Issue: Summer 2004

Leap of Faiths - The Quest for Religious Literacy

Regardless of one’s faith, in a globalized, massively integrated, post-9/11 world rocked by sectarian strife, it behooves a college-educated person to have a basic understanding of the major world religions

After a century of skepticism, faith is making a comeback. “There seems to be an awakening interest in the academy nationwide in religion,” says USC’s Don Miller. The last decade, he says, has witnessed a serious re-examination of the “secularization hypothesis” – put forward by social scientists like Marx, Weber and Freud – which had theorized that religion would be replaced by science.

“Sociologists and cultural critics back in the 1960 and ‘70s thought we were reinventing the world. Religion seemed to be passé,” adds Elizabeth Davenport. She shakes her head and laughs: “It didn’t quite work out that way. Religion is as much on the map as ever, I’m afraid.”

Perhaps even more so. Harvard researcher Diana Eck, an authority on religious pluralism, believes that “while race has been the dominant American social issue in the past century, religious diversity in our civil and neighborly lives is emerging, mostly unseen, as the great challenge of the 21st.”

According to UCLA’s Spirituality in Higher Education study released late last year, though they may not identify with any organized religion, 77 percent of American college students pray, and 70 percent attended religious services last year. Seventy-seven percent agree with the statement “we are all spiritual beings”; and 58 percent say it is “very important” or “essential” to integrate spirituality into their lives.

Yet 62 percent of the national survey’s respondents say their professors never encourage discussion of religious or spiritual

issues. It would seem universities aren’t doing a very good job of addressing this spiritual hunger.

To a certain extent, multiculturalism is responsible for this silence. Ironically, the multifaith movement’s intellectual cousin has bred a non-judgmentalist politesse that helped consign religious discourse to the realm of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Susan Laemmle remembers the first time she and USC President Steven B. Sample discussed this tacit ban on religious discourse.

“You know, the Victorians talked a lot about religion but were very quiet about sex,” Sample had remarked at a reception, “while we moderns talk endlessly about sex but repress religion.”

Laemmle told him then, as she has told many others since: “I seek to bring religion out of the closet.”

Hindu student Nidhi Agrawal is living proof that Laemmle has the right idea. Last fall, the political science and biology major from Arcadia, Calif., enrolled in a senior seminar on religion and politics. “It was amazing,” says Agrawal. “I suddenly saw the underlying role of religion in everything, from markets to political motives. There’s all this stuff to talk about that none of my other classes had ever touched on. After taking this class, I realized I don’t know anything.”

Graduating this spring and heading on to medical school, Agrawal now wishes that she had more time to study religion. “When you’re talking about the Thirty Years’ War or the Crusades, when you’re talking about Iraq, religion obviously plays a huge role. You can’t afford to not talk about it just because it may offend somebody.”

There’s a name for what Agrawal is talking about: it’s called “religious literacy.” Regardless of one’s personal faith, the thinking goes, in a globalized, massively integrated, post-9/11 world rocked by sectarian strife, it behooves a college-educated person to have a basic understanding of the major world religions. “As a socially aware person, it’s your duty to educate yourself, to learn about other cultures, traditions and ideas,” says Agrawal.

She is not alone in feeling this way.

According to Miller, his department’s general education courses “are absolutely brimming over.” A 200-seat survey course on Asian religions generates waiting lists each semester. The same goes for a 100-student course on the New Testament taught from a historical perspective. The students filling these courses are not religion majors – USC has only about 50 of those. Who do they attract?

“It’s a complete mishmash of people,” says Miller. “People with faith, people with no faith, people from all different faiths, people who are exploring. This is a trend all over the country. Religion departments are well-enrolled.”

This yawning spiritual hunger presents both a challenge and an opportunity for academe, says Laemmle. How can a secular university be responsive? How does it provide rich and varied spiritual resources for all while imposing religiosity on none? And how to bridge the gap between religion as practice and religion as scholarship?

“At many universities, especially where they have a divinity program, there’s a kind of self-imposed wall that separates academic religion from confessional religion,” explains Ronald Garet. “It’s uncommon for people on the academic and pastoral side to respect one another and have good working relationships. Divinity schools have lots of people who are hostile to religion. Religion professors bend over backward to prove that they aren’t proselytizing.”

Don Miller agrees with that assessment, but notes that “I have not sensed that here, and part of this has to do with Susan Laemmle.”

An academic herself – her Ph.D. is in English literature – Laemmle interfaces with the faculty far more often and far better than most university chaplains. “She is genuinely intellectually curious, respectful of good scholarship, yet someone of deep personal faith,” says Miller.

“One of the advantages of USC is that we are, at our best, a pretty unpretentious place,” adds Garet. “We’re willing to get our hands dirty, get in the community, stand up for what we believe in. And I think that’s true for the area of religion. We’re very well placed to relate the confessional side of religion to the critical side, to ask questions like: who is God, why do we live and die, and do I really believe the church’s stance on ordination, marriage, war or peace? These are questions of an inquiring mind; this has to be a place where those questions can get asked.” – Diane Krieger