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. Helen Murphey, a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Mershon Center, study religion? Shurouq Ibrahim, CSR’s Graduate Research Associate, interviewed Helen to find out. Watch the video below for her response!

Shurouq: How would you answer the question: Why study religion?

Transcript:

Dr. Helen Murphey:

I think it’s really important to understand how religion influences political behavior as a political scientist. So, I study religious social movements in North Africa and globally, as well as religious populism, and I think it’s really essential to see show religion informs not just worldview and ideology, but also identity and belonging. I think there’s often a tendency to view religion as being reducible to texts or practices or institutions, and while these are certainly important, my research also suggests that perceptions of religious belonging have a profound influence on how people contextualizw their sense of who they are vis-a-vis the world around them.  And this really matters a lot for understanding political mobilization. So, to appeal to certain groups, politicians may use religiously salient narratives or phrases or draw on certain symbols to express the kind of identification with a particular group, even if the significance of this language or of this style may be not necessarily understood as much by the wider public.

And at the same, understanding the complex ways that religious ideas and identities are embedded in our societies also helps to understand this connection between religion and politics beyond a religious-secular binary that I think is very common. For example, in even supposedly secular socities, such as one of the case studies I look at, Tunisia, prior to the 2011 revolution, religion did play a really big role in nation-building and creating a unified sense of national identity. And what what called secularism also involved quite heavy-handed control of the religious sphere. So I think it’s really important to see how categories like religious politics and secularism are historically constructed, how they intersect with structural power dynamics, and how they act as signifiers for different social and political visions in various ways. And I think, equally, this helps us to understand that religious identities and their political significance are not fixed and, in fact, are quite heavily contested. My research highlights the importance of socialization for religious movements where—through interactions with external factors, or through processes of internal contestation—these ideas and identities can and do shift in complex and very interesting ways.

Helen Murphey is a postdoctoral scholar at the Mershon Center. She received her Ph.D in International Relations at the University of St. Andrews in 2023. Her research focuses on the role of identity and ideology in politics, with a specialization in religious political parties in North Africa, populism, conspiracy theories and polarization.