Decolonized Approaches to Teaching Religious Studies
by WANDA DEIFELT, Professor of Religion, ROBERT SHEDINGER, Professor of Religion, TODD GREEN, Associate Professor of Religion, DOMINIQUE STRINGER ('22) and NORA NYI MYINT ('22)
Editor's note: This November 2 panel was part of the 2021-22 Paideia Texts and Issues Lecture series Decolonizing Paideia? Revising the Products and Processes of Education. Todd Green
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et me begin by expressing gratitude for the opportunity to offer some thoughts on the larger theme of decolonizing Paideia, particularly as this theme relates to the teaching of religion at Luther College and to how religion courses can contribute to larger efforts to decolonize our curriculum. My interest in this topic come from my training as a historian of religion and as a scholar of religious bigotry. Much of my research focuses on Islamophobia, but I have broader interest as a scholar in studying how minority religious traditions in the United States and Europe historically have been forced to negotiate their place in the cultural, political, and religious landscape. Such negotiation takes place within particular matrices of power, and this includes colonial power and colonial history. In my own teaching, I work to expose students to the colonial attitudes and structures that shape how many
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Americans understand religion, particularly the American tendency to think of America’s embrace of religion and religious liberty as exceptional and enlightened. To illustrate how I address this topic in my teaching, let me focus briefly on two courses that I teach regularly: Religion in America, and Islamophobia. Religion in America The story of religion in America, in the political and popular imagination, is often told in a way that reflects certain myths about the United States in regards to its exceptional place in the world. It’s a story that gets reified in the US public school system and in political speeches and messaging from across the ideological spectrum. The story goes like this. The Pilgrims and Puritans fled religious persecution in Britain in order to establish a safe haven for freedom of religion here in the New World. They sought to create what John Winthrop called a city on a hill, a metaphor that would resonate throughout American history and become a prominent fixture in presidential politics from figures as wide-ranging as John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. This story implies that religious intolerance was what the English were escaping when coming to the New World, not something they would impose once they set about creating the city on a hill. What is often missing from that story is how diverse religious communities that were not white Protestants were subject to bias and discrimination. We often don’t encounter in prominent ways the story of white Protestants invoking God or Christianity to justify genocidal campaigns against the indigenous populations, or to justify racial terrorism and brutality in the form of slavery. Both of these projects were colonial projects. Both reflected deeply engrained notions
of racial and religious superiority for the purpose of creating communities and ultimately a nation that imposed colonial structures that restricted the religious liberty of minoritized racial and religious communities. But telling this story is not popular. It does not get much space in the US public schools, and it certainly is not what politicians want to tout when giving speeches on America as a beacon of liberty and freedom. When I teach my Religion in America course, I work hard to give ample attention to these alternative narratives, to point out that the United States was a product of a larger colonial project steeped in racism and religious bigotry. This racism and religious bigotry morphed and adapted throughout American history, but it did not disappear. We cannot understand why white Protestants, and later white Christians more broadly, dominated political structures and positions of power without challenging the myths and stories that have presented the United States as a model of religious freedom. Students in my Religion in America course study this history from the perspective of those subjected to intolerance and bigotry, and in doing so, we all move a step closer to decolonizing a history that all too often is used to perpetuate—as opposed to dismantle—attitudes and practices that subject anyone who is not a white Christian to second-class citizen status or worse. Islamophobia My main area of research is Islamophobia. Islamophobia is the fear and hostility toward Muslims and Islam that is rooted in racism and that results in individual and systemic acts of exclusion, discrimination, and violence that targets Muslims and those perceived as Muslims. In addition to researching and
