Scholar of American Religion

Tag: Teaching

Cross-Post: Teaching Religion & Law in U.S. History: Part II

Note: this two-part post about teaching a course on “Religion and Law in America” was co-written with Charlie McCrary and originally appeared on the Religion in American History blog.

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While there is no shortage of avenues to explore religion and law, we decided to focus this semester’s course on the theme of pluralism. There is no better idea through which to explore the contradictions of American jurisprudence on religion. We also started the course with a guiding question: “How did we get here?” That is, to take one recent example, how did American religion law reach a point where closely held corporations can successfully claim First Amendment rights to free exercise of religion?

We began with Hobby Lobby, a case that made headlines this summer. On the first day we assigned Winnifred Sullivan’s excellent piece on the decision (which was not, through a great feat of humility and restraint, titled “I Told You So”). One of the arguments we will be making in the course is that the First Amendment has always been caught in a torturous contradiction: empowered to protect all religious expression while selectively, strategically, infringing on others. After World War II, with the expansion of rights to other religious minorities, the internal contradiction was laid bare for those previously in the majority to see.

Chief Justice John Marshall by Henry Inman, 1832

The course is a timely one. The Supreme Court has (yet again!) been generous to Americanists with an interest in law during their most recent term. McCullen v. Coakley, Town of Greece v. Galloway, and (of course) Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. were all decided during the Court’s 2013 term. And, promising more excitement to come, the Court ended with the Wheaton College injunction as a kind of judicial mic drop. These cases provide a fascinating look at where we’ve been and where we’re going. They are also excellent fodder for discussions in class.

We wanted to make the most of this timeliness. The first half of the course will be a condensed narrative of religion and law in American history. We’ve assembled a religion law highlight reel in which we move from the Quebec Act (1774) to Hobby-Lobby (2014) in six weeks. We then switch gears during the latter half of the semester and run the course as a seminar. We’ll read four excellent books, coupled with fine-grain lectures on relevant e.gs. We’ll start with Kevin Schultz’s Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (2011) and match it with a lecture on government support for religious pluralism during the Cold War. Next, we’ll move to Hugh Urban’s The Church of Scientology (2011) and discuss how the IRS lingers as the specter of messy disestablishment period politics. Powerful state classifications of religion makes an easy transition to Winnifred Sullivan’s recent A Ministry of Presence: Chaplaincy, Spiritual Care, and the Law (2014), along with further discussions of the connections between bodily health, the law, and American religious history. We’ll wrap up with Katie Lofton’s Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (2011). Lofton’s book struck some of our students as a strange inclusion (though, of course, they had not yet read it). To doubters, whether inside our course or out, we kindly direct you to Amy Frykholm’s review of the book at The Christian Century:

But the eerie feeling I had while reading Kathryn Lofton’s account of the TV maven is that I have been breathing Oprah’s reality, vocabulary, consumer choices and worldview in the cultural air all around me. I have not been immune to the Gospel of Oprah, and the fact that her influence on me has been unrecognized makes it no less profound.

What Frykholm gets at, and what we hope our students come to see too, is that decisions about law, taxes, coverture, etc., are made exponentially many more times outside of the courtroom than in it. Recognizing those influences, as recent work has shown, is both profitable and difficult.

This organization was attractive since it seemed a good way to provide students with a background in American religious and legal history before slowing the pace in order to focus on more in-depth examples. Since this course has no pre-requisite at our university, it is important that students have some of the basics covered in both traditionally “religious” history (“What is disestablishment?”) as well as traditionally “legal” history (“What does it mean that the First Amendment was incorporated against the states?”).

Of course, it’s not easy to draw a religious/legal line between this or any topic we discuss in class, which is part of the attraction of teaching this course. One of the things students walk away with is an understanding that American religious history and American legal history are inseparable. The Constitution and Bill of Rights were birthed out of a largely Protestant world with largely Protestant assumptions. The evolutionary route of the First Amendment as it currently stands is unimaginable without the influence of Native Americans, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Catholics, Bob Jones University, Mormons, atheists, Scientologists and, yes, a certain retailer of arts and crafts.

Cross-Post: Teaching Religion & Law in US History: Part I

Note: this two-part post about teaching a course on “Religion and Law in America” was co-written with Charlie McCrary and originally appeared on the Religion in American History blog.

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This semester, we will be co-teaching a section of Religion and Law in U.S. History. We’re both quite fond of the subject matter, and we thought it might be interesting to take a day to talk about why scholars of American religious history may find it beneficial to pay attention to American legal history, and more specifically to the history of religion law.

The intersections of law and religion provide an important data set for historians of American religion. They allow for attention to institutions and state power, especially in conjunction with more common ARH concerns like minority voices, secularism, pluralism, and disestablished “lived” religion. For us, there are at least three reasons the study of law and religion is compelling: (1) it’s a way to do tangible studies of historical formations of the category religion; (2) the object of study provides a framework for a structured approach to history which allows for synthetic, grand narratives by paying attention to institutions; and (3) it helps scholars of American religion incorporate debates about the category “religion” in religious studies by taking the state’s definition of “religion” as its frame of reference.

Supreme Court Chambers, by flickr user Phil Roeder

Supreme Court Chambers, by flickr user Phil Roeder

We would like to linger on this last point for a moment. There is a way in which attention to law and religion subverts many of the theoretical issues in the study of religion in America. The historically problematic and theoretically contested category “religion” and what it may or may not signify can be set aside (in a sense) to focus instead at how the law defines religion. The question of whether “religion” exists—whether it is in fact “solely the creation of the scholars study”—can be placed on the backburner because the taxonomic order being investigated is one maintained, by lawyers, judges, legislators, etc.–not by scholars. Thus, in this way, the question of whether and how one can talk about religion can inform the work (and the course) without bringing it to a halt. In addition, by tracing the way in which the law strategically selects some things as religious and others not, scholars of American religious history can also begin to track how the law conceptualizes “secular” areas in which religion is seemingly absent. Indeed, the very fact that the law—and institutions integral to it like the Supreme Court—solidifies certain spheres of social life as completely (and unironically) secular challenges historians of American religion to interrogate their theoretical frameworks. That is to say, scholars should differentiate between their own frameworks and their data’s, a tricky and technical task when our theoretical terminology is also, at the same time, a “native term.”

Legal history is the history of contestation. By definition, it is interested in who “won,” who “lost,” and why it happened the way it did. It would be difficult to write any legal history without this attention to winners and losers. As a result, American legal history is predisposed towards investigating minority groups, since they were more often than not on the losing end of these legal battles. Any group that was not a member of what David Sehat terms the “Protestant Establishment” would be applicable: Mormons, Catholics, Native Americans, Scientologists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses have all left their impression on the court system, and legal history is one mechanism by which historians can track these groups. This is the reason Sehat defines his narrative as one of American religious history “through its dissenters.”

Of course, legal history can also track the rise and fall of various Protestant groups, particularly in the early nineteenth-century post-disestablishment battles over taxation, incorporation, and church property. Through these battles, we can observe the category “religion” being legally created and recreated. One caveat to the legal history approach, though, is the somewhat limited nature of the data set. Even with such a wealth of sources, including religious-freedom court cases from the local to federal level, as well as less-studied issues like tax codes, some groups still remain absent from sources. For instance, some were so extremely out of power that they were not able to contest, or had to have others contest in their stead. The most prominent among such actors were enslaved African-Americans, who often had little to no recourse to the law. Nevertheless, slavery and the personhood and rights of slaves (if not often slaves as actors themselves) were ever-present in nineteenth-century legal debates and cases, such as Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), as well as various attempts by state and colonial legislatures to regulate slave life.

The working thesis of the course is this: the operative understanding of “religion”/ “religious” informing the framers of the Constitution is far narrower than most Americans’ understanding of what the terms mean today. This tension has been evident for a long time, prominently tested in cases like Reynolds v. United States (1878), which raised questions like, “is polygamy religious?” and “is religious action protected–or just beliefs?” For obvious reasons, Jefferson and Madison weren’t thinking about polygamous Mormons. In the last sixty or seventy years the United States has undergone significant changes to its religious demographics, from predominately Protestant to “Tri-Faith” to “pluralist.” How can the law, written in the late eighteenth century and first tested and defined in the nineteenth, still work in this environment? Slippery pluralism and a hazy ambivalence as to what counts for Americans as “religious” create real problems for the black-and-white world of law. This problem was glaringly evident in recent dissents by Justices Sotomayor (to Wheaton) and Ginsburg (to Hobby Lobby), which rested on anachronistic, narrow, and ultimately inadequate definitions of what “religion” means and who counts as a “religious organization.” Simply put, religion law is not well equipped to deal with the fact of religious diversity in a “pluralistic” nation–a reality that, through disestablishment and religious freedom, the law itself was instrumental in creating.

Field Notes from the AAR

One of the highlights of this year’s American Academy of Religion annual meeting was a NAASR panel responding to On Teaching Religion. On Teaching ReligionThe book, edited by Christopher Lehrich, is a collection of J.Z. Smith’s essays on teaching. Until this volume, many of the essays were out of print and hard to find. Lehrich chose not to include many of the most commonly cited and widely available essays,  focusing instead on providing examples of Smith’s work with which even his frequent readers may be unfamiliar. Having already browsed the volume, I’m excited about the role it can play in encouraging discussion about how, why, and what we teach.
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Paging Edward Said

There’s a lot to say about the coverage of Reza Aslan’s interview with Fox News.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YY92TV4_Wc0

Andrew Kaczynski over at Buzzfeed covered the interview under the title “Is This The Most Embarrassing Interview Fox News Has Ever Done?” (I bet you can’t guess how he answers that particular question.) Amusement and outrage was evident on Twitter as well, where the #foxnewslitcrit hashtag has become popular in religious studies circles.

The most interesting part of this, to me, is Fox News host Lauren Green’s opening question: “You’re a Muslim, so why did you write a book about the founder of Christianity?” The logic of Green’s question seems to be that being a Muslim precludes one from studying Christianity. At the very least, it seeks to color with suspicion those Muslims who choose to study it. There’s much to be said about this, of course, and one of my colleagues Thomas Whitley already summed up much of what I’d like to say. So, too, did Imran Ali Malik:

Karen Armstrong Continue reading

New Work on Historicizing “Religion”

As part of my preparations for comprehensive exams, I recently “read” Brent Nongbri’s Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (Yale UP, 2013). It originally caught my eye because it promised to examine the historical events which have naturalized the category of “religion.” While I haven’t had a chance to read it in its entirety (a month before my comps, “reading a book” very much deserves to be enclosed in quotation marks), what I have worked through so far is very promising.

As someone who regularly teaches introductory courses in the academic study of religion, Nongbri’s aim to track “the emergence of this conception of religions as apolitical paths to individual salvation” piqued my interest (1). One of the challenges with teaching introductory courses in my discipline is bringing about the process of defamiliarization that has to take place in order to see familiar things in unfamiliar ways. As a result, I share Nongbri’s interest in the question of “how and when people came to conceptualize the world as divided between “religious” and ‘secular” in the modern sense, and to think of the religious realm as being divided into distinct religions, the so-called World Religions” (2). In a very readable overview in his introduction (which I now plan to assign to my undergraduate students in World Religions), Nongbri traces the modern usage of the category to the Protestant Reformation, the Wars of Religion, John Locke, and the subsequent creation of a public and private sphere. With this introductory framework provided, Nongbri moves on to look at the uses and misuses of the category in other scholarly contexts throughout the body of the book.

I was particularly delighted to see such careful attention paid to the category given that the last readable (read: teachable) genealogical coverage that I’m aware of is what W.C. Smith laid out in Chapter 2 of The Meaning and End of Religion (1962). I had planned to assign that in future courses, but now I’ll probably try assigning Nongbri first. Nongbri’s book adds to the genealogy in the style of Smith and manages to do so without sacrificing clarity of writing or forgoing critical edge.

We need more critical historicization of the category “religion” of the kind that Nongbri is undertaking here. Nongbri’s work is reminiscent of (and looks just as promising as) Tomoko Masuzawa’s The Invention of World Religions (2005) as well as Peter Harrison’s “Religion” and the Religions of the English Enlightenment (2002). I look forward to having more time to work through it.

(1) Nongbri, 8.

(2) Nongbri, 5.

Teaching “Classification” in the World Religions Classroom (Part 2 of 2)

This post continues my reflections on World Religions pedagogy, from a paper I gave at the FSU Graduate Symposium on Religion entitled “The Importance of “Classification” in Teaching World Religions; or, On Using Justin Bieber to Teach J. Z. Smith.” The first part is here, and an introductory post providing context is here

A class like World Religions too easily becomes “death-by-e.g.,” a forced march through pre-selected ism’s of every variety. By focusing on the issue of classification, we can inject some clarity into the course that simply isn’t found in most World Religions textbooks when it comes to addressing the all-important question of “why these traditions and not others?”. I’ve found that most textbooks choose to answer this question with a solid paragraph of hand-waving and circular arguments before quietly changing the subject. The selection of traditions, all too often, must rest on its presumed self-evidency.

Jim Jones

My goal is to reach a point, early in the semester, where students can begin to understand the fundamentally Durkheimian point that classification is a social act—that it is, I tell my students, something done by people. Once we have this framework in place, we as a class can begin to critically examine things beyond the syllabus—say, what was it about the social order in the 1970s United States that spawned Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple, or, what exactly do 19th century British colonial officials in Nepal have to do with the chapter on Buddhism in their textbook?

I’ve found Justin Bieber (or as he is known in my classroom, “The Biebster”) to be a great way to illustrate the politics of classification. Now, using Bieber definitely has its own time and place—such as the predominantly white, middle-class classroom that you’ll find at FSU. And even in those settings he won’t always be a good example—but finding an example like Bieber can be very helpful. I start off with a simple picture of him projected onto the board. Then I begin by asking questions. What does he do for a living? Who is this person? Very quickly, the answers get interesting: someone will inevitably say something along the lines of “he is the voice of his generation!” at the same time that someone else says “he sucks!”

Now we can get in to the good stuff: Musician or hack? Hero or moron? By drawing attention to the way students classify Justin Bieber, it opens a door for us to talk about how each of us classifies, often times without realizing we are doing it. Bieber is also useful to introduce the ways in which race and gender can factor into classificatory systems. Charles McCrary pointed me to an excellent clip from an episode of Saturday Night Live hosted by Justin Bieber, which makes for a great in-class activity. The clip is from one of that evening’s skits, in which Bieber plays himself having a conversation with his “head of security,” played by Jason Sudeikis, which you can view below:

The joke, of course, is that the twelve body doubles—made up of the rest of the cast of SNL—look nothing like Bieber—a young white man—and the class can pick up on this immediately.

For those of you unfamiliar with Bieber’s music or public persona, the series of jokes relies on his often being confused visually for a female, and particularly a queer middle-aged woman, as well as his appropriation of hip-hop clothes and musical styles. This allows my class to tangle with the racial and gendered politics of classification: Why is there a joke about Bieber appearing female—presumably in a way not complimentary? Furthermore, what does it mean that Bieber, as one of my students has said, “tries to act Black”?  What are the politics of classifying a 20-something Canadian millionaire as “black” or “African-American”? It allows my class to identify the tensions that come with applying certain terms to certain things, in a way that is much more immediately accessible to them than, say, when their textbook discusses the politics of Catholics rejecting the Protestant critique that they are interested in “ritual, not religion.” Yet, when my class gets to that point in the textbook, they now have more familiar examples to draw upon in understanding that there may be more at stake in these arguments over descriptions than first meets the eye.

Because assessments of Bieber provoke such fierce dissent in my classes, it makes it very clear to both sides (of the Bieber debate) how the words we use to describe things are the result of deliberate human choices, and that we might be able to identify agendas and interests at stake in calling something a popstar or a fraud. When my students understand the difference between an object and how that object is classified, it can help to remove some of the tension from the room when we talk about, say, early Christian debates over the divinity of Jesus, or whether the term “terrorist” might not be of universal applicability.

However, this line of thinking is useful beyond simply assessing the content of traditions, since it also allows us to talk about how those traditions have been studied over time (or even, why this particular conglomeration of people and activities is a considered a “tradition” distinct from other people and activities). Because—and this will not shock any of you—it’s one thing to try to get students to think about Justin Bieber, and quite another to get them to engage with the classificatory systems of Durkheim or Eliade. Talking of how certain scholars of religion think about the sacred and the profane is one way to get at classification, but it can make for a shaky start if it’s their first introduction to the concept. Bieber can make for a great opening act.

As I hope has become clear, focusing on “classification” in a World Religions class has several benefits. By getting our students to think about how the groups of people under study have categorized the world around them—and then how, in turn, these same groups are classified as “religious” (or not), we can help to instill practices of critical thinking so needed in the introductory classroom. It allows us to show our students the problems inherent in a conceptual framework that classifies things as a “World Religion.” Borrowing another phrase from Smith, it gives us the opportunity to address the “duplicity in the disciplines,” specifically the disciplinary lies that make up any introductory course. More importantly, it allows us the chance to turn these potential stumbling blocks into learning opportunities, by making object lessons out of the very things that can so easily distract an introductory class. So that when the semester ends, students leave the classroom not just knowing the content of a so-called “World Religion” but also knowing how to interrogate the world around them.

Teaching “Classification” in the World Religions Classroom (Part 1 of 2)

The paper I presented at the recent FSU symposium, “The Importance of “Classification” in Teaching World Religions; or, On Using Justin Bieber to Teach J. Z. Smith” centered on the role that the concept of “classification” can play in a well-oiled World Religions classroom (as a bonus, it also allowed me to scratch “Present a paper with ‘Justin Bieber’ in the title” off of my bucket list). I wanted to take the opportunity to meditate on Jonathan Z. Smith’s statement that “an introductory course serves the primary function of introducing the student to college-level work” (1).

If our primary job is to introduce, what exactly are we introducing? In a course as conceptually muddled as World Religions, the answer isn’t always clear. Are we supposed to talk about, for example, what “Buddhism” is and what Buddhists believe? I know that’s what my students expect me to do at the start of each semester. Here, my colleagues’ papers were very helpful: as Brad’s paper showed, simply reading the textbook(s) uncritically is rife with problems. Similarly, Tara’s paper showed how easy it is to reify notions of “tradition” without intending to do so. In other words, what our panel argued is that given its conceptual problems, World Religions is an incredibly difficult course to teach well.

Classification is helpful to teach for a variety of reasons. For one, it relieves (or at least assists) instructors in the debate about the worthiness of World Religions classes (or even courses in the humanities in general) by showing that there are, in fact, a variety of useful life-skills that can be taught and developed in our classrooms. Everything from identifying authority structures to tracing power dynamics to an awareness of how ideology and rhetoric operate can be reviewed in our courses. It also gives my students the tools to follow the textbook while interrogating it at the same time. Most important for the graduate instructor, however, might be its practicality. By focusing attention on the issue of classification and, more specifically, how the people and groups under study classify and are classified, you can get more bang for your buck out of every lecture. In so doing, it makes larger theoretical points much more accessible. I’ve found that it is, hands down, one of the most useful tools with which I can equip my undergrads.

As I read Smith, he has great ideas about introductory pedagogy but his suggestions for execution were of limited use. Or, perhaps it is more accurate to say that his teaching environment at the University of Chicago must be a little different than Florida State. I once had a student enter my class late to tell me that–and this is a direct quote– “Sorry I’m late, but we were doing a keg stand breakfast.” This class began at 10am. (Go Noles!) While certainly not the norm here at Florida State, it is suggestive of the type of problems we run into while teaching introductory courses at large state schools. I’d like you to keep that story in mind while you read one of Smith’s suggestions for how to run a proper introductory class like World Religions. It’s an extended quote, but bears reading in full:

An introductory course must feature a good bit of activity….For example, there should be short weekly writing assignments on a set task that requires reflection, argumentation, and risk-taking. Each piece of writing must be rewritten at least once, regardless of grade, and this requires that every piece of writing be returned to the student, with useful comments, no later than the next class period…an ethic of revision rather than originality should prevail. Among other devices, I ask my students to keep two notebooks, one for class and one for their reading. They are to make their notes on the right-hand pages and register queries, thoughts, conversations (with attribution) with other students, and, above all, revisionary proposals and re-readings on the left. At least once a quarter, I call in all students’ notebooks and texts. After reading them through, I have individual conferences with each student to go over what they’ve written and underlined and to discuss with them what this implies as to how they are reading and reflecting (2).

In short, I think this approach may work better with a class of 10-15 students than in a 70-person class with members who are in a period of their lives where they perform keg stands for breakfast. And, that aside, though it may be an ideal way to do things, it is simply not practical as a graduate instructor.

And here’s where the rubber meets the road: if we don’t know how to introduce, what good can we do? I tried in my own way to come up with approaches that might work. I needed the quick and dirty version of theoretical sophistication, something that could work to reach students who are trying to learn while some of their peers are, quite literally, drunk.

How, then, to do it well? It’s a complicated question, and one I’m far from answering satisfactorily. I have a few ideas that have worked well, and I’m always looking to improve.

One idea in particular has been helpful: I begin by assigning a first week writing prompt using the course syllabus as an object lesson. The students must address the differences between the traditions covered in the textbook and the ones covered in our syllabus. They then have to consider what is classified as worthy of inclusion in my course, and what is not. They have to wrestle with, for example, why their textbook omits any discussion of the Flying Spaghetti Monster or Scientology. More importantly, they can begin to hypothesize why we might talk about some things rather than others or, to quote Smith yet again, “why this rather than that” (3).

(1) Smith, Jonathan Z. “Narratives into Problems”: The College Introductory Course and the Study of Religion” JAAR 56:4 (1988).
(2) Smith, “The Introductory Course: Less is Better,” 729.
(3) Smith, Jonathan Z. Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1982), xi.

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