Wanda Deifelt, Robert Shedinger, Todd Green, Dominique Stringer ('22), and Nora Nyi Myint ('22

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

Let 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 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

Todd Green

writing extensively on this topic, I teach a course on it here at Luther. The academic study of Islamophobia goes hand in hand with a recognition that colonial histories have had a profound impact on the way many of us in the West think about and imagine Muslims, Islam, and certain regions of the world (particularly the Middle East and North Africa). A legendary scholar in the field who has shaped the way I and many other scholars of Islamophobia and Islam go about our work is the late Edward Said. In 1978, Said published a seminal book called Orientalism. In the book, he called attention to the ways in which European and American imperial interests in the Middle East influenced the way they understood Islam and Muslims. He argued that the Western desire to dominate the Middle East politically, economically, and militarily shaped the kinds of knowledge produced about the Middle East and its dominant religion, Islam. In other words, power over the Middle East resulted in a type of knowledge about the Middle East that justified the imperial project. Islam as a religion, and Muslims as a people, were cast as backwards, barbaric, uneducated, and violent, all of which in turn justified Western imperial dominance in the region to “tame” the Muslim natives. This type of mindset was prominent in the nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century, but in his preface to an updated edition after 9/11, Said noted that this mindset continues to infect the attitudes of scholars, politicians, and journalists in the United States and Europe, resulting in the disastrous war on terror. All of this is important because it raises substantive and essential questions about whether there is any approach to the study of Islam that is objective. As Said noted, all of us in Europe and the United States are embedded in political contexts with particular interests in Muslim-majority countries, interests that are by no means neutral. In ways that we are often not fully conscious of, our images and impressions of Islam and Muslims have been produced by a larger colonial project. Many of us have inherited colonial and racist stereotypes about Islam and Muslims that in turn get mistaken all too often for objective knowledge—for example, the stereotype that Muslims are prone to violence whereas “we” are not. For this reason, we must endeavor to decolonize our approach to the study of Islam, to allow Muslims to become our teachers, our windows into the world of Islam, to give space for Muslims to interpret their own texts and traditions. This is what I endeavor to do in my course on Islamophobia. The course is not an introduction to Islam. The course is an introduction to how Islam has been constructed and interpreted in such a way as to promote Western political, economic, and military interests. The course is an opportunity to deconstruct this “knowledge” and to call attention to the colonial mindset that pervades Western discourse about Islam and Muslims. Once this work is done, I feel, a healthier, more nuanced approach to Islam is possible, and space is created for Muslims to become interpreters of their own texts, traditions, histories, and rituals. That is in part how I envision decolonizing the study of Islam and religion—the deconstructing of colonial narratives and interpretative frameworks that allow maligned religious communities and traditions the space and platform to assert their voices and their narratives. Thank you for the opportunity to offer these reflections. I look forward to fruitful conversation on this topic in the year ahead.

Wanda Deifelt

The title of my talk might well be called “How Not to Read Martin Luther: Three Anecdotes and a Punchline.”

First anecdote: My first reading of anything written by Martin Luther was his Small Catechism for confirmation class, back in Brazil. The pastor had us memorize the lessons, but there was no reflection and conversation, only repetition and recitation. On the Sunday before confirmation, there was an oral exam in front of the entire congregation. The pastor would call out the name of one of the 14-year-old confirmands and request that we answer the questions. It could be the names of the books of the Old Testament, one of the Ten Commandments and its explanation or any of the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. It helped that the pastor gave us hints about what he might ask us individually, but it in no way diminished the terror of getting an answer wrong.

It was a traumatic experience. The church was packed, with people standing outside at the door or peeking through the windows. I suspect they came to see how many of us would embarrass ourselves instead of being there for support. It was a great shame if somebody got an answer wrong. For example, I heard somebody comment about a man who was unfaithful to his wife “that he had never gotten the commandment about adultery right,” and the fact that he didn’t know it at his confirmation exam was an indication that he wouldn’t practice it now. As we know, when Martin Luther wrote the small and large catechisms, he was helping people to more fully be members of the body of Christ. He was convinced that those who had been baptized were able to become theodidacti, people taught by God, and able to understand and therefore also proclaim the Christian faith. After each topic he posed the question: “What does this mean?” This was not a rhetorical question, but an invitation to wrestle with and ponder over matters of faith. This impetus for ongoing formation could be summarized not only through the maxim ecclesia semper reformanda (the church always reforming) but also

Wanda Deifelt

through the expectation of what I call the ecclesia semper educanda, that is, that the church is always educating, always reading its truth in light of a new reality. In this capacity, the church is helping to form and inform not only its own constituency but society at large. This theological formation is not a privilege of pastors and theologians, but a commitment that everybody—from pulpit to pew to classroom and beyond—find meaning in and can articulate their faith.

Second anecdote: I was already working as a pastor in the Lutheran Church in Brazil and teaching at the seminary when I received an invitation to talk to a group of Missouri Synod pastors on the topic of women’s ordination. As you know, the LCMS does not ordain women. I didn’t know what to expect, so I went prepared. I brushed up on the best exegetical resources on those biblical texts that oppose women’s leadership in the early church. In my best academic effort, I proposed a critical reading of the Bible—similar to what is taught in Introduction to Biblical Studies here at Luther College. But we were getting nowhere, because for the Missouri Synod the Bible is inerrant and needs to be taken literally. I realized that we were talking completely different theological languages, and we needed to find some commonalities in order to have any meaningful exchange. After coffee break, I started with a different approach. I asked them: what did Luther teach about the Bible? Together we recalled that Luther had translated the New Testament in record time from Greek into German, that he longed to find words that even a person in the market place could understand. Luther had emphasized Sola Fide (only faith), Sola Gratia (only grace), Sola Scriptura (only Scripture), and Solus Christus (only Christ). He also defended the centrality of the gospel, the evangel found in Jesus Christ, and used it as a criterion to read other biblical texts, asking whether they proclaim the good news of love, grace, and reconciliation. “What would Jesus do?” is basically Luther’s key to evaluate all other passages, and that biblical interpretation requires conscience and reason. All of the pastors had learned this well, and, when I brought it up, they also remembered that Luther had exercised freedom when he deemed the epistle of James as “straw” because it could not withstand the wind of the gospel. They agreed that Luther was correct in his criticism. My next argument was—as you can predict—to apply Luther’s own hermeneutical principle to the leadership of women in the church and the ordination of women.

Just because something is in the Bible does not mean that it needs to be preached. The truth of the Bible lies not in its historical accuracy or whether it is inerrant, but because it leads us to ponder. It makes us think and evaluate what other passages in the bible are straw. The criterion of discernment is always the love of Christ, not the exclusion from the body of Christ. Third anecdote: In 2009, the Roman Catholic and Lutheran bilateral dialogue committee was having its first meeting in Germany. One of our mandates was to draft a statement regarding the upcoming 500th anniversary of the Reformation in 2017. Some Lutherans at the meeting spoke with great enthusiasm about the anniversary, reporting that in Germany the festivities had already started a decade earlier and great renovations were being done in Wittenberg for the occasion. This jubilation from the Lutheran side was met with a different mood from some of the Roman Catholics, who talked about sorrow and lament, since the Reformation broke the unity of the church. Between celebration and lamentation, it took the committee a while to figure out that the appropriate language was neither festivity and fireworks nor mourning and tears, but a commemoration—from the Latin commemorare, a sharing of a collective memory, a bringing to remembrance whereby both Catholics and Lutherans could tell the story of what had happened and how we proposed to move forward.

How can Lutherans engage with the very people that Luther called the Antichrist? Times have changed, people change, and theologies change. That is why we value the writings by Martin Luther and the Lutheran tradition, while also critically engaging them with current challenges and perspectives. If colonialism is the occupation of people’s lands, bodies, and minds, to decolonize Martin Luther is to point out precisely where and when religious teachings perpetuate oppressive systems, and when they liberate us from them. This requires critical thinking and ethical discernment. That is why Luther’s writings against the peasants and the Jews, for instance, have been criticized and denounced. The punchline: Sometimes we need to read Luther against Luther, to show how some of his writings contradict the very principles he espoused. Martin Luther was not always a good Lutheran. We can celebrate but we also must point out the flaws of his reasoning—as well as those of Lutheran denominations— when they want to restrict God’s grace and hide God’s love. After all, we are always called to translate the breakthrough of the Reformation anew and to challenge ourselves into growth. The Reformation is an ongoing process.

Robert Shedinger

Last year I read about an interesting survey asking ordinary American citizens whether children should be taught Arabic numerals in school. Supposedly 40 percent of respondents said no. That is, a significant minority of American citizens believe that children should not be taught our basic number system 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9! Of course, this number system is called Arabic numerals because it is based on the number system developed by Muslim mathematicians in the medieval period, a number system which they borrowed from

India. But many people are not aware of this because our Western educational system has almost totally erased the great flowering of culture brought about by the medieval Muslim world (or its preservation of Hindu culture), preferring instead to create the illusion that Western culture is built directly on that of the Greco-Roman world, a tradition that was then mediated directly to Europe during the Enlightenment. Thus, there is a need for a decolonizing approach to education that provides a more historically accurate picture of the development of cultural traditions that is not dependent on a myth of Western exceptionalism. From the year 750 CE until the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols in 1258, the medieval Muslim world, under the auspices of the Abbasid Dynasty, created one of the great flowerings of culture in the history of the world. Centered on its capital of Baghdad and stretching from India to Spain, Muslim scholars made all manner of advances in subjects like astronomy, physics, biology, medicine, engineering, art, literature, and architecture. I want to highlight just a few of these advances that still resonate within Western society today.

One of the great figures of this period was the polymath al-Khwarizmi (c. 750-850). Al-Khwarizmi dabbled in many different subject areas but is best known for his contributions to the developing field of mathematics. He developed a mathematical system called al-jabr (the balancing) which involved the manipulation of equations to solve for unknown variables and proposed solutions to linear and quadratic equations. We know this system better today as “algebra.” Nothing even remotely like algebra was known in Europe at this time (where Roman numerals were still the order of the day!). And few people today even recognize “algebra” as an Arabic word. But the mathematical legacy of the West very much rests on the mathematical developments of the medieval Muslim world.

Interestingly, alKhwarizmi continues to resonate in the West in an even lessunderstood, but ironically more obvious way. Many figures of the Arabic world had their names Latinized when their works were discussed by later European scholars. Al-Khwarizmi’s name was Latinized as “algorithm,” making him perhaps the most frequently cited Muslim scholar in the English language! Yet how many people realize when they complain about Facebook’s algorithms or use this term in a math or computer science class that they are uttering the name of a medieval Muslim mathematician? Not many. But why not? Why shouldn’t we know this?

One of the betterknown figures from this period is Ibn Sina (better known in the West by the Latinized Avicenna). Ibn Sina was also a polymath well known for his work in medieval philosophy. But he was also an accomplished physician. Ibn Sina regularized a process that had been practiced in the ancient world of separating people suspected of having infectious diseases from the general population to prevent spread of disease epidemics. Ibn Sina dubbed this process al-‘arba’iniyah (the Arabic ordinal number “fortieth). The idea was to isolate people for up to forty days to prevent epidemics. In the seventeenth century, Italian doctors used medical manuals produced in the Muslim world, and therefore translated al-‘arba’iniya directly into Italian as quarantena, thus giving us our word “quarantine,” a word which we have unfortunately become only too familiar with over the last two years.

When I teach my courses in Islam and in Science and Religion, I always share with my students the following quote and ask them to guess who wrote it:

One should then look at the world of creation. It started out from the minerals and progressed, in an ingenious, gradual manner, to plants and animals. The last stage of minerals is connected to the first stage of plants, such as herbs and seedless plants. The last stage of plants, such as palms and vines, is connected with the first stage of animals, such as snails and shellfish which have only the power of touch. The word

“connection” with regard to these created things means that the last stage of each group is fully prepared to become the first stage of the next group.

The animal world then widens, its species become numerous, and, in a gradual process of creation, it finally leads to man, who is able to think and to reflect. The higher stage of man is reached from the world of the monkeys, in which both sagacity and perception are found, but which has not reached the stage of actual reflection and thinking. At this point, we come to the first stage of man after (the world of monkeys). This is as far as our (physical) observation extends. Of course, many hands go up in the air and students confidently state that this quote must be from the pen of Charles Darwin. No one is more firmly

connected to evolutionary ideas in our Western imagination than Darwin. But this passage comes from Ibn Khaldun’s (1332-1406) Muqaddimah, one of the great scholarly works of the Muslim world. Concepts of gradual evolution and a shared heritage of humans with other primates was quite common in medieval Muslim thinking half a millennium before Darwin. But these extraordinary accomplishments have been almost totally erased from Western educational traditions.

In the tenth century, a German dramatist and poet, Hrosvitha of Gandersheim, traveled to Córdoba in southern Spain. She was overwhelmed by what she saw. Coming from a medieval German city that was dark and often beset by disease and plagues, she instead experienced a city that was light, clean, full of beautiful flower gardens with flowing fountains, sanitation and irrigation systems, medical infrastructure, and beautiful architecture, and she dubbed Córdoba the “Ornament of the World.” And indeed, the entire medieval Muslim world was in many ways the center of scientific and cultural advancement. Decolonizing our educational systems means recovering these lost traditions and returning them to the prominence they deserve. In service to historical accuracy and greater appreciation for the intelligence and creativity that can be found among people from all parts of the world, we must work to break down the stereotype that says all great cultural achievements were produced by the West

Several years ago in my Islam class, a group of students was making a presentation to the class on medieval Muslim mathematics. One student who was listening to this presentation was a junior mathematics major. At the end of the presentation I could see that she was visibly upset. I asked her what was wrong to which she responded that she had been studying math her entire life and knew the names of all the great mathematicians, like Euclid, Leibnitz, Lorentz, and Fourier, but she had never once been told about al-Khwarizmi, the developer of algebra. How, she wondered, was it possible that she could be a junior math major in college and never have heard of al-Khwarizmi (until encountering him in a religion class!). This is an excellent question and underscores the urgent need to decolonize our entire educational system.

Dominique Stringer

I want to acknowledge at the beginning that I am not a religion student. I have only taken religion classes at Luther to fulfill campus-wide requirements and because certain classes have piqued my interest. However, as a student of anthropology, I am interested in the ways in which we can learn to understand and appreciate ways of thinking different from our own. I have been drawn to various religion classes at Luther particularly because they have challenged me to re-evaluate assumptions I have made about religion in the past. When I came to Luther, I had a strong theological background; while in high school, I had completed a great books program that included the works of people such as St. Augustine, Martin Luther, and John Calvin. However, I had no conception of how the theology I had been taught had given me a colonized mindset.

Before I came to Luther, when religious texts were presented to me as authoritative, I accepted that these were the voices that needed to be heard and studied. One of the most valuable lessons I have learned in a Luther religion class is that the voices that have been erased throughout history are often the voices we need to hear. Through courses such as “Queer and Trans Religions” and “Hidden Figures of Early Christianity,” I have seen people practicing diverse and decolonized forms of religion. I have also come to understand just how many people have been silenced both within Christianity and without as Christianity in particular has moved as a colonizing force across the United States and the world at large. In addition, an anthropology course on “Religion and Culture” allowed me to explore how indigenous and non-world religions have existed in the past and continue to be practiced today in spite of colonizing forces. Luther classes have also led me to consider how our education system in America has close historical ties to religious groups and to colonization. I encountered one example of this particular history while developing a Luther exhibit on the Bethany Indian Mission boarding school in Wittenberg, Wisconsin. This project, which was undertaken in a museum studies course here at Luther, helped me personally to realize the extent to which education, particularly religious education, has often been tied to colonizing efforts. Historically, it has been the practice of many educational organizations to forcefully convert students and to teach students how to effectively convert others to a colonizing religion. I will admit that this line of thinking has also led me to question some educational practices here at Luther. For example, I do wonder why Biblical Dominique Stringer ('22)

Studies 101 is one of only four specific classes that must be taken at Luther. Most Luther educational requirements can be fulfilled through many different courses, but every student at Luther must take Biblical Studies 101. While I respect the way that biblical studies is taught by the professors here at Luther, I do wonder at the message we send when we continue to emphasize that students have a working knowledge of Christianity above all other religions and philosophies. We are told that we must study biblical studies because it is foundational for western literature. However, this reinforces the supremacy of western literature over other cultural texts that other religions would use as cultural touchstones. In other words, by requiring biblical studies without introducing students to other religious traditions, we continue the historical tradition of religious colonization in the classroom while also reinforcing the idea that western literature is more valuable than non-western literature. This is one area where I hope to see Luther continue to grow as we learn to embrace diversity and decolonization.

What I have appreciated most in Luther religion classes have been the opportunities to question the significance and the teachings of religious texts. In my experience, class discussions of the strengths and shortcomings of religion may be difficult, but those discussions are also incredibly valuable. I hope to see Luther further develop spaces where students can grapple with both the importance of religion and the dangerous connections between many religious institutions and colonization. I also hope that we can develop more classes that focus on diversity in religion and that bring awareness to marginalized people and religions. While decolonization is no easy task, our first step to decolonize religious studies can be to listen for and respect the voices of the people who have been silenced by religion in the past.

Nora Nyi Myint

My name is Nora Nyi Myint, and I am a senior double majoring in international studies and women and gender studies. I am not majoring in religion at all, but I found myself having taken four religion classes thus far. Some of it had to do with the classes fulfilling some of my electives in my majors—such as "Introduction to Interfaith Studies" fulfilling the Peace and Dialogue track of international studies, or "God and Gender" for women and gender studies. However, I am drawn to religion much more deeply than I show, and it has to do with my background growing up in a country with religion being an important identifier.

I am from Myanmar, a country made up of a Buddhist majority of 87.9%. Religion plays such a crucial part in my country that we have a section on our National Registry Card to declare our religion. If one fails to be devout to a particular religion or claim as an atheist, more times than not they are automatically given a Buddhist identity without consent. Such incidents show the extent of the corruption, and the phrase “To be Burmese is to be Buddhist” gets thrown around. Nonetheless, growing up in the city of Yangon, home to more than five million people, I was exposed to a melting pot of cultures. I am from a family where the paternal side is Baptist, and the maternal side is all Catholic. At times, I was discriminated against because of my Christian faith. One reason was that Christians were a minority. Another more crucial reason is that Myanmar was colonized by the British from 1824 to 1948 when Christianity became widespread. Due to this, Christians are sometimes seen by Buddhist extremists as traitors or “colonizers’ dogs.” I am going extensively into my background because I want people to know about the impacts of colonization. I feel like I never truly belong; in Myanmar, I am out of place due to the Buddhist majority, and here at Luther in the U.S. I feel like an outsider yet again, for my practice of Christianity is now laced with rituals that were adapted by Myanmar’s own culture. Upon initially arriving at Luther, I knew that this is a Lutheran college, and, as Christian as I am, I get anxious for my non-Christian peers whenever prayers are said during big events where everyone gathers, such as orientation, graduation, and more. I find myself questioning, do they feel like they belong here? Like all first-year students, I had to take a Biblical Studies course. I was extremely fortunate to have Dr. Jimmy Hoke, who helped me view the classic Christian narratives I know with a new lens, whether through a womanist lens or queer lens and more. We learned about Thecla, a devout follower of the apostle Paul who baptized herself, midrash focusing on narratives of women like Hagar who had little to no space in the thick book of the Bible, a lesbian interpretation of Ruth and Naomi, and so on. It made me interested in my faith again as a feminist and a pansexual woman who had felt choked by the ideologies spread by conventional Christianity. This already was a process of decolonization for me since I believe decolonization calls for the deconstruction and reevaluation of settler-imposed systems that try to silence people of color’s narratives. Further instances of decolonization happened with classes I took afterward: "Introduction to Interfaith Studies," "God, and Gender," and "From Buddhist Texts to Anime." These courses made me think how wonderful it would have been to take such courses beginning in my first year. To be effective in decolonization efforts since students’ first year, I think Luther should consider turning Introduction to Interfaith Studies, currently a 200 level course, into the first religion general education course. The class touches upon

Nora Nyi Myint ('22)

Islamophobia, provides crash courses on world religions, and explains the concept of religious pluralism all while paying attention to Christianity and its context that we may need for tackling western literature, which I heard was one of the reasons for having Introduction to Biblical Studies as a general education course. I also fully advocate that the decolonization of religions can occur outside of classes. In the future, Luther can plan excursions to religious sites to promote understanding of religious diversity and create an interfaith club where conversations like what I am having at this panel about decolonizing religions can continue. Furthermore, I am the co-president of the Intersectional Feminist Club, and we can collaborate with College Ministries and others to raise awareness about our campus’s religious diversity. Whatever we do, we must remember that efforts to decolonize religions do not have to stay in the classroom.

In conclusion, I want to share a quote by Eboo Patel, president and founder of Interfaith Youth Core: “You can look for the differences, or you can find resonances.” Let us look for ways to uplift all of us from different backgrounds of faith.