First Person

On the Market in Religious Studies

Article tools

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines P&T Confidential Facebooking Your Way Out of Tenure How can you minimize the possibility that your blog or Facebook page might hurt your career? On Course Nudging Higher Education A professor looks for small changes he can make to move students toward making smarter choices. Career News No Jacket Required A scholar's study of her own students suggests that while a professor's clothing might affect initial impressions, it doesn't make a difference in the long run. Career News Listserv 2.0 Electronic mailing lists, once hailed as the savior of scholarly communication, must now either change or fade away. Resource Salaries: Faculty | Administrative Presidential pay: Private | Public Financial resources: Salary and cost-of-living calculators Career resources: Academic | Nonacademic Library: Previous articles by topic | by date | by column Career Talk, Ms. Mentor, and more... Landing your first job On the tenure track Mid-career and on Administrative careers Nonacademic careers for Ph.D.'s Talk about your career Blogs

By Grant Greene

Just imagine: You are a historian entering the job market. You specialize in ancient religion, Christianity, and Judaism to be precise. You are trained in classical philology, fluent in all manner of Near Eastern languages, and conversant in historiography from Gibbon to Foucault.

Then upon finishing your dissertation, you find that, while jobs are not lacking, many jobs in your field are open only to members of certain religious groups. Employers, for instance, restrict consideration to those candidates who have a "personal relationship with Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior," or demand a fourth letter of recommendation specifically detailing the candidate's devotion to the Baptist Church.

On the other hand, purely secular history departments are equally distrustful. The mere presence of "religious studies" on a C.V. instantly alienates search committees, branding the candidate as something other than a historian -- confessional, methodologically soft, a potential zealot out to convert students and professors alike.

Welcome to the world of religious studies.

Perusing the monthly job openings for scholars of religion, I regularly find postings that say:

"[Insert Name] Theological Seminary in [insert location] is a confessional seminary in the Wesleyan-Arminian tradition, and agreement with the Seminary's confessional and ethos statements is essential."

Setting aside the small problem that I had to look up the "Wesleyan-Arminian tradition" in an encyclopedia, I found the listing fundamentally offensive and contrary to my whole idea of academic freedom. I thought: They expect me to agree to a religious creed in order be eligible for a job? And what is this "ethos" requirement? This no doubt takes the standard moral-turpitude clause to another level, giving the college cause to dismiss me if I violate the discipline of the church, e.g., drink alcohol, smoke tobacco, gamble, dance, have sex outside of marriage.

Of course, this is entirely legal. It is also understandable. The Roman Catholic Church should be able to employ only Catholic priests for certain positions; it should not be required to extend equal consideration to Wiccan priestesses. This is common sense. And we can all imagine the chaos that would ensue were a Zwinglian or Anabaptist historian to teach the early church to a class of Wesleyan-Arminians. (All right, bad example.)

I'm not complaining here (really!). Nor am I contending that such an allowance for legal discrimination is unjustified.

My point is that religious studies places unique burdens on young scholars on the job market. Not only do we face the normal divisions in the market, of research specialization, teaching experience, and the nebulous matter of "fit;" we also have to demonstrate our religious qualifications. Jobs are cordoned off by faith, evangelical Protestant, Catholic, ecumenical, secular. This significantly decreases the number of positions available to any given candidate.

An added difficulty is that secular and ecumenical colleges are almost always the most prestigious, placing many of those positions out of reach for young scholars. Furthermore, religious scholars are free to take positions at secular colleges (they cannot discriminate on the basis of religion), while secular scholars can be excluded from religious colleges. This makes it very easy for the young, secular scholar to fall between the cracks, not quite fitting into any department.

This was not at all apparent to me when I entered religious studies. As an undergraduate at a public college, religious studies never had a particularly "religious" feel to it. It was grouped administratively with classics and philosophy. There was such synergy between the fields that I never really distinguished between them. When it came time to decide which field I would pursue in graduate school I was torn between classics and religious studies.

Essentially I wanted to study social history and philology, which I could satisfy just as easily in a classics or a religious-studies department. The peculiarities of my preparation, however, meant that I could enroll immediately in a Ph.D. program in religious studies at an Ivy League university. In classics, I would have to first get a master's degree at a second-tier university. I did not think twice.

Six years later, I am entering the job market for the first time. Only now is it clear to me just how far from classics and history is the field of religious studies. In the most recent edition of Openings, an online publication of the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature, out of 28 faculty positions listed, 20 make explicit demands on the religiosity of the candidate. Hiring institutions seem to be much more concerned with the candidate's faith than academic qualifications.

Even in the historical subfields of religious studies, scholars are often expected to be models of Christian discipleship more than historians and exegetes. Thus, my job-searching has turned into soul-searching as well. Although I consider myself Christian, I get very uncomfortable whenever someone tries to pin me down on what I "believe." I realize, however, that when a committee asks me about my religious beliefs, I need to say something. A blank stare and an "I don't know" surely won't cut it.

What's more, what I say has to be true. It's one thing to exaggerate one's interest in Reformation history; it is quite another to exaggerate one's personal relationship with Christ. If teaching Reformation history were a job requirement, I could learn to enjoy it and teach it well. If belief in the historicity of Christ's resurrection were a job requirement, well -- it's just not a competency I could develop.

So I'm ambivalent about my job search. I wonder if I'm in the right field, and I think it shows. The other day my dissertation adviser asked me, out of the blue, "Why do you study this?" I gave an answer, but I didn't even find myself convinced.

On the other hand, upon further research I discovered that I, as a born and bred United Methodist, belong to the Wesleyan-Arminian tradition. Go figure. Perhaps this theological seminary is an option after all.

Of course, no one in their right mind would hire me to train the next generation of ministers.

But, hey, stranger things have happened.