Defending the Survey Approach

When you make sweeping pronouncements about the value of a survey-of-religions course, you can probably expect a response from someone who teaches the survey-of-religions course.  Patrick O'Donnell does not disappoint in that regard, offering a long and thoughtful email detailing his method.  He first emphasizes the importance of "bracketing":

[I was taught that] one could learn about religions, learn interesting, meaningful, important things about religious traditions in a manner that is descriptively true and phenomenologically rich while temporarily 'bracketing' one's own religious and/or philosophical worldview in the sense that one withholds (value) judgments and questions of truth insofar as same might interfere with an accurate portrayal of the religion(s) under question. In Ninian Smart's words, 'it is such bracketing that lies, methodologically, at the heart of the modern study of religion. The jargon is drawn from Husserl, but the practice and message differ from his. The practice, which is somewhat dialectical, involves trying to present the beliefs, symbols and activities of the other...from the perspective of the other. The presuppositions, feelings and attitudes of the explorer of the other's world must be bracketed out as far as possible. That is, we should not bring external judgments to bear upon the other's world.' After all, 'our views are not facts about them [say, Buddhist, Muslims, Confucians, etc.], but facts about us.' Judgments and questions of truth are not dismissed, however, for 'Later, when we have found out what Buddhist Buddhism is we can shape our own [views about this tradition].'

He notes that such bracketing "is perfectly compatible with students learning some of the intra-traditional resources for possible normative critiques of views and practices within a particular tradition."  He also challenges the suggestion that immersion in a comprehensive worldview is necessary to provide an authentic taste of the religion:

We study religions as 'ideal-types' because, after all, if we are honest with ourselves, it behooves us to acknowledge that virtually any worldview held by an individual (what I would term, after Habermas, a "lifeworld") is more or less a motley: 'There is not Calvinism in Scotland, but there is Scottish Calvinism (or there was!).' That is to say, 'Critical analysis will suggest that we tend to live in a certain amount of aporia. Do we, when it comes to the crunch, really have a systematic worldview? We have an amalgam of beliefs, which we may publicly characterize in a certain way. I may say that I am an Episcopalian, but how much of my real worldview corresponds to the more or less official views of the Episcopal Church? How much in any case is left out by an "official worldview" which tells me nothing directly about cricket, being Scottish, having a certain scepticism about nationalism, thinking that there is life on other worlds, shelving the problem of evil or other matters. Our values and beliefs are more like a collage than a Canaletto. They do not even have consistency of perspective' (quoting Ninian Smart).