THEOLOGY IN THE CURRICULUM OF A SECULAR RELIGIOUS STUDIES DEPARTMENT

The shorthand of identity sometimes re-inscribes the confessionalist politics of vulgar neo-orthodoxy, whereby religious studies becomes an identity rather than a discipline, objectivity a confession rather than a skill. For its own integrity, Religious Studies must seek the divide between thought and practice in the ambivalence of Protestantism toward alternative strategies of purification and explanation. Humility means that students of religion ought to avoid universal claims, not only because they are a power-play of colonialism, but also because they perpetuate a bad form of Christian theology, one that ignores or seeks to eradicate the particular, which it identified with Jews, in favor of a universal that emerged only as they abstracted and expropriated a particular god, the God of Israel.