Strategic Working Groups

Religion, Secularism, and Modernity || 2007-2008

In 2007-2008, the Townsend Center will fund a Strategic Group on Religion, Secularism, and Modernity. The directors of the group will be Robert Sharf (Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Chair of the Center for Buddhist Studies) and Saba Mahmood (Professor of Anthropology).

For Professors Sharf and Mahmood, this is an opportune moment to convene a Mellon Strategic Group on the subject. The international political context reminds us daily of the enduring significance of religious belief. Best-sellers by popular intellectuals Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins rail against the evils of religion, and advocate atheism for the thinking person. Here in California, the question of religion in the public sphere will enter the spotlight in the coming months, in a court case that pits the UC system against a group of evangelical high schools claiming religious bias and the violation of freedom of speech in the admission process. Clearly, the theories that characterize modernity as a process of secularization can no longer provide sufficient understanding of social change. The Strategic Working Group (SWG) brings faculty together from across the campus to reflect collectively on alternative models and theories that might account for the singular role of religion in the modern world.

According to Sharf and Mahmood, there is a need to substantially interrogate the very categories that structure debates on religion, modernity, and secularity, both inside and outside academe. “Hitchens and Dawkins operate on the certainty that religion is separate from secularity,” Professor Mahmood comments. “Many academics also work within this paradigm. Religion for them means privatized belief and spiritual experience, and has no place in the public sphere. That is a Western assumption.” To claim that religion is ubiquitous, on the other hand, is as ideologically laden as the divide between religious practice and secular public life. And the anthropological model of the all-cultural ignores the legal, political, and economic structures that come into play in matters pertaining to religion. The SWG will enable an intellectual conversation in this arena which would not have been possible otherwise.

Berkeley has tremendous strengths in the area of religious studies. The faculty includes specialists in the anthropology of religion, psychology of religion, sociology of religion, religion and art, religion and the environment, religion and gender, religion and law, religion and science, and so on. Berkeley also has eminent scholars of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism, as well as specialists in African and Native American traditions. But there are few opportunities for them to work together. Because Berkeley was founded at a time when it was considered inappropriate, if not unconstitutional, for a public institution to offer courses in religion, the university has never had a department, center, or institute to support collaborative research or graduate instruction. The College of Letters and Science offers a popular undergraduate major in Religious Studies, but the program has few resources of its own. For Sharf and Mahmood, this administrative and curricular situation represents an opportunity. By getting historians, economists, political scientists, and art historians all in one room, they hope to generate new models for understanding the nature and place of religion, both in the past and the present, and to develop and implement new models for the academic study of religion that would differ from those found elsewhere in the United States.

Initially, the SWG will focus on some of the recent writings on these issues that have appeared in the past few years, along with more classical thinkers such as Kant, Spinoza, and Kierkegaard. The goal is to reflect collectively on how the concept and practice of religion — and its twin, “the secular” — have been transformed by the advances of scientific knowledge and the social transformations of modern life. When possible, some of the authors will be invited to join in discussions of their books. In addition to this intellectual focus, the group will begin to reimagine the place of research and teaching in religious studies at Berkeley. Toward the middle of the semester, participants will turn their attention to the graduate curriculum, with the longer-term goal of creating a new interdisciplinary graduate designated emphasis in religion.

Other group members include Victoria Frede (Assistant Professor of History), David Bates (Associate Professor of Rhetoric), Ronald Hendel (Professor of Near Eastern Studies), Charles Hirschkind (Assistant Professor of Anthropology), Matthew Scherer (Mellon Postdoctoral fellow in Rhetoric), and Michael Allan (Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature).