Religious Studies, Left Coast Style

The students call their major “religion on the ground.” One studies a singles group looking for love in a Los Angeles synagogue Friday nights. Another compares Hinduism and Christianity. His master’s thesis profiled Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers, as a religious mystic.

A class schedule at the religious studies department of UC Santa Barbara reads like a road sign in a global village: Islam in America, medieval Judaism, early Christian novels, Taoism and Shintoism, along with related languages from Arabic to Ugaritic. The array of ethnic faces here is as vast as on any University of California campus. But a closer look at the faculty, dressed in turbans and Indian jewelry, hikers’ vests and slouched sport jackets, illuminates the sweep of this program.

Tucked inside the Humanities building, a California-rustic box of stucco and glass, their offices are dotted with Buddhas and prayer rugs, ritual swords and a global selection of sacred texts, all facets of the larger picture they are trying to create: UC Santa Barbara’s religious studies program brings together the jumble of modern culture and reassembles it under the heading of religion.

Though the standard university approach to the study of religion draws heavily from the Protestant, Catholic and Jewish traditions (not surprising in a country that is, according to the most recent census, 84% Christian), Sikhs, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Native Americans and others get equal time here. And though some observers fear that this sort of broad egalitarianism can dilute all religions, many clearly see it as the future.

“It is very California,” says Barbara DeConcini, executive director of the American Academy of Religion, an Atlanta-based scholarly group of about 8,000 academics. “It’s also way ahead of its time. UC Santa Barbara is one of the leading religious studies programs in any public university or state school. Others have looked to them for how to do it.”

Facing the Pacific, on a bluff laced with trails leading down to the beach, the school has always seemed to catch the winds of change along with the ocean mists. Richard Hecht, a keeper of the department’s history, remembers the impulse that led to the school’s unconventional approach.

The program’s founder, D. McKenzie Brown, was an expert in India’s politics and history and, says Hecht, he wanted religion courses on campus because he felt his students needed to know more about that part of life in India. Exposure to the country’s religious life, Brown believed, would help them understand its social problems. That was in 1958.

The first member of the new religious studies faculty was a political scientist. Then came a sociologist. The first wave of faculty also included a religion theorist, Walter Capps, who liked to combine religion and politics. (He later won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives and served from 1996 until his death in 1997.) Paul Tillich, a towering German theologian who fled Europe before World War II, joined them. By 1964 there was a full-fledged religion department for undergraduates. Five years later a doctorate program was added.

“From the beginning, there was a sense that religion and culture needed to be studied,” says Hecht, who was a philosophy student at the school in the ‘60s and now teaches Judaic studies there. “The school never followed the seminary model.” Nonetheless, when he joined the faculty, his colleagues in other departments assumed that the religious studies program trained people to be ministers.

“They thought we were clerics with a professional career, like monks who had come out of the monastery to work in the world,” says Hecht, who adds that it took many of his 37 years at the school to correct the misperception.

But within the department, the distinctions could not have been more clear. Asian religions were incorporated in the very first class offerings in the early ‘60s, even as more predictable subjects were all but eliminated. Church history, Bible study and theology all got sidelined. By conventional guidelines, UC Santa Barbara set aside the basics.

It was a bold step, avoiding the traditional seminary format. Top-rated universities from Harvard and Yale to Princeton had been founded with close affiliations to ministers and churches. The schools still support divinity programs that train Christian men and women for ordination, and universities across the country have followed the Ivy League plan.

Instead of promoting any one religious faith, all of them are researched and analyzed, says Wade Clark Roof, head of the UC Santa Barbara department. Religion is studied by comparison: How is God different for a Hindu, say, than for a Jew?

Roof, a sociologist of religion, is a prime example of how Santa Barbara’s program is different from most others. Roof tracks contemporary trends in religion, particularly among baby boomers, and was among the first to notice their “cafeteria” approach to faith and beliefs--Catholics who allow for reincarnation and Jews who meditate with Buddhist teachers.

His approach to teaching religion is as much a product of constitutional law as it is of modern American culture. The separation of church and state, which makes it illegal to promote religious beliefs or practices in a public school, helped shape the UC Santa Barbara program from its earliest days. “Our department has very secular roots,” says David Marshall, a comparative literature professor who is dean of the program. “We approach religion the way we do the study of history or literature. We look at it from every point of view.”

He sees religion as an all-purpose major, like literature or history, a way of understanding the world. Right now, for instance, fundamentalism is influencing events in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Middle East, he notes. “If you don’t understand religion,” he says, “you are not going to understand many of the global issues.”

*

Santa Barbara is the only school in the UC system that offers a doctorate in religious studies. It is also one of the oldest and largest religious studies departments in the state school system. There are currently 70 students working toward graduate degrees and about 200 undergraduate majors.

Of the other large UC schools with such programs, including San Diego, Riverside and Davis, none offers advanced degrees, and all of them have fewer than half as many undergraduate majors as Santa Barbara. Their departments are also considerably newer. UC Riverside, the baby of the bunch, is 9 years old.

“Our program has an affinity for the California context,” Roof says. An American family rarely represents just one religious faith, anymore, he explains, as in-laws, second spouses, adoptions and personal religious conversions complicate the picture. Many California families are shaped by blended faiths, he adds, and beyond that, “the state’s demographics force us to deal with pluralism.” That pressure helps fuel the school’s attempt to talk about religion in a more open-ended way.

“The definition of religion is broader here than at other schools,” says Steve Lloyd-Moffet, who studies Hinduism and Christianity, spending part of each school year at a Greek Orthodox seminary in New York to deepen his understanding of that tradition. “Here, religion is defined as a way to create meaning through symbols.” Even a standard dictionary gets more specific, mentioning God, beliefs and worship. But the absence of such particulars has attracted many of UC Santa Barbara’s students and faculty members.

Ines Talamantez, an expert in indigenous religions, has led about 20 students through doctoral dissertations. UC Santa Barbara is one of a small handful that offers any courses in her field.

“I was shocked to see that the school was actually looking for someone to teach Native American studies and related languages,” says Talamantez, who is part Apache, part Mexican American. She discovered the job was open by reading an ad on a kiosk at Harvard, where she was a student in the late ‘70s. Now she receives letters from colleges around the country asking whether any of her students are ready for the job market.

The university’s professor of Sikh studies, Gurinder Singh Mann, spent 15 years teaching at Harvard University and later at Columbia University in New York, coming to Santa Barbara two years ago. “The program in south Asian studies compares with any I have seen,” says Mann. “The entire department is becoming more and more comprehensive, with offerings not available anywhere else.”

Catherine Albanese, a professor of American religion, teaches a course on American spiritualities, a subject treated as a footnote in typical church history classes. “When I was in graduate school in the late ‘60s, the study of American religion meant the study of church history,” she says. Her class, by contrast, starts with the transcendentalism movement of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s day and continues to the New Age philosophy made famous locally by Marianne Williamson in the 1980s. One of her students wrote a paper on “A Course in Miracles,” a self-help guide to spiritual healing written in 1975 by two New York psychologists.

Such projects are grounded in a basic curriculum that stresses history and methodology. Finbarr Curtis, a student of American religions, says the required courses at UC Santa Barbara make the program as rigorous as any he’s seen. Students spend four semesters learning how to collect data and evaluate it. Four semesters of theory lead them through the major philosophers, from the ancient Greeks to post-World War II Europeans.

Curtis did his undergraduate studies at Columbia, which is affiliated with Union Theological Seminary and has its own religion department as well. The two did not fit well, in his opinion. “I felt things there were polarized,” Curtis says. “Seminary and religious studies were at two extremes.”

*

As the country changes, and a more diverse population enters public universities, programs built on Christian orthodoxies are coming to seem increasingly narrow, even insensitive. Santa Barbara’s approach is by necessity moving into the mainstream. “The knee-jerk reaction is, if you are teaching religion, you are proselytizing,” says Randall Balmer, a professor of American Religion at Columbia. The challenge, Balmer says, is to find ways to teach about religion. “The wise course in a public university is to stay away from classes in theology and move toward a comparative study,” he says. Otherwise, “people get prickly.”

Rowland Sherrill, chairman of the religious studies department at Indiana University at Indianapolis, says their program is a smaller version of UC Santa Barbara. “Religion for us is an academic enterprise,” he says. “Religious studies is a way to wrestle with the social realities of the whole country.”

Even admirers, however, advise caution about the trend Sherrill pinpoints. “There is danger of reducing religion to social studies,” says Benjamin Hubbard, head of the Comparative Religion Department at Cal Sate Fullerton, one of the largest in the Cal State system. “Questions of what the 1st Amendment permits have raised concerns about proselytizing in public schools,” he says. “But religion is a complex subject. Sacred texts, music, philosophy, architecture are all part of it. They shouldn’t be ignored.”

In his job, Hubbard sees public university programs starting to overshadow more traditional divinity schools. “I looked at 85 applicants to fill a position in my department this spring,” Hubbard says. “Not one of them went to a seminary. They studied religion as an academic subject.”

Current offerings at UC Santa Barbara reflect the shift in the way religion is taught. Christine Thomas, the school’s professor of early Christianity, teaches a course about Jesus by comparing the ways that Jesus is understood by several different religions. The reading list includes, “Living Buddha, Living Christ,” by the Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh.

“We hope to communicate a vision of religion that is broader than what students have coming into the program,” says Roof.

The department plans to add new programs, including a center for religion and public life and an endowed chair in Roman Catholic studies. The students seem ready for that and more.

Marcy Braverman is majoring in Hinduism and plans to teach after graduating. “I study the Eastern religions,” she says. “You learn a deep respect for all of the traditions. People tend to exoticize them. I can help them understand the reality.”