Why I Like Religious Studies

May 29, 2009

Today was tailored to make me think about why I like teaching religious studies. I got up this morning and went to my intro class where I was supposed to teach about the Bahai but got sidetracked by a discussion of Scientology. Then in the afternoon I taught Radical Reform by Tariq Ramadan, a book that sketches out a framework for interpreting the Quran. Then skip forward a couple of hours and I am at our small religious studies symposium listening to student presentations on Mormonism, the problem of evil in Christianity, Theosophy and Gandhi, Palestinian representations of the land, the psychology of terrorism, and a close reading of a Buddhist poem. I guess that's enough for one day.

What I like about these topics is that nowhere is there any sense of deciding on what is true or correct. Our fascination is always in clarifying the frames through which different people and religious groups are perceiving their world. In other words, everybody's crazy, and we like it that way. Our particularly human craziness is the deep need to find coherence and significance in life, and this leads our minds to connect the dots of life into fascinating patterns. Philosophers have to worry about truth claims and all that, as religious scholars we get to watch human beings spinning their webs of significance.

My intro class got off track when I showed this video of Tom Cruise talking about Scientology:

The video has its comic-relief value in watching Tom Cruise go on with a high level of intensity about his experience of life.. but the video also makes you think about the nature of religion. At 4:05 Cruise says: "If you're a Scientologist you see things the way they are. In all its glory, in all its complexity."

But of course Cruise is not really seeing "things the way they are." He's experiencing the world through a distorting lens. Just listen to him talk in and you'll hear the Scientology lingo: KSW, out-ethics, criminon, SP. It's obvious how completely mediated his experience of the world is. That is what religions do: they get people to believe that they are seeing the world for what it is. Other people are "blind" or "arrogant".. they somehow choose not to see what is obvious. But the believer knows he or she sees the world for what it is.

It makes me wonder what the mind of a religious studies scholar should be like. Obviously the claim to see the world as it is will be problematic. Rather there we should strive for a consciousness of our own lens and apply constant effort to understand the lenses through which others see the world.

There is no such thing as arriving at a pure view of the world. Wallace Stevens has perhaps the best treatment of this:

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."

The man creplied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."

And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."

Religion is, of course, what is being played upon the blue guitar: "A tune beyond us, yet ourselves."