Journal of the American Academy of Religion, LI W 1

ESSAY

RELIGIOUS STUDIES AND THE DEFAULT OF CRITICAL INTELLIGENCE

CARL A. RASCHKE "It is theory which decides what we can observe" Albert Einstein

I. The End of the Mandate of the 1960s Although it attained a fair share of professional dignity and economic support over the last decade, the study of religion as an academic venture is pitching headlong toward an eleventh hour confrontation with its own legacy. That confrontation will inevitably alter the drift, protocols, and bedrock suppositions of the field in a manner that cannot be foreseen at this juncture. Suffice it to say, however, that the confrontation will not be congenial, nor will the outcome necessarily be pacific. "Religious studies"as it came to be called about twenty years agowas forged in the retort of cultural upheaval and intellectual unease. The initial conditions were the social disenfranchisement of a once sovereign American Protestant establishment and the crack-up of its proud theological hegemony echoed in the historically transient but subtly influential "death of God" movement. The spur to growth was the lavish and relatively indiscriminate funding of public higher education during the Democratic administrations of the sixties, which made it possible in a way that seems incredible now, for "innovative" courses and departments staffed by faculty on tenure track to be introduced throughout the catalogue. The metabolism was thefloodof "baby boom" students during the high tide of affluence, when the liberal arts major was not under pressure from the market for careerrelated education. The source of sustenance was the dignity and prestige of the social and behavioral sciences, which had their fling in the sunshine of governmental largesse and which tendered a methCarl A. Raschke is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Denver, Denver, Colorado 80208.

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odological lingua franca consisting of descriptive rigor, ideological pluralism, political liberalism, and an animus toward "grand theory." The notion that an effective field of inquiry could be organized around a body of data or as a cluster of "studies", as in "black studies," "women's studies," or "American studies", without an underlying conceptual architecture was unique to that heady age of ethnoidealism and self-confident positivism. It was at the same time the coalition politics of a waning New Deal democracy smuggled into the old, aristocratic polity of the university. The study of religion did not suffer the fate of its semantic kin because, by comparison, it had a much older heritage and a modest pride of place in the realm of letters from 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 always been the Augustinian fides quaerans intellectum ("faith seeking understanding"). Up until the great American "cultural revolution" of the sixties, the ./ides had been couched at an institutional level in the Protestant/Catholic/Jew complex. Subsequent to that era, when religious studies came aboard, the locus of faith shifted toward the privatized, syncretistic, psycho-spiritual experimentalism of middle class consumer society, which was seeded within the drug culture of youth, watered by the rise of the "alternative" religious groups that followed, and harvested in the so-called human potential movement of the late 1970s. Such afidesfrom the outset had also been shaped by the existentialist and neo-Romantic protest of the post-war literate against the suzerainty of science and the fascination with technology. The field now must face the wincing fact that all the aforementioned factors, in which the operative assumptions of the "discipline" have been embedded from the beginning, have been quietly erased, particularly in the last four years. Every academic specialty has its constituency, and when the constituency dwindles, so does professional as well as monetary backing. That is not to say the study of religion has experienced a troublesome dropoff in enrollments. College undergraduates continue to be drawn toward courses in religious studies as electives, according to a number of recent informal surveys, both in order to slake curiosity and to fulfill a number of vague, soulful yearnings once assuaged by campus chaplaincies. The challenge does not stem from the ceaseless tug of FTE statistics, but from a major realignment in the arrays of social support together with a change in the standards of colleaguiale approval throughout the academy. What sociology and psychology were to the sixties, computer science and physics are to the eighties. The pervasive "sociologism" and "psychologism" of that period managed to relativize, and thereby erode, the autonomous constructs of religious inquiry, which was not

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only tied closely to the seminary, but was for the most part theological and normative in scope. Paradoxically, the renewed status of the hard sciences in the intellectual emporium have turned the fashions of those times back on themselves. In the discourse of physics and information theory, relativism has been swamped by a new speculative formalism, not to mention a metaphysical enthusiasm, that would make even Thomas Aquinas blush. The passions of "unified field theorists" can be registered at the opposite pole of descriptive pluralism. Whereas college professors once trained in philosophy and theology have abdicated for other pursuits, such as literary criticism, linguistics, and cultural anthropology, the arena of "theological" conjecture has been taken over by physicists and mathematicians. If we take "theology" in the classical sense to mean the pursuit of rational inquiry into the ultimate principles by which the universe is constituted and governed, then it is evident that we rarely find such a discipline conducted today among those professionals who still employ its nomenclature. On the other hand, the same sort of "theological" concern has been incorporated into the regular discussions and ruminations of the so-called "hard sciences." The recent popularity of books and periodicals that deal with the speculative aspects of modern science is one signal trend. So is the publishing phenomenon of "the new physics", wherein books that link the most advanced ideas of quantum mechanics to traditional religious cosmologies consistently appear on the best-seller lists. Ironically, it is physics today that may satisfy, at least within the lay community, the Augustinian desire for theological "understanding." And so many of the seemingly recondite and formalized conceptions invoked by physicists to account for phenomenal data bear resemblance to ancient, mythographic notions. Today's "angels", who guide the most subtle changes in the sublunary sphere, are the strong and weak forces of the atomic nucleus. The geography of "heaven" is Kaluza-Klein's fivedimensional geometry, which now explains so many commonplace physical events and processes through appeal to the unseen and; "supersensible" order of experience. The question, therefore, arises as to what degree and with what sorts of nuances the study of religion should have a distinctive, theoretical motivation. Descriptive pluralism has for the most part been anti-theoretical and is embedded in the historicist mentality of European scholars. The historicist tradition converged in a timely fashion with the eclecticism of the American liberal arts curriculum, together with the privatistic (some might now say "narcissistic") propensities of its student clientele, to yield the well-known patchwork structure of most American departments of "religion." The one countervariable in this equation, which at the same time has sufficed

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as a modest "theoretical" bracket for all the empirical flotsam, is the influence of mythography. Mythographic analysis of what, for want of better phraseology, we have come to call the "sacred" has come about as close to a consensual paradigm for explaining religious data as any theoretical approach, especially in the putatively "post-Christian" and de-theologized setting of the academy. The immense prestige, not to mention the prolificity, of Mircea Eliade's work combined with earlier investigations of depth psychology to elevate myth to the primary content of human religiosity. It is ironic that just as the historicist critique of theology was cresting in a general ecclesial acceptance of Bultmann's program of "demythologizing," the fledgling field of religious studies embarked on what Eliade would have termed a "revalorization" of the mythic mind. The unintended consequences of this pattern of events are easily discerned. Mythos subtly supplanted theps as the ontological reference point of the discipline. The trend was spotted a decade ago in an essay by Richard A. Ray, who asked: "Has Eliade. . .given us the game plan for an end run around Anselm's credo ut intellegam?" (1975:69). Eliade's category of "hierophany", henceforth, came to serve as a linchpin of what was patently a form of theological discourse. The difference now was that the normative position was both cosmopolitan and non-Christian (in effect, "pagan"), approximating the Graeco-Roman view of religio rather than the Judaeo-Christian notion of the revelatum. The pluralistic preoccupation of the field made religious studies a kind of half-conscious polytheism. And polytheism has always had a definite political rationale. II. Academic Neo-Paganism The transmutation of "theological studies" into religious studies has had significantly deeper as well as more far-reaching implications than one might care to posit. Both methodogically and ideologically the outcome has been a strange kind of reverse Tertullianism Jerusalem forsaken in favor of Athens. Tertullian's own intransigent distinction between ecclesia and academia has been upheld, albeit in deference to the latter. Yet today, as in classical antiquity, the tendency to defend the prerogatives of the "academic" cannot be separated from a tacit revival of the older pagan ideology. As the historian Charles Cochrane argued a generation ago, in the internecine struggle between Rome and the early church, the chief motive of official Roman polytheism was not a juridical respect for, let alone a philosophical appreciation, of divergent pieties. Rather, it was a fear of cultural and intellectual innovation brought about by serious religious belief and practice. The curial effort to preserve "the peace

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of the gods" coincided with the imperial drive to enforce harmony within the subject populations. Henceforth, Cochrane observed, "'religion' resolves itself purely and simply into a matter of form" (1957:1010). The Roman policy of nurturing the polycentric system of religione favored the personalistic or "cultic" as opposed to the public or "civil" mode of spiritual observance, which was reserved for emperor worship. Such limited forms of expression were useful to the state, since they quenched the burning thirst for individual "salvation" while being sufficiently diffuse and depotentiated not to threaten the social ideal of "Romanness". The Jews were distrusted in this situation because their ardent monotheism and ethicism contributed to nationalistic unrest. The early Christians were reviled by the Latin "humanists" chiefly because their same Hebraic refusal to compromise with an official stance of religious tolerance that camouflaged an "ungodly" political control jeopardized the entire imperial venture, which was fragile from its inception. Roman polytheism, therefore, was never a "sacred canopy" under which hundreds of motley, squirming species of religious exotica might thrive. It was an artificial creation of remote overlords, and it was easily swept away by the wave of enthusiasm focused on the message of the provincial "Galilean", which men of letters found both bizarre and repugnant. The foregoing sociohistorical comparison can be instructive if it allows us to recognize how, in the long run, our own fanatical pluralism can undercut the vitality, as well as the moral and cultural influence, of religion in the world, and leave the field to the kind of techno-political Caesarism perfected 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 or indirectly, for a return of the era of Christian theological hegemony. Constantinianism, or the fusion of a particular theological orientation with social and political authority, is still an instance of Romanism. What must be urgently acknowledged, however, is that a neo-pagan academicism, which fosters a rabid preoccupation with the pluralistic display of religious givens and psycho-subjective ephemera at the cost of more profound ontological probing and analysis, is not the grand, liberal rebuke of dogmatism and methodological monarchy it often purports to be. It is actually a deliberate default of our critical intelligence. Critical intelligence is our heritage, according to Ernst Cassirer, from the Enlightenment.1
1 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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Critical intelligence is the ability and drive to penetrate beneath the mere surface of things and to apperceive their essential makeup. It is a capacity to winnow the relevant from the strictly episodic, the valuable and enduring from the pernicious or inconsequential, the veracious 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 the data of experience are not possible without strict unification" (1951:23). By enlightenment standards, therefore, descriptive pluralism is but a form of philosophical barbarism. And the default can only lead to certain alarming, retrograde consequences. To enforce the now familiar regiment of deference and respect for anything that appears to have the faint signature of "religious" life is to perform a lobotomy on one's critical intelligence, which the tutored professional is supposed to possess. Moreover, it is to bare an inexcusable blind side to the potential aberrations of religious thinking and behavior. The "theological" observer can no more commend the phenomenon of the Schwdrmerei within his sector of research than the clinical psychologist can glorify the pathological. That is not to say we should separate the study of such aberrations from the central domain of inquiry in our profession any more than the field of abnormal psychology can be divorced from psychology proper. But we should be able to make certain normative distinctions that reflect our commitment to discriminating analysis and critical intelligence. Not too long ago one of the field's most distinguished scholars noted how those who ply the trade of "religionists" have still not been able to confront what amounts to the Euripidean pathos of the mass suicides seven years ago at Jonestown. The Jonestown episode is what from the Kuhnian standpoint must be considered a brutal counterindication 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, mnemonic shuddersthe apprehension of leaders of the fanatical neo-Nazi and pseudo-Christian religious cult known as "the Order". In the past half decade the so-called "cult" movement in America has not altogether followed the predicted Weberian path of routinized charisma. In the case of some of the most prominent representatives of the movement there has been a tendency toward criminal activities, as
movements." Ellwood, who works from a background in the history of religions, set the basic tone for how aberrant religious phenomena are discussed, particularly in the classroom. A more recent and tendentious book is Melton and Moore (1982). For example, the authors write: "As spread in the 1970s, Satanism manifested itself basically as a movement teaching self-assertion. It was not involved in animal sacrifice or acts of violence against individuals" (137).

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evidenced in the arrest and conviction of Sun Myung Moon. The erection in recent years of what religious historian Robert Ellwood calls "alternative altars" evinces a trend toward violent, conspiratorial, and black occultist fashions, which many law enforcement officials now link to serious, criminal activity and which form the ritual and symbolic matrix for a spectrum of self-admitted neo-fascist convenants. The "presbytery" of religious studies must share some responsibility for this state of affairs. A dialectical "critique of pure tolerance" is not necessary to stress the point that scholars of religion are commonly called upon by their publican counterparts in the media, the judicial system, and the diplomatic arena to "explain" unusual things that happen on the quotidian level, from the appeal of Khomeini to Satanist murders in Los Angeles, and that the effect is noxious in a cumulative sense. Because of the default of critical intelligencethe literal Greek rendering of this concept is hypocritethe common answer one hears is that these events are nonetheless interesting, albeit somewhat extreme, confirmations of the "varieties of religious experience." The overall theme to which we should harken, however, is that the continuation of this subtle habit of "hypocrisy" must in the long run undercut the basis of public support for the field, which no longer derives primarily from the sometimes narcissistic Weltanschauung of sixties youth. A mature public looks to any scholarly discipline for theoretical consensus and sophistication as well as normative guidance. By "theoretical consensus" I mean simply a clear set of methodological and axiological assumptions within the field about what inferences might be drawn from various empirical situations. "Normative guidance" refers to the willingness of recognized authorities or luminaries to exert sharp judgment or vigorous intellectual leadership, other than to simply entertain us with the facts at hand, when ambiguous and perplexing sorts of public circumstances arise. Religious studies is currently deficient in both dimensions, and seems unwilling to address the difficulty. David Tracy, a most distinguished scholar and often cited opinion-maker in matters of theological education, has suggested that the principal constituency of the field is the council of peers in the academy. This view, while seductive to the intellectual ego, can be disastrous if applied too literally. For higher education as a whole is becoming more cognizant of its public accountability, even though such earthy wisdom tended to be scanted during the previous two decades of easy funding. If, on the other hand, Tracy's regulae were genuinely followed at a methodological, if not a curricular level, the upshot might be quite positive. Descriptive pluralism, which amounts

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to nothing more than fact-foraging and taxonomy, is, in Steven Toulmin's well-known evaluation of the history of science, a condition of poverty. Religious studies must wean itself rapidly from its love affair with descriptive pluralism and agree to certain normative and theoretical, if not strictly "scientific", standards. It must, as have other surviving disciplines, adhere to the canons of critical intelligence set forth at the opening of the modern age. Otherwise, the destiny of the field can be forecast without too much qualification. We all know what happened to Old Rome.

REFERENCES
Cassirer, 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: Oxford University Press. Ellwood, Robert 1974

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 Religious Pluralism. New York: Pilgrim Press. Ray, Richard 1975

"Is Eliade's Metapsychoanalysis an End Run Around Bultmann's Demythologization?" In Myth and the Crisis of Historical Consciousness, pp. 5774. Ed. by Lee W. Gibbs and W. Taylor Stevenson. Missoula, MT.: Scholars Press.