The Politics of Religion

This past weekend was the 12^th annual Florida State University Graduate Student Symposium (#fsugss on Twitter). Dr. Aaron Hughes from the University of Rochester was this year’s keynote speaker, and this year’s conference theme was the “Politics of Religion.” There were many great panels that took place over the weekend, and the presented papers covered all sorts of topics in the field. I’ll focus my reflections here on discussions of theory issues in our field; so, if theory isn’t your bag, this post may not be for you. However, as Dr. Hughes told us Friday evening, it doesn’t matter what tradition or area you focus in, if you study religion, you should be aware of the debates in theory and method.

Professor Hughes’s keynote address was entitled “The Politics of Theory and Method.” In it, he explained how the study of religion, discussions of  theory, and various scholarly methodologies are political. It was a great keynote and could be a looooong blog post in and of itself, so I’ll focus on just a few things. The embedded politics in theories of religion and theoretical approaches to the study of religion was one thread of his keynote that struck a chord with me. In 1903, the Association of Biblical Instructors in American Colleges and Secondary Schools was founded, an organization that changed its name to National Association of Biblical Instructors (NABI) in 1922. Most, if not all, members of NABI were not only Bible instructors, but also Protestants committed to the text’s theological value and saw sharing that value as part of their task. In brief, religion could be celebrated in the classroom. This is the organization that would become the American Academy of Religion.