(appreciated, criticized) much like a musical performance or
an artifact. Study of this kind might include, for example,
encouraging the practice of Zen meditation in addition to
studying Zen texts on meditation or interviewing Zen
monks. Ninian Smart referred to this kind of study as “par-
ticipatory” and insisted that the study of religion need be
polymethodic and interdisciplinary because in order to un-
derstand religion the scholar must be simultaneously inside
and outside of the subject of study. Smith, Eliade, and Smart
all argued that the academic study of religion needed to be
a broad utilitarian and humanistic study and not some kind
of strictly (and only) objective historical study of particular
traditions.
The mid-century study of religion also boasted several
“popular” trends in books and media. The works of the liter-
ature scholar Joseph Campbell and the Bollingen Founda-
tion are examples of the extensive study of comparative my-
thology that—although occurring outside of religious studies
or divinity schools—brought a vast amount of religious ma-
terials to popular audiences in books and media, such as
Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces and The Masks of
God and the PBS series Moyers: Joseph Campbell and the
Power of Myth. While many scholars of religion view Camp-
bell’s work as “popular” and “literary” instead of historical
or scholarly, this does not downplay the influence of such
work in bringing comparative religious materials to large au-
diences (many of whom might never have studied religion
in universities). The religion scholar Huston Smith, author
of The World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions
(1958) and other textbooks and general works on religion,
hosted film and television presentations of religions and the
psychology of religious experiences that, like Campbell’s
work, presented comparative religions to large popular audi-
ences.
At the same time American social scientific studies of
religion viewed religion not as self-generated phenomena un-
derstandable only on its own terms but as a cultural product.
Human beings generate the varied religious practices and be-
liefs that they employ for a variety of contingent, political,
personal, and social purposes. This kind of science is de-
scribed as reductive: it examines religion not as a special sub-
ject but as a product of social life that can be explained with
the same intellectual tools as other human phenomena, such
as political parties, psychological pathology, or marketing
trends. Although this orientation grew out of American so-
cial scientific concerns for “religion in culture,” it echoed in
many ways Europe’s “scientific study of religion” more than
the “history of religions” and “religious studies” common in
North American divinity schools and religious studies de-
partments. Some of the North American scholars who ap-
proached religion in these ways included Peter Berger,
Thomas Luckmann, Bryan Wilson, and Robert Bellah as
well as others in sociology who devoted significant attention
to the study of religion. The works of Clifford Geertz, Mary
Douglas, and Victor Turner contributed both description
and theory to the anthropological study of religion.
CONTEMPORARY TRENDS. The intermixture of humanities
and social sciences approaches and the additions of original
approaches from cultural studies in the late twentieth- and
early twenty-first centuries has led to considerable diversity
in the discussions and discourses on religion. It is not possi-
ble to collect a canon of a dozen authors and thereby gain
an overview of North American academic approaches to reli-
gion. In this broadly diverse and creatively rich context, all
scholars share, in principle, an insistence on intellectual rigor
and critical self-awareness. The lack of an all-encompassing
theme in the field reflects the shared insistence on focusing
on religion in specific historical contexts (regardless of the
analytical and intellectual methods employed). Significant in
this American trend is the plethora of critical examinations
of the role of subjectivity in all productions of knowledge (in
universities and popular culture). Scholars of previous gener-
ations often critically examined political authority or reli-
gious truth claims, yet they sometimes failed to use these
same critical methods to examine their own productions of
knowledge about complex human phenomena (whether reli-
gion, culture, or politics). Beginning from different back-
grounds and presuppositions, contemporary scholars employ
the principle of contesting and examining everything, not
just the subject matter but also scholarship and the academy
itself.
The combination of area study with the study of disci-
plinary history is a primary manifestation of this trend to-
ward rigorous disciplinary self awareness. Steven M. Wasser-
strom (Judaic studies), Robert A. Orsi (religion in America),
Sam D. Gill (religion and cultural studies), and many others
practice this new trend in their scholarship and published
works. Wasserstrom’s Religion after Religion: Gershom
Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos (1999)
carefully explores the mystical and poetic influences on the
formation of the discipline in the works of three scholars (of
Judaism, history of religions, and Islamic studies respective-
ly). Part of understanding how to practice the study of reli-
gion is through understanding the genealogy of the study it-
self in North America. Gill’s Storytracking: Texts, Stories, and
Histories in Central Australia (1997) presents several aspects
of the contemporary trend to careful contextual research and
self-critique. Storytracking presents the worldview of Austra-
lian Aboriginal religion by applying the Aboriginal peoples’
own methods of narrative to the study of Australian Aborigi-
nal culture and thereby also provides critique of previous
scholarship that distorted the data. As such it provides both
an original study of Aboriginal culture and a critique of the
academic study of religion.
Bruce Lincoln (myth, ritual, and ideology), Charles
Long (religion in the contemporary world), and Jonathan Z.
Smith (Judaism’s myth and ritual) are prominent scholars
and teachers who reflect on the topic of religions and the
study of religions and contribute significant applications of
these reflections and theories to area studies. These three
thinkers’ contributions cover extensive and detailed philo-8786 STUDY OF RELIGION: THE ACADEMIC STUDY OF RELIGION IN NORTH AMERICA