Why Study Religion?

Undergraduate students often enter my classes on the Bible or ancient Mediterranean religions with a bit of trepidation. What kind of person dedicates their career to studying religious history, and what will they try to get me to believe or learn? Will they attempt to convert me? Or de-convert me? What will my peers think of me if I express interest in studying Buddhist literature more than economics, or ancient Judaism more than chemistry?

This anxiety is valid: many Americans are culturally raised to believe that religion is a deeply personal, internal matter that shouldn’t be discussed publicly, or that the American notion of the separation of church and state means that one’s religious identity shouldn’t matter in the public sphere. We might expect that people who spend their whole lives thinking about religion are either hardcore devotees or have a vendetta against a particular religious group (think, for example, of the movie God’s Not Dead and its characterization of evangelical Christians and atheists).

Students and members of the public often ask or make assumptions about the religious identities of their professors of religion in an attempt to understand their presumed underlying motivations. Sometimes, there’s a concern that a religion professor with a religious affiliation can’t be objective regarding what they teach. Such is the case, for example, for Dan McClellan, author of The Bible Says So and a prominent scholar of religion on social media, who is the target of skepticism regarding his ability to be an “objective” scholar given his affiliation with the Latter Day Saints.¹ Other times, there’s a concern that a religion professor without a religious affiliation just can’t truly research and teach something that they’re not a part of. Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman, well-known for his public stance as a non-religious scholar of the New Testament, is among the most critiqued for the supposed discrepancy between his research and his religious identity.² These critiques are often misguided and fail to understand what scholars of religion actually do.

As a scholar of religion and the Bible, I and many of my colleagues make a case for studying religious history that’s not simply or exclusively identity-based: understanding the history of religion and its academic analysis is meant for everyone, and not just those who identify as religious or who want to become religious leaders in their communities. This argument emerges, in part, from the academic distinction often made between theology and religious studies. While the lines between these two can get very blurry, the former typically involves systematic analysis that aims to contribute to the knowledge base and practices within a specific religious tradition, whereas the latter typically analyzes how a religious tradition historically or socioculturally develops and shapes the world that we all live in.³

Scholars of religion Megan Goodwin and Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst put it best with the phrase they’ve popularized about why understanding religion should matter to everyone: religion is not done with you.⁴ People don’t need to have a religious affiliation or need to disclose it in order to care about how religion affects the organization of our communities, how our time is structured, as well as the types of social services and protections they can receive.

A background in the history of religion is central if we want to comprehend the political and racial categories that shape the world we live in. Scholars of religion have demonstrated that what counts as “religion” in the United States, or as freedom of religion according to the First Amendment, has been contested based on race since the nation’s founding. For example, white European settlers and enslavers struggled with the possibility that enslaved Africans and their descendants could be Christian, and so at times barred the conversion of enslaved persons to maintain an association between Christianity and whiteness.⁵

Likewise, what counts as legally protected “religion” under U.S. law was and is under constant debate. Historically, some Indigenous communities had to make the legal case for their ceremonies and ancestral practices to count as “religion” and to be legally free to practice them.⁶ Even today, new legal questions are arising about whether and how people might seek religious exemptions from generative AI use at their workplaces based on religious convictions, and how judges and legal theorists could feasibly determine the sincerity of a person’s religiosity.⁷

Part of the issue, as students learn in my classes, is that what counts as “religion” has been so heavily shaped by Christianity; to make the case that a practice is “religious” in US legal contexts has often involved making it appear similar to or legible for Christians.⁸

In the U.S., even our weekends are shaped by religious history. Nineteenth and twentieth-century reforms, led by a mixture of Orthodox rabbis and labor unions, led to the inclusion of Saturday alongside Sunday as a day of rest and the formalization of the two-day weekend.⁹ Religious practitioners have also responded in 2026 to a proposal by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing American think tank, that seeks to make Sunday the uniform day of rest across the United States. For many religious groups—including Seventh-Day Adventists, Christians who maintain a Sabbath day of rest on Saturdays—such a legal proposal would interfere with their religious cultural freedom.¹⁰

Learning about religious history also allows us to understand how beliefs and practices change over time in ways that might surprise us. In my Introduction to the Bible course, students often come in not knowing that not all Bibles have the same set of books contained within them, and that which books Christians hold as sacred is culturally contingent: Ethiopian Orthodox Bibles, Roman Catholic Bibles, and Protestant European Bibles all differ in their contents based on historical and theological debate over the legitimacy and spiritual value of particular texts.

My students have also often been shocked to learn that evangelical Christians in the US have not always been as vehemently anti-abortion as many are today, and that abortion had previously been characterized as a distinctly “Catholic issue.”¹¹ This is relevant today, especially since over 1 in 6 hospital beds across the U.S. are provided by Catholic healthcare providers who may operate under religious restrictions and constrain access to birth control, fertility treatments, or abortions.¹² These hospitals first began appearing across the U.S. in the 19^th century as a way to missionize through healthcare, as well as offer affordable care through the unpaid or low-paid labor of nuns. The same goes for the role of the Bible in U.S. debates over the legality and morality of slavery during the Antebellum period, through which students learn that many abolitionists denied the brutal reality of Roman slavery to make the case that the writers of New Testament didn’t approve of treating humans as chattel.¹³

Beyond all of this, it’s okay to want to study religious history just to be exposed to and wrestle with the sheer diversity of human experience and multiculturalism over millennia: why were Buddhists in Roman Egypt erecting dedicatory inscriptions and images of the Buddha?¹⁴ Why is one of the oldest known Jewish synagogues in the world a few miles away from the Crimean Peninsula?¹⁵ How did Omar bin Said, an enslaved Fula Muslim, make sense of his displacement from West Africa and enslavement in the Carolinas through his autobiography, which is among our earliest Arabic literature in North America?¹⁶

In my Ancient Magic course, I get to see students struggle to make sense of unfamiliar phrases, ponder why some ancient Mediterranean people buried curse tablets hoping that a ghost would help them uncover a thief, or reenact augury to try to understand why Roman priests bird-watched to receive divine omens. What makes religious studies so meaningful to engage with, in this course and others, is seeing students’ realization that what we think religion ought to look like or accomplish is culturally conditioned, and that people have produced a dizzying array of practices through centuries of trial and error to navigate a world filled with humans and non-humans alike.

So, no—you don’t have to be religious to study religious history. You can be invested in religious history because the choices that religious actors made in the past and still make today impact your life, your community, and the world that you live in. You can be invested in religious history because it’s interesting to understand how people very similar to you or very different from you have been meaning-making: how they relate to those who came before them, those they live among, and those who will come after.

1. Dan McClellan, The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) about Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues (St. Martin’s Essentials, 2025
2. Bart Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (Oxford University Press, 2003); idem, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005).
3. The relationship between “theology” and “religious studies” is a contentious topic in the field. See Russell T. McCutcheon, Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion, 2^nd ed. (Routledge, 2024); Atalia Omer, “Can a Critic Be a Caretaker Too?: Religion, Conflict, and Conflict Transformation,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 79, no. 2 (2011): 459–96.
4. Megan Goodwin and Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, Religion is Not Done With You, or, the Hidden power of Religion on Race, Maps, Bodies, and Law (Penguin, 2025).
5. Katharine Gerbner, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
6. Tisa Wenger, We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
7. Sarah E. Needleman, “She Won a Religious Exemption from Using AI at Work. The Pope’s Remarks Could Fuel Similar Appeals,” Business Insider, 5 Jun 2026, https://www.businessinsider.com/worker-got-religious-exemption-using-ai-at-work-2026-6.
8. Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (University of Chicago Press, 2005)
9. Avi Garelick, “The Fight for the Sabbath,” Jewish Currents, 21 Feb 2023, https://jewishcurrents.org/the-fight-for-the-sabbath.
10. Roger Severino et al., Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years,” The Heritage Foundation, special report 323 (8 Jan 2026), https://www.heritage.org/sites/default/files/2026-01/SR323.pdf; Michael Peabody, “Heritage Foundation Report Calls for Uniform Sunday Laws,” Adventist Today (15 Jan 2026), https://atoday.org/heritage-foundation-report-calls-for-uniform-sunday-laws/.
11. Daniel K. Williams, Abortion and America’s Churches: A Religious History of Roe v. Wade (University of Notre Dame Press, 2025).
12. Bailey Sanders et al., “Growing Market Power Among Catholic Hospitals Restrains Access to Reproductive Health Care,” Center for American Progress, 29 Sept 2025, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/growing-market-power-among-catholic-hospitals-restrains-access-to-reproductive-health-care/.
13. Hector Avalos, Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Ethics of Biblical Scholarship (Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2011), esp. 251–58; Chance E. Bonar, From Slave to Saint: Onesimus Throughout Christian History (Fortress Press, 2027), 116–50. Much of the New Testament itself was likely composed by enslaved persons, further complicating a treatment of Christian scripture as divorced from slaving practices. See Candida Moss, God’s Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible (Little, Brown, and Co., 2024).
14. Steven E. Sidebotham et al., “Indians in Roman Berenike,” Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts 140 (2025): 1–126.
15. Vladimir D. Kuznetsov, “Phanagorian Synagogue (Preliminary Report),” Russian Archaeology 3 (2024): 117-27.
16. Mbaye Lo and Carl W. Ernst, I Cannot Write my Life: Islam, Arabic, and Slavery in Omar ibn Said’s America (University of North Carolina Press, 2023).