Secularism Was Overrated

When Clark Kerr, then the President of the University of California, gave the prestigious Godkin Lectures at Harvard University in 1962, which evolved into his famous book The Uses of the University, now it its 5^th edition, not once did he mention the word “religion.” President Kerr shared the view of many intellectuals and cultural analysts 50 years ago that the future of a great American university would not need to include research and teaching about religion.

Indeed, in 1968, the esteemed American sociologist of religion, Peter Berger, predicted that increased secularization of society would result in the dwindling of religious groups, leaving religious folks feeling more and more isolated, in his words “huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture.” (Note: Berger, to be sure, has since retracted this thesis.)

Thus for many secular-minded intellectuals and cultural observers, the great surprise of the past two generations has been the resurgence of religion’s influence in the world. Among the surprised are three professors of political science and public policy, Monica Duffy Toft at Harvard, Timothy Samuel Shaw at Georgetown, and Daniel Philpott at Notre Dame. They have just published their analysis of the real world situation titled God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics (W.W. Norton, 2011). They write: “Despite a powerful array of secularizing regimes, ideologies, and social trends, religion has not only outlasted its most ferocious 20^th century rivals, but in many cases it also appears poised to supplant them” (“God’s Partisans Are Back,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 17, 2011). “The 21^st century has brought us a world radically different from the one [that] secularization theory promised.”

For example, secularization theory predicted that the increase in democratization, which took off in the early 1970's, would eventually bury religion. As people felt more free to choose their own destinies, the power of religious authority over individuals was predicted to whither. And while that in itself has sometimes happened, it is also the case that in 48 of 78 countries where democratic reforms were successful between 1972 and 2009, religious people have been very vocal opponents of the power of repressive governments.

According to these three political scientists, religious groups have great positive potential for advancing democracy and stability in conflict-ridden societies. “In Indonesia, for instance, two major Islamic movements were the only civil-society actors to maintain a modicum of indepen-dence under the three decades of Suharto’s dictatorship – and they played a robust role in midwifing democracy [there] in the late 1990s.” (I continue to quote) “If U.S. foreign-policy makers better understood religion, they would become more adept at working with religious groups to promote democracy, development, and stability.”

These political scientists observe, what scholars of religion have known all along, that religion is a dynamic and powerful force in shaping cultures and complex civilizations, so understanding religion is critical for many areas of study from history, politics, art, literature, and music, as well as public health. Studying religion is both exciting and demanding. The history of religions is global in scope and invites us to study carefully the languages and cultures of the world. The currents of religious thinking and action today run swiftly, with rapids, eddies, and backwaters that require the very best analysis of scholars in the humanities and social sciences.

May these political scientists’ enthusiasm become contagious among UCLA’s faculty and administration. Indeed, a commentary in the London Times urged U.S. universities to take steps to aid “Americans to become more religiously literate so that they can [better] judge public policy issues.” This is in response to the frequently heard claim that more Americans are involved in religious activities than in any other industrialized nation, while at the same time they are the most religiously illiterate among all such nations. One of the high prices we pay for our ignorance of religion, especially the religions of others, is the ease with which many political leaders manipulate our fear of people who practice other religions. A troubling number of our leaders rely on our ignorance and lack of curiosity—and display their own ignorance—as they play to our fears. Remem-ber, for example, the controversy over the so-called “ground-zero mosque” (a building actually proposed to be a large community center for everyone, with one room dedicated as a mosque, and built six blocks distant from “ground-zero.”)

The Study of Religion at UCLA

So let’s come back to UCLA, where for 83 years, the University Religious Conference has fostered continuity in both the practice of religion and the critical-academic study of religion, beginning when this very promising university was located in downtown Los Angeles on Vermont Avenue and following its move to Westwood and it joining the ranks of world-class research universities. What can be said about the study of religion at UCLA? I am pleased to be able to report to you:

1. There are currently 31 upper-division students majoring in UCLA’s Interdepartmental major in the study of religion, taking courses in as many as eight different departments. Fifteen students received their B.A. in 2009 and 16 in 2010. And the major continues to attract the brightest among UCLA students. For example, I know that among the 16 students who graduated a few years ago, 44 per cent [seven] of them earned Latin or departmental honors; four of the 16 earned their degree summa cum laude - 25%!

2. Earlier this year, the Study of Religion major was subjected to its eight-year academic review. The two distinguished external members of the eight-year review committee, from UC Berkeley and Columbia, wrote, with UCLA’s administration in mind: “We recognize that there are many different and competing areas of study clamoring for support at a very difficult time in the University’s budget planning process. That said, we cannot overstate the importance of the academic study of religion for the humanities and social sciences at this moment in the history of the university in the United States. . . . In the first decade of the twenty-first century, few academic disciplines have emerged as more important to a liberal education or more vital to a university’s intellectual life.”

3. These reviewers further insisted that “ignorance of the subtleties of religious histories, identities, and differences can have catastrophic effects in the real world.” Case in point: such catastrophic ignorance on the part of American senators who encouraged the USA to go to war in Iraq while not knowing the critical difference between Sunni and Shi’i Muslims there. The reviewers insisted that “insofar as the university is educating citizens who will eventually participate in institutions and decision-making, it has an obligation to contribute to the production and dissemination of knowledge about religion.”

4. That said, the reviewers had high praise for what has been accomplished so far at UCLA, stating that we have a “world-class faculty specializing in particular religious traditions.”(but noting that because of their own departmental obligations, they are often not available to offer courses in what they know). The reviewers wrote: “We came away from our site visit with the sense that the Interdepartmental Program in the Study of Religion at UCLA has done a rather amazing job with a shockingly small amount of investment by the university.” They also have high praise for Prof. Ra’anan Boustan (please stand), my successor as both the chair of the Study of Religion major and the director of the Center for the Study of Religion who [in their words] “has brought incredible energy, dedication, and creativity” to both roles. I fully agree.

5. These reviewers then made the following urgent recommendation: Dividing the responsibilities of the director of the CSR from those of the chair for the Study of Religion program. That is, appointing two faculty members to do the work that until now has been carried by only one.

Here’s the story:

In 1995, when Pauline Yu, then Dean of Humanities Division, accepted my proposal signed by more than 20 faculty members to establish the Center for the Study of Religion at UCLA, she insisted that the same person be appointed the director of the center and the chair of the undergraduate major in the study of religion. She made it sound like a deal-breaker, that is, that her approval depended on our agreeing to this (to us) completely unexpected condition –we had assumed that the Dean would want to keep separate these two responsibilities. So the six-person committee that had worked for five years to present a wide range of conferences, seminars, colloquia for “works in progress” by UCLA faculty, and guest lecturers, in part to show the dean the need for this center at UCLA, agreed to her stipulation. To be sure, at that point we did not have much of a basis for protest, since there were only three students in the study of religion major in 1995.

As I then developed both the programming of the center and the number of UCLA students majoring in the study of religion (at one point as many as 45), the increasing combined workload in addition to a full-time teaching load finally led in 2009 to my resignation from both directing the center and supervising the undergraduate major.

Prof. Boustan stepped up to the plate and initially agreed to take on both responsibilities. But he has informed the Dean of Humanities, Professor Tim Stowell, that he will not continue in both roles after his three-year appointment ends–a perfectly understandable decision. The need to approve a modest increase in funding that such a division of labor will create will test UCLA’s commitment to the Study of Religion.

The Future: a Department for the Study of Religion at UCLA

The reviewers from Berkeley and Columbia also strongly recommended that the two responsibilities be divided between two faculty members, and this fact highlights why the study of religion at UCLA needs the URC: UCLA must have a Department of Religion with its own dedicated faculty. All concerned, including the members of the URC, should get behind reaching the long-term goal of persuading the UCLA administration to establish a Department of Religion. The reviewers noted that the departments of religion at UC Santa Barbara and UC Riverside are thriving and that this field is regarded nationally as “a field of growth,” not to mention a field of national and international relevance. Establishing a department at UCLA would also entail the welcome development of a graduate program in the Study of Religion. (Note: there are already graduate programs in some specific religious traditions, including Judaism, Buddhism, and Islam.)

In my own dream about the future at UCLA, I see endowed chairs for a professor of religion in the USA (the department of history lists a course in this subject, but it has not been taught by a regular faculty member since 1990!), a professor of religion and global studies, a professor of science and religion, and a professor of Christian origins and early Church History through the reign of Constantine (my field for graduate studies, and there is currently no plan to call anyone in my field to replace me when I retire at the end of the 2012-13 academic year).

One welcome development this year is the establishment of the Talimi Lectureship on the Bahai’i Faith, housed in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. Establishing other named lectureships will call the administration’s attention to the academic importance of studying religion. It certainly would be fitting for such a lectureship about some aspect of Christianity to be named after the Rev. Charles Doak, whose life, vision, and multiple contributions to the URC we are celebrating this evening.

Why All UCLA Students Need to Study Religion (whatever they may major in)

I move on to comment briefly on why, in my judgment as a participant observer, religious communities in the URC need UCLA to be a dynamic energizer for seeking the truth about everything, including religion.  In addition to the strong reasons already mentioned, students need to study about religions, their own, and that of others because:

1. More than ever before in human history, individuals are interacting with persons from a different religious tradition than their own – in the workplace, in the public schools, in all forms of media communication.

2. Without any question, the Los Angeles area has become the most religiously and culturally diverse place in the history of human beings! More than 600 different religious groups thrive here and bring meaning and life direction to many millions of people.

3. University courses dealing with religious phenomena should prepare students to become what I call empathetic analyst/critics of religion, both of their own and that of others.

3.1. By “empathic” I mean one’s ability and readiness to imagine how persons of intelligence and good will have been and now are participants in religious traditions not one’s own. One test of a good religion course is whether the student has learned how dangerous it is to stereotype someone based on their religious tradition and to understand what the relevant questions are to ask regarding how any person has personalized his or her tradition.

2.3.2. By “analysts/critics” I mean students who have acquired the in-depth knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses in the history of one’s own tradition as well as the traditions of others. A goal should be challenging every believer to regret the low points and to seek to actualize the high potential of her or his tradition, both personally and globally.

An Encouraging Example of How to Go Forward

Now let’s go back and pick up a salient observation by UC President Emeritus, Clark Kerr, in his book, The Uses of the University, with which we began this evening.

In his chapter on the “Future of the City of the Intellect,” Kerr observed: “The individual faculty member seeking something new has often found his greatest encouragement and leverage coming from the outside; the individual scholar is the inventor, the outside agency the force for innovation” (101).

Furthermore, Kerr noted that inside universities, institutes (he could have included centers) have been as much the vehicles of innovation as departments have been the closed vaults of tradition (102). One result of such leadership at UCLA is the Center for Chicano Studies, now the Department of Chicano Studies. It was established as a research center in 1969. Its undergraduate interdepartmental program was approved in 1973 about the same time as the Study of Religion IDP. Following campus protests in 1993 the Chicano Center for Interdisciplinary Instruction was created, with six full-time faculty members. In 2005 the administration approved the creation of the Department of Chicano and Chicana Studies which then with the support of outside funding was renamed the Cesar E. Chavez Dept. In 2007.

May the URC’s Critical Encouragement of the Study of Religion at UCLA Yield Much Future Fruit

I know that many of you want the URC to take most seriously the various searches for truth that are the work of a university at its best. I also know that the pervasive anti-intellectual orientation of American culture often has a negative impact on this desire, beginning with inadequate funding for your own work and continuing with inadequate encouragement and prayer support.

I know also that the URC has been a major encourager of those of us who have sought to bring the study of religion into the mainstream of UCLA’s intellectual investigation and reflection. Three decades ago, the encouragement of the URC was a major factor leading both to the success of establishing the Center for the Study of Religion and to the creation of a tenured position in beginnings of Christianity.

Yes, for 83 years the URC has fostered the academic study of religion at UCLA. As we enter the second decade of the 21^st century, the time has come again for the partnership between the URC and UCLA to flourish. May both institutions be blessed with far-sighted leadership and the spirit of path-breaking innovation.

And the people said: Amen.   * * * *

Such transitions are also a time to remember, lest we forget in our rush to the future the hard work and the human relationships that have made the present possible. The study of religion has had a long history at UCLA. Since the beginning of the University of California Southern Branch (subsequently the University of California at Los Angeles in Westwood), there have been key members of the faculty and the administration who have understood that a great public university like UCLA could and should foster the academic study of religion. The tenure of Chancellor Murphy (1960–68) saw the formation of “The Chancellor’s Committee on Religious Affairs,” which inaugurated serious and sustained consideration of the role that the study of religion might play as part of UCLA’s broader educational mission. Chancellor Charles E. Young (1968–97) reconstituted this group as “The Chancellor’s Committee on Religion, Ethics, and Values” and gave to it his considerable support. It was under the leadership of Chancellor Young that the UCLA Faculty approved an interdepartmental undergraduate major in the Study of Religion in 1973; at the same time, the Department of History established a Doctoral program in the History of Religion. The Chancellor’s Committee, working together with these academic programs as well as with the University Religious Conference at UCLA, established the Center for the Study of Religion in 1995. The Center has since become an important part of the intellectual landscape of the University.