Religious Studies

Understood broadly, religious beliefs and actions have always been a shaping force in every human society. Leaders influence religious beliefs and actions, even as religious beliefs and actions influence leaders and their followers. Leadership of various forms takes place within religious organizations. Conversely, aspects of religion affect leadership processes, not only within religious bodies, but also within corporations, civic organizations, and the political sphere. Yet, much like leadership studies, systemic, sustained religious studies found a place in academic circles long after the subject had pervaded human society.

In the West, Christian beliefs and practices have largely defined not only private and public life, but also intellectual categories. Throughout the medieval period in Europe and into the modern period, Christian theology was the “queen of the sciences,” the overarching frame of reference for all of the academic disciplines. Non-Christian traditions have been evaluated and understood in terms of Christian categories. The development of the modern discipline of religious studies offered an approach free from explicit theological assumptions.

Studies such as the English orientalist and jurist Sir William Jones's works on the languages and laws of south Asian societies at the end of the eighteenth century were precursors of more systemic comparative philological and historical studies. Into the nineteenth century, Friedrich Schleiermacher, a leading Christian theologian in Germany, articulated a Romantic vision of religious progress toward a perfect and universal expression of Christian faith and practice. Such Christian hegemony in the study of religion was eclipsed by the development of rigorous comparative examinations of religious traditions around the world in the latter half of the nineteenth century. This early period of the modern study of religion is exemplified by the English orientalist Max Müller's edited series The Sacred Books of the East, with fifty volumes published between 1875 and 1900. This type of systemic scholarly attention to a multitude of textual (and non-textual) religious traditions around the world coincided with the development of critical-textual and social scientific methodologies.

Like the study of leadership, the contemporary study of religion is an interdisciplinary field. The phenomena of religion—including ideas and beliefs, ritual practices, communal structures and organizations, and moral and political systems—are studied via anthropological, historical, sociological, philosophical, theological, literary-critical, and other methodologies. Given that their approaches vary widely within the study of religion, scholars do not agree on what motivates a person to be religious. The field includes psychosocial models (religion as rooted in human needs and insecurities—for example, Freud 1928), human projection models (the divine as a collection of human attributes writ large—Feuerbach 1841; Marx 1844), experiential or existential models [Page 1316](religion understood through human experiences—James, 1902; Otto, 1958), and sociological models (religion understood within complex social systems—Durkheim, 1912; Weber, 1922; Geertz, 1973).