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Teaching
Religion in the World History Class
Michael C. Weber
Gettysburg
College |
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Recently, a student of mine wrote a good paper on
the ancient Greek cult at Eleusis. She detailed the myth, recapitulated
what was known of the ceremony, and discussed the scholarship. It did not
seem to occur to her to discuss the people who participated in it. This
is not a problem unique to her: I think that, being a good student, she
just talked about a religion in history the same way she has learned about
it—as an intellectual system of thought or belief that somehow seems
to exist without flesh and blood humans defining and enacting the requisite
cults and rites. This, it seems to me, is one of the major weaknesses we
must address as we teach about religion in the world civilization survey
course because World History instructors teach a lot of religion. As we
survey the main human cultural groupings, the major world religions all
take a turn on our stage of presentation. This is important material because
in the premodern world (and, seemingly, increasingly in ours) religion is
one of the most important forces in history. Yet religion is only a force
when it is embodied—its effect is in humans. Ironically, this crucial
human dimension is often ignored. |
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Unfortunately, most of us have not been trained
in religious studies or philosophy to any significant degree and some of
us only learned what we know about these religions by staying one day ahead
of the students the first time we were thrust into this course. In addition,
it is probable that each of us has her or his own belief structures and
have come to some personal conclusions about religion in general and about
particular religions more specifically. Given this circumstance, it is quite
reasonable to ask, How can I, or ought I to, present this material? As a
scholar trained in both religious studies and history, I want to delineate
what I believe to be the central problem in teaching about religions in
the world history class and to describe an approach to how a class can successfully
be presented with this important material in a manner consistent with the
rest of our history teaching. This approach is informed by the difference
in how religion is studied in a religion class and a history class and the
somewhat different goals of religious studies. |
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Generally, the study of religions falls under the broad
heading of cultural history and, often, the history of ideas. Thus, our
textbooks usually treat religions as conglomerations of ideas: they are
primarily belief systems. It is surprising how many texts do this. But while
religions are belief systems, they are also social organizations. Without
a doubt, we need to present the content of the belief systems so that students
understand what the religion is about (often something conceptually new
to them to which they have had no prior exposure). Consequently, for most
of us, teaching about beliefs and the philosophy behind religions is outside
our field of training and expertise; furthermore, the study of religion
is complicated, regularly utilizing anthropology, sociology, philosophy
and even scientific understandings of people and the world. When we try
to go into detailed explanations, our presentations run the risk of becoming
mired in theological arcana. So, instead of presenting any religion in all
its complexity, books and teachers usually opt for a quick essential
description of the belief system: with this essentialist approach Judaism
simply becomes a series of beliefs about ethical monotheists, the covenant
people of the one God who controls history; Buddhism about following the
Eight Fold Path to Nirvana; Islam is reduced to being a radical, legalistic
religio-socio-legalistic monotheism of the Arabs; and the Christian religion
is summed up in the somewhat tragic narrative of the "life of Jesus of Nazareth"
and the idea of love of God and fellow Christians. However, I wish to suggest
that from the outset we as teachers need to recognize and acknowledge that
such presentations are idealistic and that deviations from such assumed,
standardized presentations of religion are normal. |
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As an introduction to complex systems, I understand
how this set of circumstances has evolved. While these characterizations
have some truth to them and are easy for students to retain, they are all
ultimately reductionist. As intellectual abstractions they miss something
fundamental: the believers! As my student of Eleusis demonstrated,
the reality of lived religion (which I would define as religion as
it is actually practiced by individuals) is nowhere to be found. And yet,
if we think about it critically, we realize that religious belief does not
exist outside human persons. Just as in political science or economics,
any effective idea finds its vitality only in practice. There can be no
religion without believers and, with no practitioners, religion ceases to
be a social force in the world and only becomes an intellectual curiosity
like, for example, ancient Greek polytheism. As historians, our actual interest
in religions is precisely in the role they play as social forces while they
are lived realities and not as antiquities or intellectual curiosities.
It is my contention that in history courses our focus ought to be different
than it now is, and that we should concentrate more upon peoples' practices
than ideas. In other words, I mean we need to focus more upon biography
and less on intellectual history. I am not advocating a return to the "Great
Man" presentations of history, but rather for a change in emphasis. We can
learn and teach about the range of actual religious experience, including
popular religion—even if we don't have a plethora of primary texts
available. Furthermore, this does not mean abandoning presenting the intellectual
or philosophical content of religion, but instead illustrating religions
primarily on the basis of their human context rather than the world of ideas.
This method has an additional advantage: it allows historians to "work from
strength," for by training we are more adept at handling biographical material
than philosophical ideas. |
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I have come to this conclusion as a sympathetic
critic as someone who was trained in the study and practice of western religions
as well as history and who teaches courses in religions of the world as
well as world civilization. Over time I have abandoned the essentialist
approach, and have concluded that the most useful heuristic for teaching
religion is the simple definition of religion as "the way an individual
constructs reality." Put slightly differently, the Ultimate Focus of a religion
provides devotees with a sense of the meaning of human existence. Anthropologically,
that is one of religion's functions in society: it is one of the primary
"meaning makers" within a cultural system. When we carefully study religions
on their own terms, we quickly discover that there really is not an essence
of any religion but a consensus—or consensuses—of experience
and belief that describes a shared construction of reality. Furthermore,
even within that shared vision there is inherent variation, often of a wide
degree. If we wish to be historically accurate in presenting a religion,
it is usually better to talk about that variation in terms of its individual
incarnations/constructions than to pose the problem in terms of "essence"
and "deviation from that essence," of orthodoxy and heresy.1
In other words, we need to teach about Christianities and Buddhisms (and,
dare I say it?) even Islams as streams or trajectories of belief and practice
and experience from which different individuals draw different emphases.
In truth, in extremis, there may be as many different emphases as
there are believers. While we could never present that, we can nuance our
presentation so that a religion becomes a shared construction of reality
but with distinctive and individual emphases. To do that, teaching needs
to shift to the believers and all the dimensions of religious experience
rather than staying focused upon the ideas themselves. We can see the truth
of this when we look at what often appear to be contradictory movements
within a religion: the role of the human Buddha in strict Theravadan tradition
vs. the god Buddha of the Mahayanists, the Gnostic Christian Jesus as a
semi-divine teacher of secret wisdom vs. the Orthodox view of a Christ who
was "coeternal and consubstantial" with God, sacrificed for the sake of
sinful humanity. The ideas may be mutually contradictory, but nevertheless
they are all held by people who consider themselves true believers. Moreover,
all of the people who held to contradictory beliefs, beliefs that were considered
by the official hierarchies of religions to be heretical, were people who
lived and died believing themselves true followers of their religious leader,
believing that they were sharing his or her construction of reality. |
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Thus, if we succumb to the essentialist position,
we are simply propagating orthodoxy rather than presenting religion as
it was lived in the lives of people. In our world civilizations classes,
we ought to seek to present the course of history as much as possible
as it was lived, not as the religiously orthodox (or, for that matter,
politically or economically orthodox) would have it. In fact, were we
told that we had to teach religious orthodoxy, most of us would object
in the name of academic freedom. When by using this essentialist model
we do it unintentionally to our students, who know next to nothing about
religions (including their own), we do them an intellectual disservice.
The only benefit I see in this essentialist approach is to those who wish
to uphold an orthodoxy in its root sense, i.e., having the correct opinions,
which is more the concern of religious clergy than historians. Yet the
problem remaining with this approach is that it overlooks the historical
facts of the variety of religious experiences, even within the same religion,
in the service of manageability of material. No one in a modern university
religion class would teach religion this way. |
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How has this predicament come to pass? Quite simply
it is part of the history of the scholarship in religion that we inherited.
Religious studies began in universities in support of particular orthodox
religious sects, first in the medieval Islamic world in support of Sunnite
orthodoxy according to one of the "schools of law" and later developed in
Christian Europe, intentionally advocating for the truth of Catholicism
or, again later, Protestant Christianity (witness the Catholic and Evangelical
faculties of theology in major German state universities). Gradually, and
only in the 20th Century, the departments of religion expanded their focus
(usually under the guise of Comparative Religion), but their raison d'être
was still to provide rational, academic support for a brand of orthodoxy.
The study of any religion as composed of a true essence and heretical variation
is the logical—though perhaps subconscious—consequence of those
initial frameworks for study. This was the universal approach of theology
departments or schools until very recently. A second and mitigating
factor was that when religion eventually was taught outside of theology
departments, it was generally in departments of "Religion and Philosophy,"
wherein religion is considered much as all the other subject matter of philosophy:
i.e., as ideas that are examined logically and historically in their development.
Thus, the theoretical preoccupation of religious studies for most of its
existence was in seeing religions as conglomerations of ideas. |
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With the advent of the anthropology, sociology,
and psychology of religion, the phenomenon of religion came to be studied
as part of human culture; but this was only a late 20th Century occurrence
and old ideas die hard.2
Modern religion scholars look upon religion as a polyvalent construct,
with many significant dimensions. Many follow the path of Ninian Smart,
who created a useful heuristic when he laid out his classic work on the
comparative study of religion, The Religious Experience of Mankind
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969). In the book, he identified
six major dimensions under which a religion could be studied: the Experiential,
Social, Doctrinal, Mythological, Ritual, and Ethical. Each religion puts
forth each of these characteristics in different measures just as individuals
display them differentially. By using one or more of these categories,
we can present religions as they are experienced. |
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Finally, from my perspective this focus upon lived
religion gets us out of another, more important though extremely subtle
difficulty, though we may be only dimly aware of it. If we only echo the
textbook-style, essentialist presentation as we teach about religions and
how they are put into practice, we invariably get drawn into value judgments
about how well or badly a particular individual incorporates the essence
of that religion. For example, in teaching about Ashoka Maurya, Indian Emperor
and Buddhist advocate, all textbooks invariably emphasize his Buddhist conversion
and most happily display a Pillar Edict as evidence in an accompanying illustration.
However, the texts also must deal with the contradiction that Buddhism has
been presented as the following of the Eightfold Path, which clearly forbids
killing another human being. In light of this, Ashoka appears as somewhat
of a hypocrite for continuing to employ capital punishment and preserving
his power by military means. The same pertains to Constantine the Great
and most of the Caliphs of medieval Islam. The resulting conclusion seems
to be to stress the flaws of these rulers as religious practitioners: they
didn't live up to the essential ideal of their own religion. The cynical
student will even see the shrewd but predictable manipulation of the masses
by a clever ruler's pretensions to belief, who perhaps used religion as,
if not the "opiate of the people," at the very least a subtle social control
mechanism. However, setting aside saints and bodhisattvas for the moment,
I doubt seriously that these rulers' appropriation of religion was much
different from anyone else's within their societies. By the essentialist
standard anyone less than saints are more or less hypocritical failures:
it's just a question of degree! This is another problem with the essentialist
model: it feeds a kind of agnostic, positivistic attitude which putatively
displays that, based upon the evidence, no one can live up to the essence
of the religion and that no one ever did. So, the logical conclusion runs,
the religion must be flawed. But consider this: whenever any interpretive
standard ends up describing most people as abnormal—people whose own
contemporaries thought were doing perfectly well—the problem is with
the standard rather than the people. |
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Consequently, my call is for world historians to
go their own way in presenting religions by presenting the varieties or
trajectories of practice within those religions. I believe that the best
way to do this is through biography and popular religious practices. I would
suggest that after presenting a sketch of the " construction of reality"
that is generally shared throughout the religion (for it is unavoidable
that we discuss something of the central content that makes the religion
what it is), we offer biographical examples of the behavior of people who
considered themselves followers of the religion in question—and
those examples should be as contradictory of examples as we can find.
Perhaps my own training in Islamic history is responsible for this aberrant
idea, for in medieval Islam scholars traditionally spent as much time studying
biography as theology. I think this can be fruitfully applicable to all
religions. Let's pick up those saints we left aside earlier: Consider contrasting
the life of Ashoka the imperfect Buddhist not with some "ideal" standard
but with that of a real, contemporary Indian saint. Take up St. Antony of
Egypt—who fled the urbanized Roman Empire of the 3rd Century because
in his vision it was going to Hell-in-a-handbasket—alongside Constantine
the Great. Compare Rabia al-Adawiyyah, the mystic of Basra, with a caliph
like Haroun al-Rashid. Contrast the life of a Hildegard of Bingen, poetess
and songstress of piety, with Richard the Lionheart, Christian King going
on crusade, glorying in Holy War—each hoping to expiate some sins
and gain salvation. |
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Needless to say, resources for this kind of teaching
are not easy to find: most of the major textbooks in religion do not address
the material as I have suggested here. Yet I believe that we can comb available
collections of biographies to find the raw material for such comparisons.
Indeed, I have found much useful in older collections (sometimes out—of-print).
Eric Schroeder's Muhammad's People and Roland Bainton's histories
of Women of the Reformation are full of examples. Ken Wolf's small
reader Personalities and Problems is good on some of the important
figures and has the advantage of being geared to the undergraduate student.
The contemporary series of Textual Sources for the study of Religion
(ed. John Hinnells) out of the University of Chicago Press have some fine
biographical material. There are also numerous internet resource pages with
especially good material on Byzantium and the European Middle Ages, especially
the Internet Sourcebooks project of Paul Halsall (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook.html).
As far as I know, there is no collection of historical biographies of religious
figures in existence, though Gary Comstock has a nice collection of contemporary
Religious Autobiographies (2nd edition, Wadsworth, 2003).
In all the world's classical religions, which are mostly patriarchal, we
should be especially attuned to consider the roles available to women in
contrast to those of men and to pay attention to how women constructed their
own versions of reality. |
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Add to this the evidences of popular piety
seen often in religious art and fables in contrast to the work of learned
theologians. By doing this, we have a better chance of presenting religion
as at least an approximation of "how it really was" than the orthodox/heretic
model ever could provide us. More importantly, it will help students think
critically about one part of life that, in most cases, they have been taught
never to think about. It gives them material to consider that is much more
varied and interesting than the simplistic, monochromatic, orthodox views
of religion they bring with them from home, school, and religious institutions.
Another advantage is that it makes the study of religion accessible to the
student who has a hard time understanding the importance of ideas standing
alone in history, a very abstract enterprise, and instead places those ideas
in an individual life. Surprisingly, it makes the comparison and contrast
of religions easier to see and the relations of religion to the wider society
clearer. For these reasons, I believe that this method is an effective way
to present the religions of the world in their human context. |
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| Biographical
Note: Michael Weber is currently visiting Assistant Professor of History
at Gettysburg College. His Ph. D. work studies the assimilation of Islamic
educational, scientific, and philosophical ideas by medieval European scholars,
both Christians and Jews. For the past 20 years he was in New England,
most recently as Associate Professor of History at Salem State College in
Massachusetts. He was trained at Boston University in an interdisciplinary
program in Medieval Studies, combining the study of history, religion, philosophy,
and literature into one degree program. He has been active in the World
History Association at the regional and national levels since 1996. |
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1
Among religion scholars there is exciting work being done on the question
of essence (i.e., orthodoxy) and deviation (i.e., heresy) in most of
the world's religions. While the terms orthodoxy and heresy were generally
considered Christian and historically primarily utilized by Christian
theologians, there have been such concerns in most of the world's religions.
In other words, there has always been a problem of multiplicities of
belief and practice. John B. Henderson discusses this problem extensively
for Confucianism, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity in his book The
Construction of Orthodoxy and Heresy: Neo-Confucian, Islamic, Jewish,
and Christian Patterns (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998). For some time
religion scholars have considered this bifurcation as a distortion of
religion. Henderson delineates the very similar processes within these
four traditions that lead to the construction of both orthodoxy and
deviation from it. It is important to see that this was a dynamic process,
two or more competing visions trying to win adherents to their ideas
and organizations. Neither group's positions were understandable apart
from the other. One of his important conclusions is that, as much as
ideas, the political forces played a role in the ultimate triumph of
the orthodox vision and this can readily be seen when orthodoxy changes
with political change. One lesson we draw from his work should be that
even if we want to present an essence for a religion (i.e., the orthodox
opinion) even it is not static and really cannot be understood apart
from the competing visions of the same religion.
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To be fair, the contrast between how religions are presented in
world civilization classes and religion classes is partially the
result of the subject matter to be covered. When I taught "Religions
of the World" I had thirteen weeks to teach about six or seven major
religions. When I teach World Civ I, I have about four days to cover
all the early religions—and I have to teach economic, political,
social, and intellectual trends on top of that. However, historians
still have tended to take an older, ideaistic approach to religions.
Religious studies has left this exclusive approach behind. The clearest
historiographic introduction to the study of religions is Eric Sharpe's
Comparative Religion (original edition: London: Duckworth
Press, 1975 with various reprints and editions). In his first chapter
he gives an overview of the history of religious studies, see especially
pp. 21-26.
In his presentation, one characteristic that becomes very clear
is that for a very long time there was an implicit acceptance of
the superiority of Christianity (and, by necessary implication,
of Judaism as its antecedent). Sharpe notes that the study of other
religions was seen as an attack on Christianity and Christian scholars
perceived little worth in such activities as the "religious traditions
. . . had traditionally been regarded as at best worthless, at worst
as the work of the devil." (Sharpe, 144). Even great scholars like
Adolf von Harnack had little use for comparative religion (see his
comments on p. 127). He seems in these comments to be not much more
enlightened that Fielding's Parson Thwackum, whose religious horizon
of understanding he summed up with these well-known words: "When
I say religion, I mean the Christian religion; and when I say the
Christian religion, I mean Protestantism; and when I say Protestantism,
I mean the Church of England by law established." The comparative
study of religion, like that of all comparative history, takes us
out of our comfort zone, where we "know" exactly what religion is
and how it functions. I would even argue that part of the reaction
against world history seems to me to be a result of this dissonance.
This seems to explain why we keep coming back to essentializing:
we are comfortable there, with manageable ideas. But religion scholars
would no more limit their study to ideas than they would to, say,
prayers. As Joachim Wach, the great professor of comparative religion
at University of Chicago put it, "The scholar of religion will never
base his research and conclusions on material drawn from a sing
area of religious life. Before him spread all the phenomena that
desire to be called a religion." ("The task of the History of Religions,"
in Wach, Joachim, Introduction to the History of Religions,
ed. Joseph Kitagawa, New York: Macmillian, 1988:19)
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