The Make Your Own Religion Project - Wiley Online Library

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Design & Analysis The “Make Your Own Religion” Project Chad M. Bauman, Butler University Brent A. R. Hege, Butler University Russell Kleckley, Augsburg College Lydia Willsky-Ciollo, Fairfield University Davina C. Lopez, Eckerd College Abstract. The “Make Your Own Religion” class project was designed to address a perceived need to introduce more theoretical thinking about religion into a typical religion survey course, and to do so in such a way that students would experience the wonder of theoretical discovery, and through or because of that discovery hopefully both better retain knowledge gained from the project and nurture within themselves the practice of thinking more analytically about religion (and other social and cultural things). Despite a number of challenges and unresolved questions associated with the project, it has proven relatively successful at introducing and provoking theoretical thinking about religion in a compressed period of time, without taking an inordinate number of class periods away from the survey itself. A brief description and analysis of the assignment is followed by four short responses.

The “Make Your Own Religion” Project Chad M. Bauman Context The Make Your Own Religion (MYOR) project emerged several years ago from collegial pedagogical brainstorming of the best kind, that is, the kind including libations.1 At our favorite local pub, I shared with my Butler University colleagues, Brent Hege and James McGrath, my frustration that students in our department’s traditional survey course, “Religions of the World” (ROTW), were leaving it without being exposed to much theory about religion and religious people. Brent, who also teaches sections of the course (and who provides a response below), mentioned that he had been mulling over designing some sort of project involving students developing fake religions. Then, through a process Brent tells me has a name – cryptomnesia (or kleptomnesia) – I forgot that I had stolen the idea from him. A year ago, blithely thinking I had come up with it on my own, I went about designing the assignment and adding to it the social media element described below. Only later, when Brent’s

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I would like to thank the following students for giving me permission to quote (anonymously) from their final papers, or make reference to their Facebook religions: Olivia Booth, Olivia Crum, Kristen Haeberlein, Liz Hauk, Dain Kim, Cristina McNeiley, Allyson Munneke, Lily Pickett, Kiley Shelley, Sam Thomas, Aya Tomozawa, and Annie Weber.

© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Teaching Theology & Religion, Volume 19, Issue 1, January 2016

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Design & Analysis eyebrows lifted in an unusual and quizzical sort of way as I described “my” project to him did I remember that the seed of the idea had been originally his. Nevertheless, while this story may suggest a certain deficiency of memory on my part, it does also demonstrate the value in collegial brainstorming, and its ability to bear fruit even many years after the fact. It also suggests that even without interacting with one another, faculty seeking to address certain pedagogical concerns may come up with very similar ideas. For example, as this article was going to press, Joseph Laycock (2015) published a blog in Religion Bulletin that outlined a project very similar, in its general formulation, to the one described here (but with significant and intriguing differences, and with its own genealogy of borrowing from and adapting the projects of others). Butler University has around four thousand, mostly undergraduate students, roughly half of whom enroll in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences while the other half enroll in one of five professional colleges. Butler students are generally polite and willing to do what is asked of them (like Midwesterners more generally), politically moderate, traditionally religious but increasingly secular, middle to upper-class (on average), and relatively well-prepared for college. Undergraduates admitted to Butler are relatively high performing, and average around 1,200 (1,780 including writing) on the SATs, and 28 on the ACTs. Those numbers have trended higher since two successive runs to the NCAA Final Four by the men’s basketball team several years ago increased the university’s profile, number of applicants, and selectivity. The Religion major is very small, and the majority of students encounter us only through core courses, like ROTW, where students from all six colleges mingle in roughly equal numbers. Our ROTW course, which usually enrolls twenty to twenty-five students, is designed for non-majors as a broad survey, and satisfies our university core curriculum’s “Texts and Ideas” component. In a typical fourteen-week semester, all of us who teach the course cover Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity, usually in about two and a half weeks per religion. My course, in addition, usually devotes half a week each to Sikhism, Jainism, Taoism, “oral” religions, and “alternative” faiths (like Scientology, Satanism, the Unification Church, and the People’s Temple and Jonestown – Jim Jones was a student at Butler), and leaves a few days unscheduled for dealing with additional topics suggested by students or current events. Traditionally we have spent very little time in the course dealing with theory, and it is likely the course would not be as popular as it is if we were to completely abandon the elements of a religion survey course, since that is what students expect of it when they enroll. And yet, learning from years of teaching the course, and from Barbara Walvoord’s (2008) research, that students often come to introductory courses in religion sorting out their own religious questions, I began to wonder whether we could help them think more analytically about religion itself – about how and why religions develop, about why people are or are not religious, about why people convert or remain within their birth tradition, and so forth. The MYOR project was designed to do precisely that, that is, to enable students to think theoretically about religion from their own perspective, in a compressed period of time, and without taking the time required to survey the broad spectrum of theory about religion, much of which might be more difficult to read than the material typically assigned in lower-level core courses at Butler. It was also designed to allow students to “discover” theory in such a way that it felt like their own, which (we theorized) would not only increase retention of theoretical ideas about religion, but also inculcate, in a rudimentary way, the practice of thinking theoretically about religion (and other aspects of culture).

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© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

The “Make Your Own Religion” Project Description of the Learning Design Students in the course are required to create a new religion on a social media platform and to compete with one another for converts and followers. Students are primed for the assignment by in-class discussions and assigned student reading on the nature of religion, characteristics that most religions share, and satirical religions like Pastafarianism.2 In the assignment’s first iteration, we actually brainstormed, in class, about how to design the simulation, and which social media platform could best support it. That collective brainstorming contributed significantly to student investment in and enthusiasm about the project in a way that could not be duplicated in subsequent iterations, when the details had already been worked out. In our initial brainstorming, we decided that students should build either a Facebook (FB) page (better for sharing publicly) or group (better for keeping private and controlling membership) for their religion, and I have continued to follow that format. Students are allowed to use a FB account separate from their regular one, and to develop a closed group to which only I and the classmate “born” into their religion (see below) are invited. A few of them do use an alternate profile, and even I use one to participate in the project (though more for organization than out of concerns about privacy). On the page/group, students fill in the details of their religion’s beliefs, scriptures, practices, ethics, and membership requirements, add pictures, interact with “followers,” and so forth. Each student is also required to include, on the page, a statement I supply indicating that this “religion” is part of a course simulation, the point of which is not to make fun of “real” religions, but rather to learn about them. After all of the religions are established (and links to them posted in a discussion forum on Moodle, so that all students can see their classmates’ religions), I send out “birth announcements” indicating into which of their classmates’ religions each student has been (randomly) “born.” Students are then encouraged to compete for followers (if their religions are evangelical), and I encourage participation and activity by announcing, at the outset, that I will be giving prizes to the students whose religions (1) gain the most followers (measured by page “likes” or group members – the largest religion so far had 260 followers at the end of the semester), (2) “convert” the largest number of their classmates, and (3) provoke the most activity or substantial conversation on their page/group. I also generally give a “professor’s choice” prize for the religion I consider the most creative, poetic, thoughtful, or humorous, or the religion that in the most interesting way spills out from the virtual to the “real” world. At the conclusion of the project, students are given a grade that assesses their religion largely in terms of its creativity, the breadth, depth, coherence, and thoughtfulness of the information they provide about it – I “like” or comment on every student post, so they know I’ve seen it – and the amount of activity (their own and others’) they generate on their page. This constitutes half of their grade for the project. The other half of their grade derives from a reflection paper (around 3,000 words) they write about the project. In the first half of the paper, students are asked to describe

2 Pastafarianism is a satirical religion brought into being by an open letter written by Bobby Henderson to the Kansas State Board of Education to protest the board’s decision to permit the teaching of intelligent design in public schools. In the letter, Henderson outlined his belief that the universe had been created by a “Flying Spaghetti Monster,” and demanded that his beliefs about creation be given time in classrooms along with intelligent design. The religion now has a substantial “following,” and you have probably seen Pastafarian bumper stickers, even if you didn’t recognize them as such (Henderson 2005).


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Design & Analysis how they went about creating their religion, what tactics they employed to provoke conversation and attract converts and followers (if they tried), why they made the decisions they did about content, and so forth. What students write in this section often reveals that they have been thinking very carefully and strategically about their religion in ways not always immediately apparent from the religion itself. In the second half of the paper students are required to reflect on the dynamics that come into play in the simulated environment, on how the FB religions are born, develop, and grow (or don’t), and on whether these dynamics have parallels or analogies in real world religion. They are also asked to write about whether they have learned anything from the simulation about why people are religious (or not), or why people convert (or don’t). We devote the class period before the paper is due to a broad conversation about these questions. As part of that conversation, I encourage students to advance theories about what kinds FB religions would be most likely to grow the largest, and then we do some rudimentary statistical work to see whether their theories have been born out in the simulated environment. Analysis of the Learning Design I have now assigned the MYOR project in four semesters, and the assignment has been quite successful at performing the primary task for which it was designed: getting students to think theoretically about religion and religious people. This theoretical thinking begins almost as soon as they begin developing their FB religions and have to decide what to include. One of the most common realizations that students make (so simple and yet incredibly important and apparently not immediately obvious to many) is that real religions are (1) not easy to create, (2) really complicated, and (3) the product, in most cases, of decades, centuries, or millennia of work by large numbers of people. As one student put it, “Nothing about religions has a clear beginning or end; they are like spider webs with each concept interweaving with the next. When I thought I had answered [one question], it only generated another question and idea.” The theoretical discovery progresses, and deepens, as the project continues. I attempt to provoke this discovery, in a concentrated way, with the conversation we have in class the period before the paper is due. When prompted, for example, students hypothesize that the largest religions will be those that connect to a pre-existing fad (like “Baconanity”3) or draw followers from a pre-existing “tribe” (like “Green Bay Packism,” the largest religion so far). Students also advance theories about what kind of characteristics the “founders” of the largest religions will have. Some theorize, for example, that founders of large religions will have lots of FB friends, or that they will have utilized existing social networks (like sororities, or sports teams) to gain followers. Other students hypothesize that founders of large FB religions will be unafraid of social embarrassment and unafraid to ask their friends and family members to support them, or that they will be extroverted, “a leader,” and more “dynamic” or “appealing” than average. Students immediately, and usually without prompting, begin to think analogically. For example, one student who did not have a FB profile prior to starting the assignment, and who struggled to develop a following for his FB religion, remarked that trying to gain adherents for a fake religion on FB without having previously developed

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As this essay went to press, many but not all of the FB religion pages and groups I mention were still functioning and public.

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The “Make Your Own Religion” Project a social network on FB would be like moving to a new town and trying to start a religion. The perceptive reader can already imagine how easy it is to use these conversations to introduce students to religious theories about things like social capital (connections to pre-existing “tribes” or social networks) and charisma (personal dynamism or appeal), or the sometimes blurry line between religious innovation/genius and psychopathy (the willingness to be embarrassed or bear shame as a result of articulating or trying to spread a vision considered crazy or fantastical) that gives rise to phrases like the apostle Paul’s “fools for Christ,” or poetry like that of Manikkavacakar, a ninth-century Hindu bhakti poet: “While the world called me Demon! / and laughed at me, / I left shame behind, / took as an ornament / the mockery of the local folk. / Unswerving, I lost my cleverness / in the bewilderment of ecstasy” (Nammalvar 1993, 118–19; also see the poem “God’s Idiots”). Yet because students discover and articulate these theories on their own, and without the specialized language that scholars use, they seem to me to understand, embrace, and retain them better than they would otherwise. To give just one example of this kind of self-discovery, and à propos the topic of religious genius and psychopathy, the student creator of “Baconanity” wrote in her project paper, “My Aunt tried to challenge my religion’s credibility and others told me it was weird and they didn’t understand what the point was. All of this negativity definitely made me feel insecure about my fake religion, and I can only imagine that this same type of disapproval took its toll on creators, prophets, and messengers of religions long ago . . . I was able to see that this is how real religions developed – surrounded by skeptics.” In their papers, students muse about the difference between adherence and piety, and how important it is, in both real and “virtual” religions, to have a core group of committed and active followers or apostles (something that is particularly difficult to generate virtually, where most followers “like” and leave). Others note that short FB posts draw more attention than long ones, and wonder whether thriving religions might be typified by an ability to be summarized simply and easily in lists like the four noble truths or the ten commandments (precursors, perhaps, to today’s often viral, numbered internet lists?). Still others register the randomness of being born into a particular religion, which is particularly apparent in the simulated environment, and how most people, like most students in the class, do not convert from (or very far from) the religion into which they are been born. Another student, from Korea, noticed that her religion struggled to grow because her religion was articulated in English while most of her FB friends primarily spoke Korean, and began to wonder about how the language in which a religion is first articulated might affect its chances of survival. Even thinking, as they are encouraged to do, about the ways in which the simulated environment does not adequately reflect reality helps students learn more about religion. One student observed, for example, that the students’ FB religions are not affected, as are real world religions, by money, and suggested that in some future iteration we might randomly give some of the FB religions money to promote their religions through marketing advertisements on FB, in order to simulate the effect of greater wealth on growth (for another potential solution, see Laycock [2015]). Other students comment on how important it is for the founder or evangelist of a religion to be convinced of the truth of their religion, and how hard it is to replicate that kind of conviction for students’ FB religions. Despite the ways in which the assignment has been a success, it also has certain weaknesses and limitations. One of the vexing issues surrounding the project is whether to prejudice student opinion about the common elements of religion by giving them a


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Design & Analysis predetermined list of things to include in their FB religion (such as scriptures, ethics, theology, cosmogonies, and so forth), or to give them no particular direction and allow them to explore the nature of religion through the project itself. I have vacillated on this issue over the four semesters I have assigned the project. Having done it both ways, I can suggest that choosing the former path tends to lead to the development of more complete and coherent religions, while choosing the latter provokes students to think more seriously about the nature of religion itself, but also provokes students anxiety about what precisely they are required to do. A third option I have tried with limited success is having an in-class discussion about the common characteristics or elements of religion, and then introducing the assignment and encouraging students to use the discussion as a starting point in the development of their religions. Another potential problem with the assignment is privacy. Students must “friend” me on FB in order to invite me to “like” their religion’s page or join its group. Once they do, if they used their regular profile, I see all their FB posts (including those unrelated to the course) in my feed.4 A more significant privacy concern has to do with whether it is fair of me to ask students to create a religion to which, for the most part (though more on this below), they do not actually adhere, which some perceive to be at least a mild form of blasphemy, and to do it in full view of at least their classmates. As one might expect, a few conservative Christian students have had concerns about their friends or family members seeing their created religions and wondering if they have apostatized. One or two have even reported uncomfortable interactions with conservative relatives who came upon their FB religions with no context. For example, one student wrote, “I actually spoke to one of my friends about the project and she practically yelled at me for even thinking about coming up with my own religion. Even though it was for a class, and was a major component of my grade [ironically, the student’s religion was called “The United Church of Nerds, or Those Who Seek Good Grades], she felt that I should never put myself in a position where I, in a way, acted as a god. To her, coming up with my own religion was going against her God, and thinking of myself as one.” As a pedagogue, I am of two minds about this student’s report. One the one hand, it demonstrates that the project exposes my students to a kind of danger (of being misunderstood, of getting into arguments, of needing to explain themselves, and so forth), and I don’t know how comfortable I am putting them into that kind of danger. On the other hand, I intentionally and for pedagogical reasons, regularly put my students in positions they find uncomfortable (for example, by asking them to visit mosques and temples), and surely, if the student carefully reflected upon the conversation she described (as her paper suggested she had), she would have gained important and meaningful insights about religion and religious people. I had predicted that some of my more conservative students (or those with conservative friends and relatives) might run into problems like this. But I had not expected that atheist and agnostic students might also have some concerns. In fact, quite a few of them have worried that people might think they had become religious or “joined a cult”! Allowing students to use FB profiles created purely for this project, and to be nonevangelical and create their religion as a closed group, surely helps mitigate the

4 I should note that one advantage to being FB friends with all students in the class is that it allows me to do things like conduct FB polls (for example, on whether students would prefer me to cover Scientology or Satanism).

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The “Make Your Own Religion” Project potential for problems involving privacy, but it does not altogether alleviate them. Among other issues, because part of their grade is determined according to the amount of activity students generate on their religion’s page or group, and generating activity becomes easier the more followers one’s religion has, the assignment does subtly advantage those who keep their religions public and try to grow them. A final conundrum is whether to insist that students create certain kinds of religions. In my experience, students primarily create three types of religion: (1) purely humorous or ridiculous religions focusing on the worship of things people would never worship (for example, one of my favorites, “Urban Antiazoicism,” the worship of inanimate objects as if they were animate); (2) satirical religions focusing on the worship of things that people do, in a more metaphorical sense, worship, like the hilarious “United Church of Hipsters, but Not Too United” (“We Worship the Old Gods”!), “Healthianity,” “Baconanity,” and “Green Bay Packism”; and (3) original, creative, or quasi-serious religions involving the honoring or pursuit of things (such as nature, peace of mind, peaceful relations) that the founder actually considers worth honoring or pursuing. “Be-ism” was one example of this kind of religion, as was “Vindurism,” in which the student creator included a number of beautiful, short, original poems using the wind as a metaphor for our experience in life, and as a model for how we ought to behave. The categories are not necessarily mutually exclusive. “Ruligion,” for example, was a witty, creative, quasi-satirical religion that nevertheless derived a relatively coherent and meaningful worldview and ethics from the reality television show, RuPaul’s Drag Race! In my experience, students who create the third kind of religion not only learn the most about religion but also gain the opportunity to articulate their own worldview, because they are, in a limited sort of way, actually creating something like a religion. For this reason, I have, every time after the first time I assigned the project, encouraged (but not required) students to create the third kind of religion. For the same reason, I stopped referring to the FB religions as “fake,” and instead started calling them “new,” “creative,” or just “Facebook” religions. By far, however, and despite this, most students still create religions in the first and second categories. This is no particular surprise. Religions of this kind are easier to create, particularly since in religions of the second kind, scriptures, ethics, and worldviews can be borrowed rather than created. Moreover, creating ridiculous religions creates less cognitive dissonance for strongly committed religious students in the class. Yet I continue to wonder whether there might be sound pedagogical justification for requiring that students create the third kind of religion. And I wonder how the class’s experience might be different if I did. Vindurism or Baconanity? The Promises and Perils of the “Make Your Own Religion” Project Brent A. R. Hege As Chad Bauman notes in his essay, the process of pedagogical innovation often takes unexpected twists and turns, especially when the seed is sown in a favorite neighborhood pub! “Kleptomnesia” aside, I am thrilled that Chad found such success with this idea in his course. The great benefit of this assignment is the opportunity for students in an introductory course to engage theoretical matters without initially being aware that they are doing so, at least not explicitly. Rather, in the process of thinking about what type of religion they might like to create and then launching their tradition on Facebook, they intuitively


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Design & Analysis grasp many salient issues related to theories about religion and are poised to reconsider various aspects of historic traditions as well. As Chad points out, students come to understand the importance of social and historical contexts, charismatic and dynamic founding and proselytizing personalities, the availability of potential converts and the methods required to reach them, and the roles of scriptures, theologies, ethics, and other factors in shaping and perpetuating a religious tradition. In terms of areas with the potential for improvement, I want to focus on one concern Chad himself raises, namely the temptation to create a rather superficial humorous religion. I suspect that one reason for the popularity of this approach is that it is easier for students to detach themselves from the existential aspects of religious engagement if the tradition they create is obviously intended to be fictional and humorous. However, by avoiding any potential discomfort, students might also be denied a valuable opportunity for serious reflection on their own presuppositions and religious commitments. This is an understandable temptation, but another negative result of this approach is that the deeper features of religion are often left unexplored. For example, students who opt for the third type and create something like “Vindurism” are, I suspect, generally able to reflect on the existentially meaningful aspects of religious traditions with more nuance and sophistication than students who create something like “Baconanity” (as entertaining – and delicious – as these might be). While it is certainly conceivable that creating a humorous religion could very well produce deep and meaningful insights into the nature of religion, requiring students to create a “serious” religion will prove to be much more effective in realizing the goals and objectives of the assignment, namely to invite students into deeper levels of engagement with the complex phenomenon of religion. Anyone considering implementing a version of this assignment in their own courses will want to weigh the desire for student freedom and creativity against the desire for seriousness and sufficient attention to the breadth and depth of the assignment’s learning objectives. Perhaps future iterations of the assignment will venture beyond Facebook into other social media and methods of proselytization, much as living religious traditions are already doing. In addition to grappling with theoretical issues in religious studies, students might also be invited to deeper reflection on the relationship between religion and culture and religion and media, which would recommend this assignment to instructors of advanced courses in religious studies as well.

Variations on a Theme by Chad Bauman: Adapt and Improvise Russell Kleckley My experience with a similar course at Augsburg College resonates with Chad’s success in his creative design. The differences relate mainly to context and purpose for the course I teach, “Religion, Vocation, and the Search for Meaning,” a required, general education course typically taken in the first year. The course introduces students to the theological lens of vocation through the religions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Augsburg has a very religiously diverse student population, including Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hmong, agnostics, and atheists. Many of these students enter the course uncertain and suspicious of what a required religion course at a Lutheran college will be like. Consequently, I use the exercise in the very first week of class. The timing helps to ease students into the course. It provides a safe and common entry point by “leveling

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The “Make Your Own Religion” Project the playing field” across the varied terrain of religious identity, ideology, and commitment while relaxing defensiveness and building community. My aim, similar to Chad’s, is to help students gain insight into the theoretical foundations of religion. Specifically, I am interested in illustrating the standard dimensions of religion, such as myth, ritual, symbol, doctrine, ethics, institutions, and experience. However, I give students very few directions except for some open-ended questions: What are the questions your religion addresses? What is required for membership? What are its beliefs and practices? And so on. Students, I consistently find, do not need to be told to include the standard characteristics or be given specific guidance on what to include. The important features inevitably appear, a point that itself becomes part of the discussion. Additionally, the exercise illustrates the relationship between religion and culture. While students “make up” their religions, they do so drawing on images, ideas, and symbols that are already familiar and then invest them with higher meaning, purpose, and value. Instead of spreading their religions through social media, my students rely on more old-school style presentations, five to ten minutes in length. Students from other groups follow-up with questions, often leading to other critical opportunities for learning. For example, a question may pose circumstances that a group had not considered, illustrating how religions adapt and evolve in light of new issues while keeping true to their original vision. Students in the presenting group often engage in on-the-spot consultation to discuss, wrestle, sometimes argue, and eventually reach a consensus on how to respond, unwittingly but usefully and compactly demonstrating how communities struggle to define orthodoxy and heresy. Similarities, of course, appear across the different religions. But the exercise also demonstrates the particularity of each religious expression and the difficulty at times of understanding, intellectually or experientially, another religion apart from living within it. Students learn that religions are not simply belief systems, an assumption they often bring into the class. Rather, they begin to appreciate religions as shared frames of reference for inhabiting the world. These and other insights later become points of reference as we continue through the course and explore the three great monotheistic religious traditions. Chad Bauman has offered a great model for the “make your own religion” exercise, and I will engage in repeated acts of “kleptomnesia” in appropriating his ideas. My advice: experiment and adapt to your own student context and course objectives. Creation Over Synthesis: Innovating Engaged Learning in the “Make Your Own Religion” Project Lydia Willsky-Ciollo One of the greatest challenges facing teachers in the humanities, generally, and religious studies, specifically, is the struggle of how to encourage students to invest in lower-level or survey courses. How, beyond checking off requirements of a core curriculum, do we make the study of religion important, interesting, and accessible? Chad Bauman has done precisely this in his Make Your Own Religion project. First of all, Dr. Bauman meets the students on their own turf. Social media, specifically Facebook in this instance, is the language that our students speak. Sound bites, videos, GIFs, and web links are a shorthand through which undergraduates communicate their opinions,


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Design & Analysis preferences, and points of view. Secondly, by placing the reins of religious innovation into their own hands, students are immediately invested in understanding how religions work, what they are comprised of, and how they sustain themselves and survive. I have attempted a similar, though far less developed, project in a course, “Alternative Scriptures,” offered at Whitter College in Spring 2014. Throughout the course we discussed the elements of scripture (like narrative, language, authority, telos) and devoted classes to various instances of alternative scripture, from the more recognizable – the Book of Mormon – to the more obscure – tattoos as scripture. At the end of the course, students had several options for their final paper, one of which was to write their own scripture for their own religion. I found, overwhelmingly, that those students who opted to write their own scriptures exhibited a deeper grasp of sacred texts and the religious communities they help to create. Enabling students to create rather than synthesize raises many generative questions for the field of religious studies. A major question raised by Dr. Bauman, as well as by Dr. Laycock in his blog post (2015) cited by Dr. Bauman above, is whether anything can be transformed into a religion? The short answer is, well, sure, as Bruce Lincoln contends in his “Four Domains of Religion.” Dr. Bauman’s first two types of religions – ridiculous and satirical religions, respectively – are indicative of this possibility. Allowing students to perceive the religious in the most bizarre and obscure of places could make them more sensitive to the variety and ubiquity of religious practices and beliefs. However, I wonder alongside Dr. Bauman whether this could have the effect of moving students too far outside the realm of religions, in an institutional and practical sense. If we are teaching students to think critically about religion by enabling them to apply theoretical constructs to (potentially) secular subject matter, do we run the risk of divorcing theory from content? I have felt this same cognitive dissonance in courses where I allow for more innovative or “out there” projects. The question, to apply the administrative language of curriculum creation, is whether the learning outcomes are the same for students who created new religions of the first two types versus those who created the third, original or “quasi-serious” religions? Bauman indicates that there is a marked difference, with those who created religions of the third type learning the most. I wonder, more musingly than critically, whether such differences were quantifiable or personal and if, as Bauman wonders, it is better to let students creative juices flow or to more narrowly focus their imagination. I expect that the answer may vary from teacher to teacher and even from student to student. Inventing (a) Religion in the Classroom: On Pedagogies of Origins Davina C. Lopez I am grateful to Chad Bauman for reminding us that thoughtful teaching about religion(s) with undergraduates is essential for helping students move past the notion that learning about religion entails assembling and memorizing data about “what X tradition/people believe[s] about Y.” In my view, the Make Your Own Religion project affirms that a primary objective of teaching religion is to provide opportunities for students to develop critical thinking skills through doing the work of observing selves and others, raising questions about the discourses, actions, and worldviews they encounter in the process. I conduct a similar project with students in my lower-level course on New Religious Movements (NRMs) at the small, private liberal arts college where I teach. In the assignment, called “Inventing Religion,” I ask my students to imagine and narrate

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The “Make Your Own Religion” Project various aspects of an NRM of their own design, focusing on such concepts as origin stories, location, membership requirements, authority structures, insider worldviews, outsider perceptions, and so on. The students interact with one another “in character” during the final two weeks of the course and then reflect in writing on that experience using the framework and vocabulary for understanding NRMs they encountered in the semester. Though different than Chad’s assignment as described here, I have faced similar issues and questions in the process of working with students on “their” religions. And through Chad’s description and analysis of his assignment, I am reminded that, while studying religion is relevant and necessary for world-understanding, how, exactly, to introduce undergraduate students to the study of religion(s) is no easy task and, in fact, is a lively and unsettled question in the guild at large. That is, if we are to introduce students to studying religion, where and how we start – whether with “world religions,” “theory,” “classic” approaches, or “scriptures” – makes a difference for the overall orientation and goals of the semester-long enterprise. Our students are often shaped by a world characterized by the pursuit of easy answers and instant gratification, persistent divisive rhetorics about good and evil, and the idea that the goal of college is job training and not world-navigation or cultivation of the imagination. Religion is one of those hot-button areas where neutrality is revealed to be a fiction. At the same time, our students have likely been exposed to religious discourses that are used to justify violence and coercion, as well as love and justice, sometimes simultaneously. And unlike many other academic fields, students come to college with very little awareness that religion is something that can be appraised and studied at all, rather than something which is simply a matter of feelings and opinions about matters thought to come from somewhere beyond the sphere of human activity and thought. Professors are in the position of having to negotiate students’ embrace of, and resistance to, perspectives with which they may be unfamiliar and/or find disagreeable, sometimes on deeply personal and traumatic terms. Teaching religion, however we do it and at whichever institution, occurs in this world: pluralistic, polarized, and perplexed. Given the realities of the world in which teaching religion takes place, I find that “Make Your Own Religion” and assignments like it can comprise highly effective pedagogical strategies on two fronts. First, such an assignment reinforces the idea that religion is a complex human activity, driven and bounded by human concerns, located in human times and human places, and that humans hide the hands at work in making religion “happen” by appealing to otherworldly discourses and practices. Recognizing the humanity, and thus contingency, of religions is important for students to think through how religion functions in their own lives and the lives of others, across time and cultures. Second, having students design a religion and critically engage and question that experience helps them recognize that theory is not irrelevant, “out there,” or unrelated to practice, but is grounded in observational power that students can exercise all the time concerning what is around them. Giving students the chance to flex their observational muscles in a relatively safe and controlled setting is vital, and, to be sure, this skill is readily transferrable. Of course, effective pedagogical strategies can lead to larger questions about the field and how it is organized, and this assignment also accomplishes that. As Chad notes, one major question that occasioned this assignment in the first place concerns the role of theoretical engagement in introductory religion courses that have world religions as the rubric. In such courses, content appears to take priority over structure and method – the comment about not having time to do theory is symptomatic. But privileging content


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Design & Analysis about religions of the world is itself the result of a series of methodological decisions that is worth historicizing and theorizing. Thus, placing this assignment in a world religions course could expose the frequent lack of self-conscious theorizing in worldreligions pedagogies. I wonder, though, whether students might bring the observations they make about their “own” religions back to the traditional material of the course in which this assignment takes place. For example, an important aspect of Chad’s assignment is the drive to obtain converts/adherents in large numbers (with a reward from the higher power, the professor, for those who get the most). What would it look like if students were to translate their own competition for followers into observations as to how, and why, some religions make it to have enough status as a religion to be included in a course on world religions, while others just barely make the cut or, worse yet, are deliberately neglected or fade into obscurity? That kind of meta-questioning might make some teachers and students nervous, and yet I submit that it might be pedagogically rewarding to empower students to begin to critically engage the contours of the field in precisely this manner. After all, our religion courses are also products of human activity and thought. Helpful in elucidating the contextual nature evident herein is Bruce Lincoln’s incisive observation on history-of-religions approaches to the study of religious phenomena. In his view, such analysis comprises a discourse that resists and reverses the orientation of that discourse with which it concerns itself. To practice history of religions in a fashion consistent with the discipline’s claim of title is to insist on discussing the temporal, contextual, situated, interested, human, and material dimensions of those discourses, practices, communities, and institutions that characteristically represent themselves as eternal, transcendent, spiritual, and divine. (Lincoln 1996, 225–27) This observation is perhaps all the more pertinent for the teaching of religion, since, ultimately, helping our students to identify, understand, interrogate, and transform religion, and regimes of knowledge and power more broadly, lies at the heart of what we ought to strive for in the classroom. Chad Bauman’s “Make Your Own Religion” project represents a productive step in this direction.

Bibliography Henderson, Bobby. 2005. “Open Letter to the Kansas State Board.” http://www.venganza .org/ (accessed March 5, 2015). Laycock, Joseph. 2015. “Create your Own Religion (Out of Someone Else’s): A Class Exercise.” Religion Bulletin, March 4. http://www.equinoxpub.com/blog/2015/03/ create-your-own-religion-out-of-someone-elses-a-class-exercise/ (accessed March 5, 2015). Lincoln, Bruce. 1996. “Theses on Method.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 8: 225–27. http://religion.ua.edu/thesesonmethod.html (accessed March 5, 2015). Nammalvar. 1993. Hymns for the Drowning: Poems for Visnu. A. K.Ramanujan, trans. New Delhi, India: Penguin Books. Walvoord, Barbara E. 2008. “Students’ Spirituality and ‘Big Questions’ in Introductory Religion Courses.” Teaching Theology & Religion 11, no. 1: 3–13.

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