Approaching the Study of World Religions
In order to be an educated person today, one must have an awareness of world religions. To learn about world religions is to increase one’s cultural literacy—the objective that lies at the heart of this study.
The religious traditions examined in this book are foundational aspects of cultures around the globe. Religion plays a crucial role in shaping, transforming, and transmitting cultures. Interacting with other cultural aspects—politics, economics, aesthetics —religion is a potent force in culture, in ways both constructive and destructive. When people believe they are acting in a manner that is condoned by a transcendent power or is in keeping with timeless tradition, they tend to act more fervently and with greater conviction. In other words, religions are powerful, sometimes even dangerous. Knowing about them is crucial for negotiating our complex world.“World Religions” has been a course of study in American colleges and universities for nearly a century. Recently, the category has come under scrutiny by some scholars, as has the so- called world religions discourse that often accompanies it.1 Although such scrutiny sometimes loses sight of the obvious—that “world religions” as an academic category is here to stay and that learning about its subject matter is vitally important—critics are correct to demand sound academic approaches to the study. A primary concern is that the study of world religions, and indeed the entire enterprise of the academic study of religion, arose within the nominally Christian European intellectual culture that assumed that Christianity was a model of what a religion ought to be and, commonly, that it was the only true religion. Until the late decades of the nineteenth century, theorists applied the term world religion (in the singular) only to Christianity. Eventually Buddhism, Judaism, and occasionally Islam were grouped with Christianity as “world religions” (or “the world’s religions”).
By the 1930s, the list had grown to include the ten to twelve religions that still today are normally categorized as world religions.And so, to the basic need for knowing about the world religions (however they came to be categorized), we can add another vital need: that we go about studying them appropriately through awareness of what we might call the “do’s and don’ts” of religious studies, which this chapter explores in some detail. We can begin by noting that an appropriate study of world religions does not privilege any religion as being somehow exemplary or the model with which others are to be compared. On a related note, we need to avoid terms and categories that are rooted in such privileging. For example, “faith” is a natural term to use when studying Christianity, but it is far less applicable to the study of Confucianism or Shinto. Other important issues involve underlying motives or assumptions that can too easily creep in. A common assumption is this: All religions ultimately say the same thing. This possibility is an intriguing one, but in fact, it is impossible to prove by way of a sound academic approach— that is, well-reasoned theorizing based on careful analysis of the evidence.
The challenge of mastering the “do’s” and avoiding the “don’ts” only enriches our study. We begin by considering the rise of the modem academic field of religious studies.