How To Study Religion

Tomoko Masuzawa was startled to discover that one of the “precepts” of modern religious studies was “Thou shalt not quest for the origin of religion” (In Search of Dreamtime, 2). This was odd on a couple of fronts.

For starters, “every one of the ‘founding fathers’ of our discipline stunningly violated this rule and indulged and jubilated in the forbidden act.” As a result, those founding fathers (the origins of the discipline) are both celebrated and denounced. They can be excused because “they lived and wrote before there was any recognition of the prohibition. Apparently, they inhabited the prehistory of our discipline; indeed, they must be our own primal fathers, roaming the earth before the Fall or, at any rate, before reality set in” (2).

The other oddity is that the subject matter of religious studies is said to be precisely the study of origins: “Religion itself, whether ‘primitive’ or ‘highly developed’ is [understood to be] preeminently concerned with origins.” This appears in various forms: Some claim “that the quintessentially sacred myths are creation myths” or the claim that “rituals are periodic recreation of those mythic times of being, or repetition of some ‘axial’ event” (3).

The discipline is thus set up with an inherent opposition between the scholar and the practitioner. The former has given up the search for origins, but the religious actors he studies are concerned with virtually nothing else: “As always, the declaration of difference is pronounced from the point of view of the subject, against the object” (4).

In its base structure, religious studies places the skeptical scholar in a position of superiority to the believers he studies.