244 - Academic Religion Today

Academic Religion Today
By Martin E. Marty

THE best time to measure the religion of the academy is during the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. The religion of academic religious studies, it goes without saying, is different from the religion of churchly expression. How different becomes clear when one assesses the book of Abstracts that accompanied the meeting last November in Anaheim, California.

Reading such Abstracts is not the same experience as attending sessions. Scholars submit their condensations early. Their extended papers, oral presentations, subsequent mind changes, and responses to critiques from the floor allow for nuances that are missing from digests. Yet, having attended the meetings for years and having been in many sessions in November, I can attest to the general faithfulness of the documents to the more extended texts.

Academy meetings include much more than the lecture and seminar sessions. They allow for book promotions, alumni/ae receptions, elbowbending, job-placement, and the like. There is also some AAR policymaking. But, having been elected Vice-President in the presidential succession after having accepted this assignment, I shall for reasons of fairness and discretion bracket all talk of Academy politics and get right to the substance.

I

A reader who has never been to a meeting and is relatively far from academic religious study may need some background reminders. First, the AAR meets concurrently with the Society of Biblical Literature, whose papers also are in the Abstracts. Second, except for job-seeking thesis writers, students are absent, and it is distorting, almost eerie, to pursue studies without students. Third, add to this the understanding that most scholars are trying out their horizonal work, their most experimental and least safe explorations, and it is clear that what goes on at a meeting is not fully representative of life in the classroom. But it is quite representative of what goes on in the minds of scholars, and assessing some of that can be informative.

Martin E. Marty is Professor of the History of Modern Christianity at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. He is the Editor of Context and Associate Editor of The Christian Century. He is the author of numerous volumes on religion and the American churches, such as Varieties of Unbelief (1964), Righteous Empire (which won a National Book Award in 1971), and The Public Church (1981). He is currently Vice-President of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) of which he writes in this essay.

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Pluralism is the first word that hits the reviewer. it is one thing to put the name "pluralism" on American religious life and another to see what interests scholars. A glance at such Abstracts as these makes it difficult to find the center holding in what our government leaders these days patent and promote as a "Judeo-Christian" civilization. The "groups" that convene in these sessions are devoted year in and year out, to Buddhist, Chinese, Muslim, Japanese, Korean themes. And there is a cafeteria of options: Afro-America, Bonhoeffer, evangelicalism, liberation, narrative, Plato, peace and war, ritual, Schleiermacher all vie with "consultations" on esotericism, feminism, rhetoric, Zoroastrianism, and Urantia Book, Baha'i, and process thought. All religious expressions past and present seem equi-near, which can also mean equi-distant.

Such a pluralism reflects, more than many a church leader would like to think, the world of impressions and options available to parishioners and the great unwashed outsiders. While the young collegian who is seeking to express a faith, or a faith to express, may not entertain all the choices with equal seriousness, the choices are there. The campus newspaper, national magazines, radio, television, and dormchatter are more likely to tilt toward these rather than toward quieter mainline religion.

A consequence, then, of this pluralism is a loss of normativeness for the privileged and inherited Christian complex. In her AAR presidential address, Professor Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, who described herself as a daughter of secular Jews who lives with Hindu myth and friendliness to the Christian story, felt called to criticize those scholars who enter religious studies with no empathy for people who are expressively religious, indeed, scholars who sometimes show distaste for their own tradition. Her kind of scholarship wins back some space for those who feel that some religious studies experts half a generation ago adopted the wrong posture. So eager were they to be more neo-positivist, scientific, and non-committal, so ready were they to be "more secular than thou," that the secular academy found them out of focus. They had lost empathy. Many are winning it back, but with little danger of turning academic religious studies into the promotion of particular faith traditions.

When the neo-positivists ruled, some scholars-Robert Bellah of Berkeley among them-began to question whether the academic study of religion was itself a form of religion, one that biased inquiries and made them unscientific in their own ways. A religion-of-non-religionin-order-to-study-religion always looms as a possibility. Yet, today some counterforces limit its development. Too many cohorts of scholars demonstrate their passionate involvements: feminist, Afro-American, evangelical, and liberationist scholars are not alone. Some of the "advocates of fairness" for the New Religions have all but become advocates for the New Religions. It is possible to be "fair" in the study of religion, to keep covenants with the diverse students and the traditions they embody; it is not so easy, however, to be objective and dispassion

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ate-as even the condensed theses in the Abstracts, to say nothing of the spoken word at the Academy meetings, makes clear. The classroom is not the chapel, and academic study is not designed to nurture faith. Yet, it may do more justice than it did decades ago to the fact that faithful people are constantly nurturing and being nurtured, and the academy must reckon with this affective life.

II

If one begins by noting how different is the charter of the secular academy and, with it, the study of religion in church-related colleges, than the practice and nurture of faith in chapel and in theological formation at seminaries, one can do most justice to what goes on at an AAR meeting. For analogies: one can study Marxism and capitalism and Maoism-all of them likely to be at least quasi-religious-without worshipping Marxism, capitalism, and Maoism. Yet, one can do more justice to such phenomena when their mythic dimensions are made patent and when one recognizes the passion that people bring to such systems.

That having been said, it remains to be noted what are the current preoccupations of scholars who take pains to arrange sessions and present wares. Their agenda may seem exotic and esoteric to practitioners of "Judeo-Christian" synagogue and church religion. Some mainline figures receive regular and continuing attention: Bonhoeffer, Kierkegaard, Lonergan, Schleiermacher, and Wesley are honored with study groups. The Abstracts, on the other hand, show little attention to Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and maybe Barth. Such a string of names alerts Abstracts readers to the task of doing some reckoning not with who is in, but what is in, the zone of concern today.

If I count sessions, papers, and allusions accurately, to take just one example, the Holocaust is much studied. Such inquiry is overdue, and should prosper in a time of compensation for past neglect. The Holocaust commissions, conferences, and curricular committees are not giving a fair picture if they complain of scholarly neglect now. It is often heard that one should study the Holocaust as one studies the Crucifixion. This year's program seldom refers or alludes to anything close to the Crucifixion. By the way, and as a corollary, Jewish studies are alive and well, and represented in the program with far more strenuousness in a culture where Judaism is a statistically small minority. There are almost as many Eastern Orthodox Christians as Jews in America, and they make up a significant component in Christendom. One would hardly know they exist in the scope of the American Academy.

Alongside Holocaust and Jewish studies, another zone of creativity and energy is feminist studies. Academy membership includes, to date, too few blacks, Hispanics, Orientals, and Native Americans. The only "minority" that has "made it" in the programs and Abstracts is made up of women. Here as often, however, the concerns do not match those of church and synagogue in their mainstream patterns. The Abstracts give

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concrete evidence that lesbian and Goddess themes draw more attention than do preoccupations with ordination of women. There was a session on the Inclusive Language Lectionary, but it was exceptional.

This is the place to attach a corollary notion only hinted at so far. Whoever complains that the American establishment or mainline is too potent would never know it from an AAR program. I glimpsed one reference to nineteenth century evangelicalism in the Episcopal line, and there was an examination of a Presbyterian action on peace issues to match a bicentennially-thriving Wesleyan Studies Group. Yet, if these Abstracts were the only trace about religion unearthed by future archeologists, they would think that Baha'i and Urantia and Goddess religion prevailed; they would hardly know there were Lutherans, Disciples, members of the United Church of Christ, United Methodists, Presbyterians, or Anglicans in the world of the 1980s-or even in the historical records of the past that produced the 1980s.

In ethics, there has been some shift from civil rights and war and peace (more from the former than the latter) to medical and business ethics. In theology, there is some notice given liberation and more to process, while the neo-orthodoxies and neo-scholasticisms of midcentury have fallen into neglect. One notes a good deal of attention given "narrative," "story," and "rhetoric," some of the sort that blends with synagogue-and-church concerns and some enhoused in more fashionable and remote "deconstructionist" contexts of the "this, too, will pass sort.

III

Most of us live in more worlds than one. Some of the cool-sounding agnostic students of comparative religions are more passionately creedal in their advocacies than serenely traditional Catholics in the Academy. Many may be strong Catholics engaging in fair-minded study of Hinduism or Hare Krishna without loss of their Catholic focus in chapel or their scholarly credentials in the classroom. Benjamin Mariante, following Robert Bellah, has spoken of a "multiplex consciousness" with which people endure and even prosper in a pluralist world. They can carry many kinds of signals, some of them appearing to be quite contradictory, without turning schizoid or duplicitous. It depends upon what subject and resources are called forth at particular times.

So it is that no longer must one be presumed to be an agnostic in respect to all religions to do justice to all of them, to be non-committal in practice in order to be committed to theory. The division of labor between church and academy, as old as that between Jerusalem and Athens, lives on and causes stress. The religion implied by both poles is partial and does not do justice to the signals in the larger environment. If the chapel windows are sometimes closed, capable of inducing claustrophobia, needing the airing a classroom can provide, the classroom prospers when its habituees remain aware that behind academic study of religion are millions of practitioners of faiths. They provide the warm

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bodies and communities in which sacred texts are engendered, where symbols are celebrated, and myths retold. Without them, the religious studies would soon be for archaeologists, nothing more.

The humanities, wherein "divinity" is curricularly housed in our epoch, are not prospering at the moment on American campuses. It is imprecise to talk about a "boom" in religious studies, as academics did two decades ago. Yet, religion more than holds its own where humanities hold their own. If some of the AAR studies seem beside the point and if some of them are (but, one asks, what is the point and where is it, and who names it?), overall there is an impression of vitality.

The scholars will not do the work for ministers and lay leaders in believing communities. Their attention to pluralism and novelty may at times distract from that work. Yet, they have also provided a service by showing thoughtful people in the secular academy that religious concerns, attentiveness to the transcendent and the sacred, remains an awesomely potent force in our time. One sees it in the holy wars abroad and political fanaticisms at home, in medical ethics and the mythology of women's consciousness, and, not least of all, in the quiet search of individuals and communities. With religion, people ward off chaos and find meaning.

The Abstracts more often contribute to the appearance of chaos than the clarifying of meaning. Yet, the people who write them and the people they describe remain important in the economy of the academy and the culture. They dish out criticism of church religion. They deserve scrutiny and participation on the part of churchly scholars who are also at home, if uneasily, as they are in the pew, in the classroom, and the study.