CSUN Religion Faculty Makes Intellectual Conversions : Education: Some students find certainty has become elusive. Nonbelievers develop an appreciation for spiritual systems.

Despite its name, the religious studies department at Cal State Northridge is not training seminarians or conducting chapel on the side. Instead, it takes an analytical approach to religion in traditional academic fashion.

Nevertheless, the department says many of its 4,000 students a year undergo an intellectual conversion while taking classes in the largest religious studies department on a Cal State campus.

“You won’t return to the place where you were when you first came in,” said Richard Shofner, one of the department’s 10 full-time professors.

Some fundamentalist Christians find religious certainty has become elusive; some non-religious students discover a new appreciation for once strange-sounding beliefs.

“I feel I have more compassion for other people’s beliefs than I ever did before,” said Janice Edstrom, a Catholic who returned to school after raising two children.

“We don’t compel our students to think what we think in order to pass a course,” said James Goss, department chairman, “but we do ask that the students wrestle with some ideas that mean something to them personally.”

About 45 students are majoring in religious studies and an undetermined number are minoring in the field.

The exposure to critical analysis can spoil religious life for some, Goss said.

“Our majors are going to know as much, if not more, than most rabbis and priests in certain subjects, and frankly some students are turned off by the lack of depth in churches they go to,” Goss said.

To be sure, most students taking classes such as World Religions, Bible 101, Introduction to Judaism or Contemporary Ethical Issues are humanities students filling out their requirements for graduation.

Yet, “there are no ‘snap courses’ in the department,” an outside review of the department concluded in May. The review said that students rated the grading tough but fair.

Religious studies professor Thomas Love said the department is regarded as one of the toughest graders in the School of Humanities.

“But students still pack our classes,” Love said. “It’s amazing that they hang in there as well as they do.”

Religious studies blossomed in state-run universities around the country in the late 1960s when academicians took seriously a 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision that outlawed devotional exercises in public schools but endorsed teaching “about religion.”

UC Santa Barbara pioneered religious studies in the University of California system. With 18 full-time professors, its program remains the premier department in the state, scholars say.

San Diego State and CSUN (then San Fernando Valley State) followed with state-approved religion programs in the fall of 1969 and 1970, respectively.

“There was a national explosion of religious studies departments about then,” said Alan Sparks, acting chairman at San Diego State, which has seven professors teaching about religion.

Of California’s 20 state universities, 11 offer a major in religious studies and 14 provide a minor in the field, according to a survey by Ben Hubbard, who teaches in the Cal State Fullerton religious studies department.

CSUN is now asking to become the first state university to award a master’s degree in religious studies, although the system’s chancellor’s office has expressed initial doubts about potential enrollment.

Goss said a master’s program would be geared particularly for people in business or other occupations in which understanding religious cultures is important.

That motivation is already observed in undergraduate religious studies classes where relatively few students plan to enter the ministry or teach college-level religion, Goss said.

“Many are taking courses not because they are training for a job but because they want to understand people and different cultures,” Goss said. A number of companies hire those kind of graduates, he said.

Students also are known to enroll in classes to try to sort out their own religious ideas, Goss said.

When they come from a conservative Christian background, students can become troubled when what they have been told are religious truths become subject to critical investigation.

Love said that his world religions class typically is unbothered when he points to inconsistencies in Eastern religious literature.

“They laugh,” Love said.

Then, when confronted with two different creation stories in Genesis, Love said, “all of a sudden they remember the same kind of thing going on in Hindu literature. They begin to see the Bible is a huge collection of literature written in radically different times.”

Elizabeth Say, now an assistant professor in the department, said she was “the perfect example” of a religious studies major who began questioning what she had been taught in a conservative Baptist church.

“When I took classes here in the 1970s, I defined religion as my own narrow perspective on Christianity at the time,” Say said. “I can remember being told in my church, ‘You have to be careful or you will lose your faith.’ I’m sure they felt that prophecy has been borne out.”

Say said that several years ago she left that congregation when she was advised she was in “rebellion against biblical authority.” After earning a doctorate at USC in 1988, Say returned to CSUN to teach Women and Religion, Modern Religious Ethics and other courses.

Comparing religious studies students in the 1970s and now, Say said that today a larger percentage is irreligious and unfamiliar with religious beliefs.

“But those that are religious are more ardent and vocal about it,” she said. “In the middle of a class discussion they might say, ‘But the Bible says. . . .’ ”

For students interested only in a devotional use of the Bible, several evangelical Christian groups meet weekly on campus.

“We follow not the opinions of man or the opinions of professors, but the truth about God in the Bible,” said Michael Almanzor, who teaches about two dozen students at a Bible study in the student union building.

Almanzor said he does not advise fellow Christians against taking religious studies courses. Only if a student appeared to be confused and upset by a religion course, would he suggest dropping the course, he said.

Goss, the department chairman, said he would give the same advice.

“There is no attempt to force them out of their evangelical way of thinking,” he said.

Goss said that many faculty members are involved in religious life: Goss teaches an adult Bible class at his church, Northridge United Methodist. Howard Happ is an Episcopal priest and Mokyusen Miyuki is an active Buddhist, for example.

The religious studies majors tend to be people who “are not necessarily religious, but who have become fascinated with the interplay of religion and society,” Say said.

Indeed, that is the case with Elizabeth Drexelius and Angelia Weitzman, the co-leaders of the department’s student-run social group, whimsically named Mystics and Martyrs.

Drexelius, who drifted away from her Roman Catholic roots before coming to CSUN, said she developed an appreciation for others’ religiosity.

“I can talk with a Muslim and not be turned off by the rhetoric,” she said. “Whether I agree with someone’s dogma is less important to me now.”

Weitzman said she was brought up in a Conservative Jewish synagogue, but her study emphasis at CSUN is on Christian ethics.

“I have no interest in becoming a Christian,” Weitzman said. “I study it because of its impact on society.”