Many religious-studies professors consider personal references to one’s own faith to be out of place in an academic context. Even professors of biblical studies and theology at the church-related liberal-arts college where I teach are cautious about revealing their religious convictions. We want students to learn to think critically. Nevertheless, I think we scholars of religion are so worried about looking like Sunday-school teachers or evangelists that we do not explain our own religious convictions when it would be appropriate to do so.
As I’ve gotten older (I am now 56), I’ve become more comfortable about revealing my views, which I used to conceal as much as possible. Although students don’t care for self-indulgence, proselytizing, or bias in the classroom, they welcome candid statements about what a professor thinks, including what he believes about some matter of faith, if the comments compare his position with other possibilities and invite discussion and contrasting views.
It can be appropriate for a professor to speak of faith in that way, just as it can be appropriate for a political scientist to explain her political opinions, an art historian to justify his assessments of works of art, or a scientist to espouse a particular energy or environmental policy. In most fields, teachers must learn to balance critical distance and passionate engagement with their subject matter.
To be sure, the study of religion is different from other academic fields. At public universities, professors must honor the separation of church and state. Students are to be taught about religion, not indoctrinated in a specific faith. And at public and private institutions alike, practition-ers of religious studies have been anxious to prove that they can be as tough-minded and academically rigorous as their colleagues in any other discipline. That often means trying to be as detached, scientific, impersonal, or value-neutral as possible.
Scholarly detachment is crucial, whether one is explicating Aquinas or studying Islam’s impact on the gender roles of Indonesian villagers. In stark contrast with much of their previous experience, students should be exposed in a college classroom to the idea that religious assertions have intellectual content, which can be discussed rationally. But analysis and assessment should not mean that references to one’s own views (which may, of course, be a lack of religious belief) are somehow illegitimate. Something important is lost when a teacher is not able — because of external or internal constraints — to articulate a personal response to the religious issues at stake.
An older colleague who teaches philosophical ethics told me: “I used to be vigilant about never revealing my own position on any issue. I was worried about suppressing a student’s viewpoint. Now I realize that students are tougher than we give them credit for. We professors overestimate our impact on our students. They encounter many teachers and will find their own way.”
Students need something to respond to. They deserve teachers who know where they stand and who can articulate and criticize their own views. I think I’m just getting to the point where I can do that comfortably, at least on certain occasions.
Sometimes I offer my own interpretation of a scriptural passage and explain how it influences my version of Christian faith. In a theology course, I observed that, for me, the resurrection is meaningful not as a statement about what happened to Jesus’ body, but as a symbol of the disciples’ renewed commitment to his message. I also explained why most Christians would criticize that view. In a class on religious autobiography, I commented that Kathleen Norris’s Dakota appeals to me because its “spiritual geography” makes me think about what spaces are sacred for me, and because it shows why a Benedictine monastery’s ritual and communal life can appeal to a Protestant.
As I try to get students to appreciate a literary text, I might explain how it says or shows something about what is holy — for the author but potentially also for me, and for students. Our responses to a vision of ultimate reality require not simply detached observation but appreciation and critical evaluation, which necessarily engage one’s own values.
How and when one refers to one’s values or beliefs depends a lot on institutional context and culture. I feel fortunate to teach at a college that allows and encourages the process of “faith seeking understanding,” in Anselm’s words, without imposing any litmus test of orthodoxy or common belief. A liberal-arts college, especially one associated with a religious tradition, can offer more genuine intellectual freedom than some public institutions do. A colleague in economics tells me that he no longer has to avoid discussions of religious values when they arise naturally in his field, the way he did when he taught at a major state university.
Of course, an atheist, Jew, evangelical Christian, or Muslim, for example, might feel stifled by the majority of liberal Protestants and Catholics at my institution. Professors of religious studies face different challenges at different colleges, and in teaching various subjects. At some religious institutions, religion professors are supposed to defend the denominational creed and must be very tactful when they express any doubts or dissents they have. And a friend who teaches the Bible in a conservative part of the country says: “I won’t open the door to the proselytizers and those who can only accept one religious position as valid. I need a high wall between academic study and pious testimony.”
At every institution, the power imbalance in the classroom tempts students to try to please teachers by agreeing with their positions. And although I am willing to take the risks involved in speaking about what I believe and why, for other professors — the untenured, those who are fervent skeptics or believers, and members of controversial religious groups — the risks are far greater.
Three generalizations about speaking of faith seem to apply. First, the most significant references to one’s own views usually come at unpredictable moments in the course of teaching, rather than as the kind of ritualized confessions of so-called social location that many academics now do as a set piece. Second, an instructor’s reference to her own views should never be an end in itself but be pedagogically valuable — to explain the subject matter, and to show students that self-critical awareness of one’s own views can influence one’s interpretations. And third, many students are enormously relieved to learn that the instructor, too, has doubts, uncertainties, or views that are at odds with other members of his religious tradition.
As I think back to moments when I’ve explained my own religious beliefs in class, I realize that I was also expressing another kind of “faith seeking understanding": my version of faith in the values underlying the academic enterprise. I was giving testimony about the significance of the subject matter and the humanities. I asserted the values of encountering ancient traditions and difficult texts, of self-criticism, and of giving reasons for what one believes.
Most of all, I tried to get my students to see why a book or an idea mattered, why it might speak to them as it spoke to me. I find myself, pretty far down the road of my career, more often explaining, thinking out loud about, and seeking further understanding of what I’ve been doing as a teacher all these years.
John D. Barbour is a professor of religion at St. Olaf College and author of The Value of Solitude: The Ethics and Spirituality of Aloneness in Autobiography (University of Virginia Press, 2004).
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 54, Issue 20, Page B24