Twenty years ago, in his monthly column in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Stanley Fish predicted that religion would supplant high theory and gender/race/class as the “center of intellectual energy in academe.”1 That didn’t happen. Perhaps it should have. Religion should at least have become a fourth term in that trifecta. Political extremism–including totalitarianism–operates using a veneer of religiosity. Therefore, effective citizenship requires skilled analysis of religious discourses, traditions, histories, and practices.
Fish’s 2005 article “One University, Under God?” speaks of a “growing recognition in many sectors that religion as a force motivating action could no longer be sequestered in the private sphere” and asserts that the 2004 election demonstrated an “interpenetration of religion and electoral politics.” What Fish calls “the interpenetration of religion and politics” appears in 2024 to be precipitating previously unimaginable changes in American democracy. “In every sector of American life,” Fish’s article asserts, “religion is transgressing the boundary between private and public and demanding to be heard in precincts that only a short while ago would have shown it the door.” He also suggests that religion is “a growth industry in academe.”
Not at my institution. Some years ago, a colleague nearly resigned from a committee because I suggested adding “religion and other identity markers” to a learning outcome that called for students to demonstrate an ability to “analyze the operations of gender, race, and class in a range of cultural artifacts and practices.” My colleague’s discomfort with the inclusion of religion exemplifies an ongoing tendency in some quarters of the academy to relegate religion to church, mosque, synagogue, and temple, since its truth claims resist the dominant values of the liberal academic establishment: “reason as opposed to faith, evidence as opposed to revelation, inquiry as opposed to obedience, truth as opposed to belief,” as Fish puts it.
Despite the challenges posed by religion to the liberal academy’s epistemological preferences, institutions of higher education are well-positioned to initiate, sustain, or expand conversations about the role of religion in public life. American civic life in 2025 has produced urgent questions that require skillful analysis of religious behavior and texts, as well as knowledge of history as religion has shaped it: What is the difference between Christian nationalism and other forms of Christianity? How do fundamentalist and modernist traditions of biblical interpretation differ? To what extent can the Bible (Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, or Ethiopian) help citizens engage contemporary moral questions? Where did the various Bibles come from–and who composed them, for what rhetorical purposes? Where did Judaism, Christianity, and Islam come from? How do these three religious traditions resemble each other and how do they differ? Are anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism the same thing? Is it anti-Semitic to criticize Israel?
Professors and public intellectuals contribute valuable service on campus and beyond by helping students, staff, and other community members engage such questions and expand their understanding of politics and religion. Where positioned to influence curricular and co-curricular planning, academic leaders can meet this American moment by supporting opportunities to strengthen religious literacy, which the Harvard Divinity School defines as an ability to “analyze the fundamental intersections of religion and social/political/cultural life.”2
Higher education has long provided valuable cultural leadership when it comes to understanding how gender, race, and class shape public life. Now is the perfect time–whether our institutions do or do not embrace religious affiliations–to activate or strengthen initiatives aimed at equipping citizens to navigate a public sphere impacted by the increasing power of Christian nationalists and heightened tensions on campuses due to the Israel/Hammas war. When higher education professionals decline to initiate and lead conversations about religion, they leave the field to politicians and religious leaders (or pseudo-religious leaders) who may be weaponizing religion for anti-democratic purposes. Let’s create opportunities on campus and beyond to talk about politics and religion. Their intersection is an appropriate subject of concern for academic leaders.
Notes
1. Fish, Stanley. “One University, Under God?” Chronicle of Higher Education Volume 51 Issue 18 (1/7/2005): C1-C4.
2. “What Is Religious Literacy?” Religion and Public Life. https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/what-we-do/our-approach/what-religious-literacy
