Our Mission: Deeper Insight
Our primary mission at the City of Brotherly Love Institute (COBL) is to show how learning about religion provides deeper insights into history. What does that mean? If someone says they’re studying history in college, people get it. But what if someone is studying religion or majoring in religious studies? Not many would know what to think. Yet, an estimated 47,000 students in the U.S. are majoring in religious studies, and this has grown over the last decade by more than 22%. The confusion is simple. When most people hear the word “religion,” they think of “theology” or a particular faith group with its own set of beliefs and practices. But the academic study of religion in the form of religious studies is very different.
First Prayer at the Continental Congress in 1774. [Original copy 1848]. Wiki Commons Public Domain, 2022.
Our Value I: Religion or Theology?
To study religion means that we must apply unbiased thinking and techniques to an aspect of life people consider “religious.” Well, what is religious? That’s very hard to answer. There are some 4,000 to 10,000 religions in the world, each one with its own approach to faith and ritual behavior. But a value we uphold at COBL is that our approach to understanding religion is anchored in what is called “Religious Studies.” It’s purely interested in discovering information about what people consider sacred (ideas, behavior, things, the seen and unseen realm, time and space). Theology, on the other hand, often involves the goal of memorizing, strengthening, promoting, protecting, and advancing the faith traditions of a particular group.
This means that religious studies uses the understanding and procedures of other areas of study to understand religion.
These may include:
(1) literature or literary criticism to understand sacred texts.
(2) anthropology to explore how religion affects culture.
(3) sociology for what it can tell us about how religion impacts social behavior.
(4) psychology for analyzing religious motivations.
(5) philosophy for grasping the rules guiding religious logic,
knowledge and truth-claims, and
(6) history to distinguish historical events from myths and legends.
The American Academy of Religion (AAR) points to the similarity between religious studies and other topics of study that use the word “studies” to describe itself: “Just as the adjective ‘Russian’ in ‘Russian studies’ indicates that Russia is the object of study, not that people who study it are necessarily Russian, the adjective ‘religious’ in religious studies signals that the object of this study is religion. It does not imply that those who teach religious studies are themselves either religious or not. The aim of the academic study of religion is not to defend or promote a specific religion but to describe and understand religion in contextual and cross-culturally accurate terms.” This principle highlights our value for approaching religion as an academic study at COBL.
Our Value II: Religion and History
Religious diversity is essential to understanding the history about the founding of the U.S. Religious commitments, beliefs, and practices play a significant role in how people participate in civic life. Some groups, such as Anabaptists, saw their religious identities as standing in opposition to political participation. Others, such as Anglicans, saw the church as an extension of the state. Religious ideas framed how Americans thought about the ethics of slavery, participation in the American Revolution, and the role of virtue in democratic citizenship.
This next value underscores our belief that religion is not relegated only to a set time of worship each week, but how it’s manifested in various aspects of life. People bring their whole selves to public engagement, and careful attention must be paid to religious influences for how we understand and assign meaning to a variety of issues during the colonial period.
Prior to the founding of the nation, the insistence of religious observance was prevalent in all the 13 colonies, but each developed its own system of faith based on Christian teachings. Through their attempt to enforce religious commitments, officials were able to influence how people viewed their status under British rule, their conflict with Native peoples, the rights of enslaved Africans and indentured servants, neighboring colonies, religious intolerance, inequalities between women and men, and a widening gap among the social classes—all major tensions that contributed to the onset of the American Revolution. Religion and history can be strange bedfellows, and yet they are clearly joined at the hip. But integrating a study of religion and history deepens our understanding of both.