At an institution which aims to shed the cold light of Reason into every nook and cranny of human experience it seems a shocking anachronism that there should be a Department of Religion.
If any of us still really believed in religion as it once was considered, as a sort of Truth revealed to one portion of humanity to the perpetual exclusion of another portion, then there might be justifiable arguments raised to defend it. But religion has been so tamed by the dictates of reason that we reflexively speak of it, not in terms of the salvation of men's souls, but in politico-historical, anthropological or sociological terms, and it is indicative that it is these sorts of arguments which will probably be used to justify its continued departmental study in response to this column.
Now since religions are concerned with the spiritual and not the temporal order of the world, why need we give credence to arguments for their institutional study which are not themselves phrased in spiritual terms? For if religions have had a great impact on temporal affairs (which no sane person denies), is not the worldly aspect of their developments rather to be treated in history courses than those entitled "religion?" If Dartmouth is to be consistent in its commitment to rational inquiry and its stand against narrow-mindedness and dogma, it ought to do away with this remarkable relic, the Religion Department.
There are many problems with the maintenance of a religion department at an American college. One is that it may be hijacked by sundry Rosicrucians, Christadelphians, Brownists, and similar eccentric and unbecoming sects which will turn it into a private fiefdom for the advancement of their own interests.
But surely the greatest argument against the maintenance of a Department of Religion lies in the religious doctrines themselves, in their irrationalism and implicit contradiction. Surely responsible professors would need to spend so much time half-apologizing for the egregious poppycock their studied religions have propagated that they would have very little time left over for "advancing" studies. Now, one could accept a department whose purpose is explicitly nonobjective, which advances the claims of religion to be taken seriously, as against irreligion, but again here we run up against the claims to objective study which Dartmouth rightly claims to be so necessary to the educational mission. I am certain that a Department of Religion Is Not All Bats or a Department of Religion Can Be Fun might make a go of it, were it not for that little problem. But even then it would need to be appreciated mainly for the slightly musty, archaic, parchment whiff it exuded, as if Dartmouth were to maintain a Department of Alchemy, or a Department of Jousting, more for atavistic and traditional reasons than for any serious regard for the subject matter.
It would be inhuman to argue in this matter for a rigid application of rationality pressed to its logical conclusion. On the contrary, to argue that religion is unworthy of study because it is irrational would be shocking stupidity; if that were the case, nothing pertaining to humanity would be worthy of study. But maintaining a department in a given subject implies not only that the College considers the subject to be worthy of the time and attention of its students, and that it has some relevance to students' lives, but that this relevance should be perpetuated, even encouraged.
The follies and bigotries of religion continue to bring needless suffering to people on every continent on earth, and Dartmouth, in encouraging its study in an institutional setting, seems to be aligning itself with those thugs who make religiously-bred prejudice a method of enforcing acceptance of injustice.
The author has deliberately argued, not for a discontinuation of the study of religion, but for an abolishing of the institutional form of a department in its name. To have a separate Department of Religion is to unaccountably privilege certain discredited thought systems over others (pre-Copernican astronomy, say, or phlogiston), to arbitrarily deem some religions "great" and others minor, where of course the truth of doctrine should in the mind of a religionist be something totally independent of its historical importance, and to suggest a clear boundary between religion and philosophy which does not exist. Rather, the author proposes, establish a combined department of philosophy and religion, or else scatter the religion material among various social science courses.
It has been a great accomplishment of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to transform the lion of religion into a lamb, and we may hope and trust that the twenty-first sees this lamb led to the slaughter.
