dear religious studies scholars who defend the field by pointing to anti-muslim, anti-semitic violence: this makes our field parasitic on those events. let's do better.

just additional context here, the point is to think through the effect of using hate as a field's metric of value. it's not just relevant to religious studies, but as these departments get cut, the takes have been pretty loud.

justifying a field is also implicitly a way of identifying who we imagine the students of that field to be, what kind of analysis we are asking them to do. do we really want to frame this as a defensive position?

there are other ways to frame the study of religion! ones that do not align the field with state anti-insurgency projects or colonizer-essentialist world religions models

for example, how about saying that the study of religion is the study of how communities identify and institutionalize themselves as collectives, or how people imagine otherwise worlds and then try to materialize them concretely?

p.s. that's not radical, that's just straight durkheim.

or how about just being like "the study of religion is about the formation, elaboration, and contestation of ideology" or "the study of religion is the critique of ideology"?

p.s. that's marx, a philosopher and scholar of religion. it is not radical to draw on this tradition. in fact it is reactionary not to.

legit though, yesterday a scholar of religion was telling me that once they went to our annual conference and **was on a panel with an FBI agent.** this is the kind of alliance we are courting with this "religious literacy as multiculturalist security" discourse. just stoppppp