Faith, politics,
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Dr. Christopher Gilbert gave the keynote address for the Sharon Walker Faculty Excellence Awards banquet in December. He has worked with Morningside in the past as an outside evaluator for the Walker Awards. Gilbert is a professor of political science at Gustavus Adophus College in St. Peter, Minn., where he has taught since 1991. He has published extensively on religion and politics in the United States, including four books, most recently “The Political Influence of Churches,” which he co-authored with Dr. Paul Djupe of Denison University in Granville, Ohio. He is the recipient of two all-campus outstanding teaching awards from Gustavus students and faculty, and he received the Gustavus Faculty Scholarly Achievement Award in 2007. Gilbert has a doctorate from Washington University in St. Louis. He lives in St. Peter, Minn., with his wife, two sons and two cats. Here is a shortened version of his keynote address.
We’re here tonight to celebrate excellence, particularly excellence in teaching, something I know exists in abundance at Morningside College. I teach about faith and politics, or religion and politics as we would say in my field. It remains to me an endlessly fascinating topic, sitting at the intersection of two particularly important sets of American institutions, and the intertwining of the two continues to spawn endless controversy in the political and religious arenas, and endless subjects of study for those of us in the scholarly professions. For many of us who choose to examine religion and politics, whether in the U.S. or around the globe, the reaction of peers has often been noteworthy, usually for the wrong reasons. It’s too simple to say that political science is divided into two camps – those who take seriously the idea that religion matters in the political realm and those who do not – but it often feels that way. The religion and politics scholar always has to look out for those who see the entire line of inquiry as taboo – the two topics one never, ever discusses in polite company, right? I know many of you do understand the levels of anxiety that come with feeling that one has to justify one’s place in academia. I’m sure you’ve seen stories recently in The Chronicle of Higher Education or elsewhere about specific departments and programs targeted as no longer necessary or justifiable in tight budget times, and the liberal arts seem to be front and center in those stories. Those cuts and attacks don’t strike equally across academic disciplines, and within political science it’s exceedingly rare to have to worry about justifying one’s choice of topics. One of the frustrating features of the study of religion and politics within political science, then, is our particular reaction to the scorn of our more secular colleagues. My field has turned inward, choosing to talk with one another, even to create our own journal to give ourselves publication outlets safe from the doubters. This both helps the field – it’s good to publish and it’s wrong that research is denied publication in the discipline at large because most other political scientists decline to take religion seriously – but it also hurts the field, giving us an insular mindset that helps to perpetuate the idea that there are two camps and we need to protect ourselves from the doubters.
