Why Study Religion? is a video series in which the CSR asks its faculty, students, staff, and guests what is important to them about the academic study of religion and why more folks should consider pursuing it. Find out more about the Center and its initiatives HERE. To learn more about OSU’s Religious Studies Major, visit our website at THIS LINK.
Why does Dr. Damon T. Berry, a Comparative Studies alumnus, think it’s important to study religion? Shurouq Ibrahim, CSR’s Graduate Research Associate interviewed Dr. Berry to find out. Watch the video below for his response!
Shurouq: Why is the study of religion important?
Transcript:
Dr. Damon T. Berry:
One, if you take the classical notion of what it meant to study the humanities or liberal arts, which was — and still is in ways that people don’t acknowledge — the foundation of higher education. The whole point of it wasn’t just so that you could be good at producing widgets. The point of it was to make a more well-rounded person who could engage very purposefully as a citizen, as someone who belongs to a community, has a certain situation in that community, has relative relationships of power in that context, and to act accordingly — to know yourself and your world well enough to engage intelligently with it. So I would argue that anybody benefits by studying religion — just by nature of the ways it’s going to make you engage with questions that you don’t otherwise get to engage with.
On the more immediate level, there’s no way that you’re going to talk about freedom in the American context, or the modern liberal democratic context, without having to wrestle with religion. In my Intro class, and in other contexts, when I talk about the history of religion in America, for example, we can’t not talk about the First Amendment, Article VI — which are the only two places where religion is mentioned in the Constitution — and the fact that religion is never defined in American law. And then you have subsequent legislation that affects people’s reproductive rights, it affects all sorts of things. So, whether you’re in business, whether you’re going to work in a law office, or you’re just going to be a person living in a modern liberal democracy, you have to know about these things. And if you don’t, there’s going to be a lot you don’t understand about why things are going the way they’re going. And in the context of religious freedom, this is on the UN Charter of Human Rights, so I don’t know if there’s a place on the planet where you can live where you don’t have to think about that.
Dr. Damon T. Berry received his Ph.D in Comparative Studies from OSU. He is currently an Associate Professor of Religion and Chair of Religious Studies at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. His research focuses on the imbrication of religious and racialized discourses that shape and inform ideologies and practices of exclusion and violence. He has published in several venues on topics such as religion and violence and the history of racist movements. He has written three monographs: Blood and Faith: Christianity in American White Nationalism , Christianity & The Alt-Right: Exploring the Relationship, and most recently, The New Apostolic Reformation, Trump, and Evangelical Politics.