Who Gets to Do Theology?

OVER THE PAST several weeks I’ve been writing about public theology: how theological (or quasi-theological) ideas appear in public, and do things in the polis. Meanwhile, to the dismay of many in the American public, people like Pete Hegseth have essentially been doing public theology as they try to make holy meaning out of acts of war. I know (because I’ve heard people say so) that it’s a sign for a lot of Americans that theology has no place in the public sphere. It makes them wish that theology would just disappear and leave us in peace.

Unfortunately, theology doesn’t disappear. It just goes underground (where it waits to explode, like a land mine). It is, nevertheless, the case in American culture that only a select group of people feel authorized to talk about, and comment on, matters that verge into the theological. Hegseth claims this authority, as a certain sort of Christian. And words like peace or human rights have come to feel like hollow or exhausted responses, to many. What if a certain (dare I say) theological investment might revivify them? I’m talking about the sort of investment that both religious and non-religious people might benefit from: the sense (for instance) that more than human powers actually want, for us, a world without vindictive violent destruction. I think that’s something we could say pretty confidently (but also speculatively) about either God or nature.

But part of the reason why Americans don’t tend to say things like that in public is because such theological claims have been privatized. That is (for better and for worse!) what secularization has done. This doesn’t mean that they’ve been domesticated and kept within the home. It means that such claims exist within a private corporate network that functions as a shadow to the civic world. And if you don’t belong to one of these private corporate networks, theology is not meant for you. Meanwhile, the theology produced in this corporate context continues to act on whatever is left of your civic world.

You might wish that theology would just disappear. And you might think that my framing question here (who gets to do theology?) is the wrong question to ask. I get it. But I’m asking the question anyhow, because I think it’s worth talking about how it got to be the case that here in America non-religious people aren’t typically authorized to talk about, or trusted to comment on, theology. And what that means.

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MANY PEOPLE ASSUME that the reason why non-religious people don’t study or talk about theology is because secularization banished it from the public sphere, to protect the public from undue or coercive religious influence. People tend to assume that secularization in the US was a move to protect people from theology, in other words. But, really, it might be more accurate to say that it was a move to protect theology from people. Or from the secular world at large.

In the early years of the American experiment, colleges here didn’t look much like they did in Europe. This was, in large part, because some of the first universities in Europe were founded in the early Middle Ages not to study religion, but to study the practice of law. Trade was booming, and rulers wanted bureaucrats who could write trade laws and develop contracts. Eventually, theologians ended up making their way into those universities. But that was sometimes controversial. Their relative freedom from the church, in that academic setting, was always a bit of a liability. Too much freedom meant that you were flirting with heresy. If you wanted to think theologically, it was safer to just join a monastery where religious affairs were always orderly. But it was useful to have theologians in those universities, because creating trade laws means that you need to be good at thinking about power. And theologians are good at thinking about the nature and shape of power.

In early America, the situation was quite different. Education here was deeply Protestant from the very beginning, in part because Protestants didn’t have monasteries. Their clergy were secular people. But it was also the case that educational institutions (especially on the “frontier”, in places like Indiana where the little college where I teach was founded) played a crucial role in the development of civic life. These schools were often tiny, but they were training the professionals who would become the region’s ministers, teachers, and other local bureaucrats or civic functionaries. At this time the Master of Divinity degree was the most predominant professional degree in the country.

Eventually, however, as these small colleges evolved (if they didn’t close) they began to offer more courses, in more subjects. Their curricula began to tilt in a secular direction. The strong influence, here, was the research university model that began in Germany and was, especially after the founding of institutions like my alma mater the University of Michigan, on the rise after the mid-19th century. The smallest of these colleges retained the more intimate (and often more open to religion) liberal arts model. But the majority of these institutions slowly began to offer an education that was more and more secular.

One of the key reasons for this is because the denominations that founded these institutions moved their departments of theology (and all associated programming) to seminaries. They separated the seminaries from the colleges. At my college, Hanover, the Indiana Presbyterians moved the seminary to New Albany. That seminary later folded, and was incorporated into McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. The aim of such moves was not to erase theology, but to control it.

Rather than let theology run wild and become unpredictably managed in a secular institution where people might allow experimental new forms of it to foment and develop, this allowed religious denominations to manage their theology. They kept it standardized, and ensured that all pastors in the tradition would receive that standard version. If you were a Methodist then you learned about Methodist theology. If you were a Catholic, you learned about Catholic theology. You weren’t encouraged to think about how other sects might interpret theological ideas (unless you were being encouraged to think about their views as inaccurate or insufficient in some way).

Many schools removed departments of theology from their institutions completely, or turned theology departments into departments that more objectively studied religion, rather than getting involved with the ideological quagmire that is theology. Today departments of theology in undergraduate institutions (like the one I teach in) are rare. There are some catholic schools that teach catholic theology, or evangelical schools that teach evangelical theology. But few schools have a theology department where the nature of that theology hasn’t already been predetermined. Where even non-religious ideas or practices can be contemplated as theological.

Theology has snuck into other disciplines in subtle and somewhat subterranean ways. Famously, and controversially, there are a number of scholars of religion who have been accused of being undercover theologians of a sort. Such a charge has been leveled against “historians” of religion like Mircea Eliade and Rudolph Otto, for instance. They’ve pretended to be doing an objective study of religion when, really, they’re just doing theology (is the charge.) And it’s also the case that literature and art are both cultural sites where theology often bubbles just below the surface but is never quite spoken about in explicitly theological terms. The subtle theological, or religious, or maybe just spiritual dimensions remain a bit unspoken so that the conversations can continue. Theology, properly speaking, is often taboo in settings that don’t actually seek a kind of revenge against the secular or civic world.

There is something very Protestant, I will acknowledge, about the idea that you can talk about theology beyond the institutional confines of a specific religion. Protestantism has, as one of its animating impulses, this anti-authoritarian—perhaps even, if we’re being generous, a bit democratic—impulse to make religious materials as broadly and widely accessible as possible. And yet there is also a counter-impulse within Protestantism towards sectarianism, which can have the tendency to work against the democratization of things, and lend itself instead to the creation of little elite spheres of influence that are thought to be predestined for greatness.

To the extent that I have been influenced by the Protestant tradition (I earned my PhD in theology from a Methodist college, my mother’s side of the family has historic ties to Latvian Lutheranism, and perhaps more influential than anything else, I grew up in the USA), I will own that I might be drawing a little something from that more democratizing well of the tradition. But I do so not to maintain Protestantism but for the dream of a complex multireligious democratic politics, which is not a dream that belongs to Protestantism alone.

NOT LONG AGO, in one of my theology classes, a non-religious student offered a kind of perfect mirror, to show me what they’d been learning. “Theology just exists in the public sphere”, my student said to the room. “It’s there. It’s doing things. It impacts us.” This is true, whether you’re religious or you’re not. She was recognizing that this as a problem, but also a fact.

I teach my students to see this. And I also teach them to believe that they can speak into that world, critique it, and reshape it, no matter who they are. For me, doing theology means seeing how and where theology has shaped the world you inhabit (your view of nature, or your politics). It means being able to think critically about this. But it also means recognizing that these ideas might be empowering or disempowering you, whatever you believe. And you have a right to speak about that, and make judgements. We teach people to study biology without making them into biologists, because we believe that this is knowledge they need about the world. I think about theology in that way.

For some commentators, like Ross Douthat, the theology that’s stuck there at some of the deepest layers of American public life and policy is perhaps the only thing that’s holding us together. For people like Douthat, the loss of the (white) Protestant majority means nothing less than the loss of American identity. And he’s open to a kind of cultural switch, in which catholicism might now rise to take on the mantle of cultural authority in America. But he fears a world where the public sphere isn’t essentially animated by Christian theology. I don’t want to live in Douthat’s world. I have a different set of concerns, as you might. I often wonder, for instance, whether a democracy is ever really possible when a near majority of the people within it actually worship a king.

I know that many people have lost their faith in democracy as such. The Kamala Harris campaign tried to run their campaign on what felt, to me, like a political theology of democracy. The campaign assumed that we cared enough about democracy to vote for it. That we valued democracy in an almost religious way. And they lost that wager. But I’m not ready to give up and live in Douthat’s world, where the only alternative is to invest in the authority of the Christian tradition. I am going to keep assuming that something like a pluralistic democracy is possible, even if it’s currently broken. But I also happen to believe that, if such a thing is going to be possible, it might need something like a theology to animate it. Even if the community to which that theology is accountable isn’t religious in any sort of uniform way.