which is pass/fail), will automatically pass. Those students who were failing at the end of the third quarter, and/or do not attend online classes, are put on the bubble.

For those students on the bubble, the school will convene a three-person committee consisting of the teacher of the respective class, the student’s counselor, and a school administrator like a vice principal. This three-person committee will engage in a holistic review of the student’s record and make a determination about whether or not the student should receive credit.

While such a system is far from perfect and erected with haste, it is far superior to the previous system that relied almost entirely upon all-or-nothing standardized state testing and high-stakes final exams. The most important consideration for school districts is to address the diversity of home life situations of their students. Determining advancement eligibility based on this holistic model better allows schools to address these diversities of experiences among their students. No student should be punished for having a difficult home life. Eliminating high-stakes tests in favor of holistic examination has the potential to help those students that need it the most, especially when they are stuck at home.

Though these orders only apply to the current year, and states may very well return to high-stakes testing next year, it nevertheless represents a significant step away from bad policy. Hopefully, this year will serve as a proof of concept, showing that these tests were unnecessary to begin with.

Commentators and pundits have regularly lamented about the plight of the Class of 2020. But, if current trends continue, the Class of 2020 is set to be a pivotal turning point in American education. Hopefully, state and local governments will recognize the benefits of empowering their teachers and will codify these changes permanently.

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Finland will reopen schools and daycare centres after May 13, having kept them mostly closed since March 18 due to the coronavirus pandemic

Finland's Prime Minister Sanna Marin said children would return to school gradually, starting on May 14 for a little more than two weeks, before their summer break begins as usual at the start of June.

Pupils at upper secondary and vocational schools will continue to study remotely, she added.

The spread of the coronavirus has showed signs of slowing in Finland, with the number of cases per capita well below those of neighbouring Sweden, Norway and Estonia.

Education Minister Li Andersson said there were no longer grounds for keeping the schools and daycares closed.

"It is clear that a long period of remote teaching may have negative impacts on children's learning and wellbeing," Andersson told a news conference.

By Wednesday, 206 people had died in Finland and it had 4906 confirmed coronavirus cases.

The Finnish Institute of Health and Welfare said about 200 cases of infection had been found in children under 16 years old in Finland but none of them had been hospitalised.

The institute's Director of Health Security Mika Salminen said more evidence had emerged during the school closure to prove that children played a very small role in spreading the virus.

"Also children don't generally infect adults," Salminen said in reference to the coronavirus, adding there was little evidence of such cases.

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