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Journal of the American Academy of Religion, LI W 1
ESSAY
RELIGIOUS STUDIES AND THE DEFAULT OFCRITICAL INTELLIGENCECARL A.
RASCHKE
"It is theory which decides what we can observe"Albert
EinsteinI. The End of the M andate of the 1960s
Although it attained a fair share of professional dignity
andeconomic support over the last decade, the study of religion as
anacademic venture is pitching headlong toward an eleventh
hourconfrontation with its own legacy. That confrontation will
inevitablyalter the drift, protocols, and bedrock suppositions of
the field in amanner that cannot be foreseen at this juncture.
Suffice it to say,however, that the confrontation will not be
congenial, nor will theoutcome necessarily be pacific."Religious
studies"as it came to be called about twenty yearsagowas forged in
the retort of cultural upheaval and intellectualunease. The initial
conditions were the social disenfranchisement of aonce sovereign
American Protestant establishment and the crack-upof its proud
theological hegemony echoed in the historically transientbut subtly
influential "death of God" movement. The spur to growthwas the
lavish and relatively indiscriminate funding of public
highereducation during the Democratic administrations of the
sixties, whichmade it possible in a way that seems incredible now,
for "in nova tive"courses and departments staffed by faculty on
tenure track to beintroduced throughout the catalogue. The
metabolism was the floodof"baby boom" students during the high tide
of affluence, when theliberal arts major was not under pressure
from the market for career-related education. The source of
sustenance was the dignity andprestige of the social and behavioral
sciences, which had their fling inthe sunshine of governmental
largesse and which tendered a meth-Carl A. Raschke is Professor of
Religious Studies at the University of Den ver, Den ver,Colorado
80208.
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132 Journal of the American Academy of Religionodological lingua
franca consisting of descriptive rigor, ideologicalpluralism,
political liberalism, and an animus toward "gran d theory ."The
notion that an effective field of inquiry could be organizedaround
a body of data or as a cluster of "studies", as in "black stud
ies,""women's studies," or "American studies", without an
underlyingconceptual architecture was unique to that heady age of
ethno-idealism and self-confident positivism. It was at the same
time thecoalition politics of a waning New Deal democracy smuggled
into theold, aristocratic polity of the university. The study of
religion did notsuffer the fate of its semantic kin because, by
comparison, it had amuch older h eritage and a modest pride of
place in the realm of lettersfrom which it could trace descentwhat
was once known as theology.Finally, the human impulse for the
academic study of religion,whether under clerical or strictly
magisterial oversight, has alwaysbeen the Augustinian fides
quaerans intellectum ("faith seekingund erstand ing"). Up until the
great American "cultural rev olution" ofthe sixties, the ./ides had
been couched at an institutional level in
theProtestant/Catholic/Jew complex. Subsequent to that era, when
reli-gious studies came aboard, the locus of faith shifted toward
theprivatized, syncretistic, psycho-spiritual experimentalism of
middleclass consumer society, which was seeded within the drug
culture ofyouth, watered by the rise of the "alternative" religious
groups thatfollowed, and harvested in the so-called human potential
movementof the late 1970s. Such a idesfrom the outset had also been
shaped bythe existentialist and neo-Romantic protest of the
post-war literateagainst the suzerainty of science and the
fascination with technology.The field now must face the wincing
fact that all the aforemen-tioned factors, in which the operative
assumptions of the "di scip line "have been embedded from the
beginning, have been quietly erased,particularly in the last four
years. Every academic specialty has itsconstituency, and when the
constituency dwindles, so does profes-sional as well as monetary
backing. That is not to say the study ofreligion has experienced a
troublesome dropoff in enrollments. Col-lege underg raduate s co
ntinue to be drawn toward courses in religiousstudies as electiv
es, according to a number of recent informal surveys,both in o rder
to slake curiosity and to fulfill a num ber of vague,
soulfulyearnings once assuaged by campus chaplaincies. The
challenge doesnot stem from the ceaseless tug of FTE statistics,
but from a majorrealignment in the arrays of social support
together with a change inthe standards of colleaguiale approval
throughout the academy.What sociology and psychology were to the
sixties, computerscience and physics are to the eighties. The
pervasive "sociologism"and "psy cholog ism" of that period m anaged
to relativize, and thereb yerode, the autonomous constructs of
religious inquiry, which was not
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Raschk e: Religious Studie s 133only tied closely to the
seminary, but was for the most part theologicaland normative in
scope. Paradoxically, the renewed status of the hardsciences in the
intellectual emporium have turned the fashions ofthose t imes back
on themselves. In the discourse of physics andinformation theory,
relat ivism has been swamped by a new specula-t ive formalism, not
to mention a metaphysical enthus iasm, that wou ldmake even Thomas
Aquinas blush. The passions of "unified fieldtheorists" can be
registered at the opposite pole of descriptivepluralism. Whe reas
college professors once trained in philoso phy andtheology have
abdicated for other pursuits, such as literary criticism,linguist
ics, and cultural anthropology, the arena of
"theological"conjecture has been taken over by physicists and
mathematicians. Ifwe take "theology" in the classical sense to mean
the pursuit ofrational inquiry into the ult imate principles by
which the universe isconsti tuted an d governed , then i t is evide
nt that we rarely find suc h adiscipline conducted today among
those professionals who st i l l em-ploy i ts nomenclature. On the
other hand, the same sort of "theolog-ical" concern has been
incorporated into the regular discussions andruminations of the
so-called "hard sc iences ." Th e rec ent pop ulari ty ofbooks and
periodicals that deal with the speculative aspects ofmodern science
is one signal trend. So is the publishing phenomenonof "the new
physics", wherein books that l ink the most advancedideas of
quantum mechanics to tradit ional rel igious
cosmologiesconsistently appear on the best-seller lists.
Ironically, it is physicstoday that may satisfy, at least within
the lay community, the Augus-t inian desire for theological
"understanding." And so many of theseemingly recondite and
formalized conceptions invoked by physi-cists to account for
phenomenal data bear resemblance to ancient,mythographic notions.
Today's "angels", who guide the most subtlechanges in the subluna
ry sph ere, are the strong and weak forces of theatomic nucleus.
The geography of "heaven" is Kaluza-Klein's five-dimensional
geometry, which now explains so many commonplacephysical events and
processes through appeal to the unseen and;"supersensible" order of
experience.
The question, therefore, arises as to what degree and with
whatsorts of nuances the study of rel igion should have a dist
inctive,theoretical motivation. Descriptive pluralism has for the
most partbeen anti-theoretical and is embedded in the historicist
mentali ty ofEuropean scholars. The historicist tradit ion
converged in a t imelyfashion with the eclecticism of the American
l iberal arts curriculum,together with the privatist ic (some might
now say "narcissist ic")propensit ies of i ts student cl ientele,
to yield the well-known patch-work structure of most American
departments of "religion." The onecountervariab le in this
equation, which at the same t im e has sufficed
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134 Journal of the American Academy of Religionas a modest
"theoretical" bracket for all the empirical flotsam, is
theinfluence of mythography. Mythographic analysis of what, for
want ofbetter phraseology, we have come to call the "sacred" has
come aboutas close to a consensual paradigm for explaining
religious data as anytheoretical approach, especially in the
putatively "post-Christian"and de-theologized setting of the
academy. The immense prestige, notto mention the prolificity, of
Mircea Eliade's work combined withearlier investigations of depth
psychology to elevate myth to theprimary content of human
religiosity. It is ironic that just as thehistoricist critique of
theology was cresting in a general ecclesialacceptance of
Bultmann's program of "demythologizing," the fledg-ling field of
religious studies embarked on what Eliade would havetermed a
"revalorization" of the mythic mind. The unintended con-sequences
of this pattern of events are easily discerned. Mythossubtly
supplanted theps as the ontological reference point of
thediscipline. The trend was spotted a decade ago in an essay by
RichardA. Ray, who asked: "Has Eliade. . .given us the game plan
for an endrun around Anselm's credo ut intellegam?" (1975:69).
Eliade's cate-gory of "hierophany", henceforth, came to serve as a
linchpin of whatwas patently a form of theological discourse. The
difference now wasthat the normative position was both cosmopolitan
and non-Christian(in effect, "pagan"), approximating the
Graeco-Roman view of religiorather than the Judaeo-Christian notion
of the revelatum. The plural-istic preoccupation of the field made
religious studies a kind ofhalf-conscious polytheism. And
polytheism has always had a definitepolitical rationale.II.
Academic Neo-Paganism
The transmutation of "theological studies" into religious
studieshas had significantly deeper as well as more far-reaching
implicationsthan one might care to posit. Both methodogically and
ideologicallythe outcome has been a strange kind of reverse
TertullianismJerusalem forsaken in favor of Athens. Tertullian's
own intransigentdistinction between ecclesia and academia has been
upheld, albeit indeference to the latter. Yet today, as in
classical antiquity, thetendency to defend the prerogatives of the
"academic" cannot beseparated from a tacit revival of the older
pagan ideology. As thehistorian Charles Cochrane argued a
generation ago, in theinternecine struggle between Rome and the
early church, the chiefmotive of official Roman polytheism was not
a juridical respect for, letalone a philosophical appreciation, of
divergent pieties. Rather, it wasa fear of cultural and
intellectual innovation brought about by seriousreligious belief
and practice. The curial effort to preserve "the peace
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Raschke: Religious Studies 135of the gods" coincided with the
imperial drive to enforce harmonywithin the subject populations.
Henceforth, C ochrane observed, " 're-ligion' resolves itself
purely and simply into a matter of form"(1957:1010). The Roman
policy of nurturing the polycentric system ofreligione favored the
personalistic or "cultic" as opposed to the publicor "civil" mode
of spiritual observance, which was reserved foremperor worship.Such
limited forms of expression were useful to the state, sincethey
quenched the burning thirst for individual "salvation" whilebeing
sufficiently diffuse and depotentiated not to threaten the
socialideal of "Romanness". The Jews were distrusted in this
situationbecause their ardent monotheism and ethicism contributed
to nation-alistic unrest. The early C hristians were reviled by th
e L atin "hu man -ists" chiefly because their same Hebraic refusal
to compromise withan official stance of religious tolerance that
camouflaged an "ungod ly"political control jeopardized the entire
imperial venture, which wasfragile from its inception. Roman
polytheism, therefore, was never a"sacred canopy" under which
hundreds of motley, squirming speciesof religious exotica might thr
ive. It was an artificial creation of remoteoverlords, and it was
easily swept away by the wave of enthusiasmfocused on the message
of the provincial "Galilean", which men ofletters found both
bizarre and repugnant. The foregoing socio-historical comparison
can be instructive if it allows us to recognizehow, in the long
run, our own fanatical pluralism can undercut thevitality, as well
as the moral and cultural influence, of religion in theworld, and
leave the field to the kind of techno-political Caesarismperfected
in the totalitarian states of the twentieth century.III. Religious
Cults and the Default of Critical Intelligence
By the same token, I am not thereby plumping, directly
orindirectly, for a return of the era of Christian theological
hegemony.Constantinianism, or the fusion of a particular
theological orientationwith social and political authority, is
still an instance of Romanism.What must be urgently acknowledged,
however, is that a neo-paganacademicism, which fosters a rabid
preoccupation with the pluralisticdisplay of religious givens and
psycho-subjective ephemera at the costof more profound ontological
probing and analysis, is not the grand,liberal rebuke of dogmatism
and methodological monarchy it oftenpurports to be. It is actually
a deliberate default of our criticalintelligence. Critical
intelligence is our heritage, according to ErnstCassirer, from the
Enlightenment.11 The original prototype for this sort of bubbly
phenomenology was Ellwood (1974),which is still cited quite often
today in studies or intentories of the "new religious
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136 Journal of the American Academy of ReligionCritical
intelligence is the ability and drive to penetrate beneaththe m ere
surface of things and to apperceive their essential m akeup.It is a
capacity to winnow the relevant from the strictly episodic,
thevaluable and enduring from the pernicious or inconsequential,
theveracious from the merely specious. The spirit of the Age of
Reason,says Cassirer, was empowered by this form of intellectual
loyalty. It
was predicated on the belief that "rational order and control of
thedata of experience are not possible without strict
unification"(1951:23). By enlightenment standards, therefore,
descriptive plural-ism is but a form of philosophical barb arism.
And the default can onlylead to certain alarming, retrograde
consequences.To enforce the now familiar regiment of deference and
respect foranything that appears to have the faint signature of
"religious" life isto perform a lobotomy on one's critical
intelligence, which the tutoredprofessional is supposed to possess.
Moreover, it is to bare aninexcusable blind side to the potential
aberrations of religious think-ing and behavior. The "theological"
observer can no more commendthe phenomenon of the Schwdrmerei
within his sector of researchthan the clinical psychologist can
glorify the pathological. That is notto say we should separate the
study of such aberrations from thecentral domain of inquiry in our
profession any more than the field ofabnormal psychology can be
divorced from psychology proper. Butwe should be able to make
certain normative distinctions that reflectour commitment to
discriminating analysis and critical intelligence.Not too long ago
one of the field's most distinguished scholarsnoted how those w ho
ply the trade of "religionists" have still not beenable to confront
what amounts to the Euripidean pathos of the masssuicides seven
years ago at Jonestown. The Jonestown episode iswhat from the
Kuhnian standpoint must be considered a brutalcounterindication to
the irenic, idealistic paradigm of the academy.This year another
national sensation causes even more intense and,for victims of
anti-Semitism at least, mnem onic shudders the app re-hension of
leaders of the fanatical neo-Nazi and pseudo-Christianreligious
cult known as "the Order".In the p ast half decade the so-called
"cult" movem ent in Americahas not altogether followed the pred
icted Weberian path of routinizedcharisma. In th e case of some of
the most prom inent rep resentatives ofthe m oveme nt the re has
been a tenden cy toward criminal activities, asmo vem ents." E
llwood, w ho works from a background in the history of rel igions,
set thebasic tone for how aberrant religious phenomena are
discussed, particularly in theclassroom. A more re cent and ten
dentio us book is Melton and Moore (1982). Forexample, the authors
write: "As spread in the 1970s, Satanism manifested itselfbasically
as a movement teaching self-assertion. It was not involved in
animal sacrificeor acts of violence against individuals" (137).
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Raschke: Religious Studies 137evidenced in the arrest and
conviction of Sun Myung Moon. Theerection in recent years of what
religious historian Robert Ellwoodcalls "alternative altars"
evinces a trend toward violent, conspirato-rial, and black
occultist fashions, which many law enforcement offi-cials now link
to serious, criminal activity and which form the ritualand sym
bolic matrix for a spectrum of self-admitted
neo-fascistconvenants.The "presbytery" of religious studies must
share some responsi-bility for this state of affairs. A dialectical
"critique of pure tolerance"is not necessary to stress the point
that scholars of religion arecommonly called upon by their publican
counterparts in the media,the judicial system, and the diplomatic
arena to "explain" unusualthings that happen on the quotidian
level, from the appeal ofKhomeini to Satanist murders in Los
Angeles, and that the effect isnoxious in a cumulative sense.
Because of the default of criticalintelligencethe literal Greek
rendering of this concept is hypo-critethe common answer one hears
is that these events are none-theless interesting, albeit somewhat
extreme, confirmations of the"varieties of religious exp
erience."
The overall theme to which we should harken, however, is thatthe
continuation of this subtle habit of "hypocrisy" must in the
longrun undercut the basis of public support for the field, whic h
no long erderives primarily from the sometimes narcissistic
Weltanschauung ofsixties youth. A mature public looks to any
scholarly discipline fortheoretical consensus and sophistication as
well as normative guid-ance. By "theoretical consensus" I mean
simply a clear set of meth-odological and axiological assumptions
within the field about whatinferences might be drawn from various
empirical situations. "Nor-mative guidance" refers to the
willingness of recognized authoritiesor luminaries to exert sharp
judgm ent or vigorous intellec tual leader-ship, other than to
simply entertain us with the facts at hand, whenambiguous and
perplexing sorts of public circumstances arise. Reli-gious studies
is currently deficient in both dimensions, and seemsunwilling to
address the difficulty.
David Tracy, a most distinguished scholar and often
citedopinion-maker in matters of theological education, has
suggested thatthe principal constituency of the field is the
council of peers in theacademy. This view, while seductive to the
intellectual ego, can bedisastrous if applied too literally. For
higher education as a whole isbecoming more cognizant of its public
accountability, even thoughsuch earthy wisdom tended to be scanted
during the previous twodecades of easy funding. If, on the other
hand , Tracy 's regulae weregenuinely followed at a methodological,
if not a curricular level, theupshot might be quite positive.
Descriptive pluralism, which amoun ts
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138 Journal of the American Academy of Religionto nothing more
than fact-foraging and taxonomy, is, in StevenToulmin's well-known
evaluation of the history of science, a condi-tion of poverty.
Religious studies must wean itself rapidly from itslove affair with
descriptive pluralism and agree to certain normativeand
theoretical, if not strictly "scientific", standards. It must, as
haveother surviving disciplines, adhere to the canons of critical
intelli-gence set forth at the opening of the modern age.
Otherwise, thedestiny of the field can be forecast w ithout too
much qualification. Weall know what happ ened to Old Rome.
REFERENCESCassirer, Ernst
1951 The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. Trans, by Fritz C.A.
Koelin and James P. Pettegrove. Boston: Beacon Press.
Cochrane, Charles N.1957 Christianity and Classical Culture. New
York: OxfordUniversity Press.
Ellwood, Robert1974 Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern
America.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice Hall.Melton, J. Gordon, and
Moore, Robert L.
1982 The Cult Experience: Responding to the New
ReligiousPluralism. New York: Pilgrim Press.
Ray, Richard1975 "Is Eliade's Metapsychoanalysis an End Run
Around
Bultmann's Demythologization?" In Myth and the Crisisof
Historical Consciousness, pp. 5774. Ed. by Lee W.Gibbs and W.
Taylor Stevenson. Missoula, MT.: ScholarsPress.
