UNITED
STATES:
SCHOLARS GET RELIGION
Christian
Science Monitor - 26 February 2002
Posted 2 March 2002 on RELIGIOSCOPE
More
academics are starting to see the 'religion factor' as key
to understanding forces in economics, politics, and society,
reports Mark Clayton, staff writer of The Christian Science
Monitor.
When
it comes to academic scholarship, blue sky and dollars are
often the only limits on research. But Luis Lugo discovered
another obstacle early in his scholarly career. All it took
was for the doctoral candidate in political science to suggest
a project that would delve deeply into religion.
The response, at best, was cool. "In my own discipline,
political science, the Emily Post rule applied," recalls Dr. Lugo, who took his PhD at the University of Chicago
in the 1970s. "Religion was simply not something one
discussed in polite company."
Lugo,
who persevered and went on to examine religion's impact on
early United States foreign policy, chuckles about the incident.
But that's not the only thing that makes him smile. In the
years since he started his studies, US higher education has
done a sharp about-face. American scholarship, Lugo says,
has gotten religion.
The
ivory tower has gone from keeping a rigid distance between
religion and social-science scholarship to a still-modest,
but growing, embrace of it, says Lugo, director of the religion
program at the Pew Charitable Trusts in Philadelphia.
He's
not alone in his assessment of the shift. "Since the
early 1990s, there has been a broad increase in the amount
of interest in religion in the academy as a research topic," says Kathleen Mahoney, coauthor of a forthcoming book on religion's
role within higher education. "We are seeing religion-and-fill-in-the-blank
research: religion and economics, religion and political science,
religion and history."
For
most of the 20th century, scholarship and religion were at
opposite poles when it came to research - with religion confined
to its own department. Religion's ingrained values were seen
as antithetical to a search for answers based on a scientific
line of reasoning.
Now,
however, a broader range of academics are beginning to see
the "religion factor" as a key to understanding
historical, political, social, and even economic forces.
"Increasingly,
scholars are realizing there is no such thing as value-free
inquiry," Dr. Mahoney says. "Why can't Christians
bring their values into inquiry - and have that perspective
inform their research?"
Among
scores of research projects, books, and monographs, examples
of scholarship branching out are easier to find than ever.
A
Santa Clara University economist is using economic tools to
study religious extremism. An Emory University interdisciplinary
institute is conducting a research project on marriage, sex,
and family issues as they relate to Christianity, Judaism,
and Islam. A Harvard University history professor is authoring
a book about the rise of evangelical political power and the
Christian right in Orange County, Calif. And such research
is trickling into the classroom, observers say, through courses
with words like "God" or "religion" in
their titles, many of them offered outside the religion department.
Caution
still prevails
Mahoney,
Lugo, and others note that some disciplines have warmed to
religion research, while others remain in the deep freeze.
Political
science and sociology were relatively early and growing adopters
over the past two decades. History, too. But go to the economics
department, and the idea of focusing on religion may still
get a skeptical reception.
Robert
Barro is helping to change that. A leading conservative economist
at Harvard, he is examining the impact of religions on the
economies of nations. It's still a small shock to some of
Dr. Barro's colleagues.
When
Barro began his research, there really wasn't a department
on Harvard's campus where it fit well, he says. So he and
Rachel McCleary, a religion and philosophy expert, formed
the Religion, Political Economy and Society Project. Now,
the idea is to branch out beyond economics and involve other
disciplines in basic religion and social-science research.
"I
started by thinking about why some countries grow faster than
others over a long time," Barro says. "At
first I was thinking about political institutions and property
rights, but I've expanded to think about the impact of religion
and culture on economies."
Up
against the scientific method
Such
innovation, however, is still a fairly recent development.
After
World War II, American higher education became captivated
by advances in the hard sciences. Social-science research
veered sharply in favor of strictly quantitative methods that
mimicked research in the natural sciences. Religion was hard
to measure and didn't fit the new mold.
Another
factor was the scholarly embrace of the "secularization
thesis." As society became more advanced, it would naturally
becomes less religious - or so the thesis held. Religion,
therefore, would soon be as relevant as a buggy whip, so why
try to study its effects on society?
Then
real life intervened. Even as church attendance was dropping,
Jimmy Carter became America's first "born again" president in 1976. Ronald Reagan enjoyed Christian-right support
- as did Pat Buchanan later. George W. Bush may be president
today because he appealed more to Christian-right voters.
Add to that the Iranian revolution, the Branch Davidian battle
with the FBI in 1993, and most recently, the Sept. 11 attacks,
and it's clear that understanding religion's impact on society
has never been more important.
Such
events have driven scholars to adopt a pragmatic view, says
Alan Wolfe, a political scientist and sociologist who directs
the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at
Boston College.
"I'm
not a religious person," he says, "But I
and others are interested in understanding religion's role
in society. One thing after another has led me to realize
if you want to understand American politics or Sept. 11, you
really need to know more about American history and the role
religion has played in it."
Even
onetime proponents of the secularization thesis, like Boston
University sociologist Peter Berger, have reversed course.
"I
started out my career believing with almost everyone else
that modernity goes hand in hand with a decline in religion," says Dr. Berger, who wrote The Desecularization of the
World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics in 1999. "Well, I was wrong.... There are secularized regions
- Western Europe, for example. But it doesn't go hand in hand
with modernity. So there has to be something else going on."
Growing
numbers of political scientists and historians have also found
religion to be a critical element in their work.
"I
think we [in the academy] are finally figuring out that the
importance of religion is self-evident," says Ted
Jelen, a political scientist at the University of Nevada at
Las Vegas. "Social scientists have been constantly
predicting the secularization of the world. That simply has
not happened. Religion is remarkably resilient."
While
not yet ubiquitous by any means, this shift in attitudes is
scattered across the academy. Mahoney ticks off a list that
includes growing enrollments in academic organizations with
a Christian orientation - the Society of Christian Philosophers,
for instance. More faculty are attending conferences on the
place of religion in the academy and the role of spirituality
in teaching.
Evidence
of the upsurge can also be seen in more and better submissions
to scholarly journals, which are coming from a greater variety
of disciplines. "We're starting to crack the mainstream
journals in all fields," exults Dr. Jelen, who edits
the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.
Still,
political scientists are "pretty recent converts," he says. Just a few hardy adventurers dissected religion and
American politics in the early 1980s. Now, however, mainstream
academic organizations have subgroups catering to religion
research, like the American Political Science Association's
religion section, which has about 500 members.
The
trend seems unlikely to abate anytime soon. Islamic fundamentalism,
for example, is the subject of new scholarship at many institutions.
Follow
the money
There's
another reason multidisciplinary religious scholarship is
picking up speed: money. Several well-known endowments have
funded religion research projects across disciplines, including
the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Lilly Endowment, the Ford Foundation,
and, most recently, the John Templeton Foundation.
"These
large organizations want to study religion in a social-science
context, so now there is money for scholars who might not
otherwise study religion," says Philip Goff, director
of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture
at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis.
The
1990s stock market certainly helped make these goals a reality.
Share prices of Eli Lilly & Co. shot skyward, propelled
by sales of popular drugs like Prozac. The Lilly Endowment
holds much of that company's stock. The result is a well-funded
endowment (about $15 billion) giving generously to research,
Dr. Goff says.
"I
know professors who say, 'I got a 'Prozac grant' to study
religion,' " he says. "The mutual-fund boom
has been great. Studies being funded by Lilly and Pew have
attracted many scholars."
Even
with a sagging stock market, though, religion-research funding
looks to be more than a flash in the pan. Pew, under Lugo's
direction, is starting up 10 cross-disciplinary research institutes
on university campuses. The institutes must be located in
the center of campus - to woo faculty from many disciplines,
he says.
"We're
trying to enrich the academy," Lugo says, "to
get academics to think more broadly about issues important
to the public. The long-term result, we hope, will be students
who graduate with a better understanding of religion's impact
on society because their professors understand it better."
A
magnet for budding scholars
If
that happens, then it may be easier to attract young scholars
to carry on the research. When Harvard's Barro needed help
gathering data, he recruited Brian Boyle, a junior majoring
in sociology, and Jeremy Galen, a sophomore religion major.
Both
young men are excited by the prospects - and open to incorporating
religion into their own future scholarship.
"I've
read the last 15 years of literature in this field," Mr. Galen says. "What interests me is that the study
of religion goes hand in hand with these other questions about
society. I would have no hesitancy whatsoever about doing
research in this area. There's enough scholarship support
for it to be well received."
Mark
Clayton
Copyright
© 2002 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.
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