What Is Religious Studies? Definition, Subfields, Methods, and Funding

Religious studies is the academic, non-confessional study of religion: the effort to describe, compare, and explain religious beliefs, practices, texts, institutions, and experiences as human phenomena, using the methods of history, the social sciences, and the humanities, without assuming that any religious tradition is true or false. This guide covers what the discipline studies, how it differs from theology, its major subfields, the methods scholars use, a short history of the field, how researchers are trained and funded, and the professional societies and journals that organize it.

What Is Religious Studies?

Religious studies (also called the study of religion, the science of religion, or, in German-language scholarship, Religionswissenschaft) treats religion as a subject of empirical and interpretive inquiry. Its object of study is broad: scriptures and other texts, rituals, institutions and law, material culture and art, ethics, myth, religious experience, and the ways religion intersects with politics, economy, gender, health, migration, and everyday life. It is cross-cultural by design, covering major traditions such as Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Sikhism, as well as Indigenous, new, local, and non-institutional forms of religion, and the study of secularism and non-belief.

Three commitments characterize the field as it is usually described:

• A non-confessional stance — the scholar does not need to be a believer, and the work does not aim to advance or defend the claims of any tradition. Scholars may or may not be religious themselves; what matters is that the analysis rests on evidence and argument that can be assessed by people of any belief or none.
• Comparison and breadth — the discipline looks across traditions, periods, and regions rather than confining itself to one community, and asks what is distinctive about a given tradition versus what recurs across many.
• Methodological plurality — there is no single “religious studies method.” The field is multidisciplinary and borrows from history, philology, sociology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science, which is why it is often described as a field of study rather than a single discipline in the narrow sense.

Neutrality here is a method, not a verdict. Religious studies does not claim that religion is illusory, nor that it is true; it sets those questions aside in order to describe and explain what people believe and do and what difference it makes.

Religious Studies vs. Theology

The most common point of confusion is the relationship to theology. The distinction is usually drawn along these lines:

• Theology is typically carried out from within a tradition, often summarized as “faith seeking understanding.” It reasons about the content, coherence, and implications of a community’s beliefs, and is commonly associated with seminaries, divinity schools, and faith-based institutions.
• Religious studies adopts what is often called a third-person or outsider-compatible perspective, treating religious claims as data to be described and explained rather than as positions to be defended.

The boundary is not absolute. Many scholars work in both settings; some universities house theology and religious studies in the same department; and contemporary scholars increasingly regard theology as one of several ways of studying religion. Philosophy of religion, which evaluates arguments about God, ultimate reality, and religious language, sits between the two and is practiced by believers and non-believers alike. In practice, funders, journals, and degree programs typically specify which approach they expect, so researchers benefit from stating clearly which one their project uses.

Major Subfields and Approaches

The subfields below are the ones most often listed for the discipline. Their names and boundaries vary by country and institution, and many scholars work across several.

• History of religions — the historical study of religious traditions, movements, and ideas in their social and political contexts, often grounded in the languages and primary sources of the tradition in question. It aims to reconstruct what people believed and practiced in particular times and places, without ruling on the truth of the claims.
• Textual and philological study — the critical reading, editing, translation, and interpretation of scriptures, commentaries, inscriptions, and manuscripts, including the history of how texts were composed, transmitted, and received. Biblical studies, Qur’anic studies, Buddhist studies, and Sanskrit-based Indology are examples of text-centered fields.
• Phenomenology of religion — an approach that tries to describe religious phenomena (such as ritual, sacred space, or myth) in terms close to how participants experience them, by setting aside the researcher’s own presuppositions. It was influential in the twentieth century and has been criticized for its assumptions, which scholars continue to debate.
• Sociology of religion — the study of religion as a social institution and a source of identity: religious participation, affiliation and disaffiliation, secularization, religion and politics, and the organization of religious communities, often using surveys, interviews, and statistical analysis. See the general guide to sociology for the parent discipline.
• Anthropology of religion — the ethnographic study of ritual, belief, myth, healing, pilgrimage, and religious change in specific communities, typically through long-term fieldwork. See What Is Anthropology? for the parent discipline.
• Psychology of religion — the study of religious belief, experience, development, and behavior at the level of individuals and groups, including questions about conversion, prayer, well-being, and moral reasoning. It overlaps with the cognitive science of religion, which uses ideas from cognitive and evolutionary science to study why religious ideas and practices are widespread and recurrent. See What Is Psychology? for the parent discipline.
• Philosophy of religion — the analysis of concepts and arguments about religion, such as the nature of religious language, the problem of evil, religious pluralism, and the relationship between religion and science.
• Comparative religion — the systematic comparison of themes, practices, or structures across traditions (for example, pilgrimage, sacrifice, asceticism, or conceptions of the afterlife). Contemporary comparative work tends to be cautious about assuming that categories developed in one tradition, including the category “religion” itself, translate neatly into others.
• Lived religion and other emerging areas — the study of religion as practiced in everyday life rather than as codified doctrine, along with areas such as religion and law, religion and media, religion and health, interreligious studies, and the economics of religion.

Related fields that frequently intersect with religious studies include linguistics (for ancient and sacred languages), archaeology (for the material record of early religion; see What Is Archaeology?), political science, and gender studies.

Methods Used in the Study of Religion

Because the field is multidisciplinary, methods are inherited from the parent disciplines and then adapted to religious subject matter:

• Historical-critical and archival research — working with primary sources such as manuscripts, inscriptions, legal records, correspondence, and institutional archives, and evaluating their authorship, date, and context. See qualitative research for the general framework.
• Philology and translation — reading sources in their original languages (for example Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, or Tibetan), which is a distinguishing requirement of many text-based subfields.
• Ethnography and participant observation — extended fieldwork in religious communities, combining observation, interviews, and documentation of rituals and everyday practice. See qualitative data collection techniques.
• Surveys and quantitative analysis — used in sociology and psychology of religion to measure affiliation, practice, belief, and attitudes across populations, and to track change over time.
• Experimental and cognitive methods — laboratory and field experiments, and, in some work, neuroscientific measures, used in the psychology and cognitive science of religion.
• Philosophical and conceptual analysis — reconstructing and evaluating arguments, and examining the categories (such as “religion,” “belief,” or “sacred”) that scholars themselves use.

Two methodological ideas recur in the literature. The first is the insider/outsider problem: whether and how a scholar who does not share a community’s commitments can understand it, and whether a scholar who does share them can remain analytically distant. The second is reflexivity: scholars are expected to state their own position and its possible effects on the work. Anthropology and the social sciences also use the paired terms emic (the participants’ own categories) and etic (the analyst’s categories) for a similar distinction.

Research involving living people raises its usual ethical obligations. Interviews and surveys about religious belief and practice concern information that participants may regard as sensitive, so projects typically require review by an institutional review board and a careful informed consent process, including thoughtful handling of confidentiality in small or closely connected communities. Work on sacred texts and objects may involve additional questions of access, community permission, and the care of cultural materials.

A Short History of the Discipline

People have written about other people’s religions since antiquity, but religious studies as a distinct academic field is generally dated to nineteenth-century Europe. The philologist Friedrich Max Müller, at Oxford, published Introduction to the Science of Religion in 1873, and the Dutch scholar Cornelis Petrus Tiele was among the early professors in the field. Chairs in the history of religions were established in several European countries in the final quarter of the nineteenth century, and the new field defined itself partly by applying comparative and historical methods to religions instead of treating one tradition as the standard.

The classical social theorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, and the psychologist William James, shaped the sociological and psychological study of religion. In the mid-twentieth century, phenomenological approaches associated with figures such as Gerardus van der Leeuw and Mircea Eliade were prominent, and later scholars, such as Ninian Smart in Britain, developed broad, multi-dimensional frameworks for describing religions. In recent decades, critical and postcolonial perspectives have questioned the field’s own categories and history, and approaches centered on lived religion, material culture, gender, and cognition have grown.

In the United States, the institutional story is closely tied to public education. The American Academy of Religion traces its origin to a 1909 association of biblical instructors, and adopted its present name in 1963 to reflect a broader mission of fostering the academic study of all religions. The same year, in Abington School District v. Schempp, the U.S. Supreme Court held that devotional Bible reading in public schools was unconstitutional while noting that the objective study of religion within a secular program of education is permissible. Scholars often cite that period as one in which university programs in religious studies expanded. Terminology also changed: by the 1960s and 1970s the label “religious studies” had become the common name for the field.

Training and Career Paths

Undergraduate majors and minors in religious studies are offered at many universities and colleges, and the subject is also commonly taken alongside history, philosophy, languages, sociology, anthropology, or area studies. Typical pathways include:

• PhD (research and faculty track) — the standard credential for university research and teaching positions. Doctoral training usually combines coursework in theory and method, advanced language study for the traditions being studied, comprehensive examinations, and a dissertation based on original textual, historical, ethnographic, or empirical research. Many students specialize in a tradition or region and pair it with a methodological home such as history, anthropology, or sociology.
• Master’s degrees — used as preparation for doctoral study or for work in education, nonprofit and community organizations, museums, libraries and archives, publishing, and public service. Master’s programs in divinity and theology serve a different, ministry- or faith-oriented purpose from academic religious studies, and prospective students should check each program’s aims.
• Non-academic roles — graduates work in education, journalism and publishing, museum and heritage interpretation, humanitarian and interfaith work, public policy, and research administration roles supporting humanities and social-science programs.

Language training is a notable feature: scholars of a particular tradition typically need reading knowledge of its source languages and of major scholarly languages in the field, and this training often lengthens doctoral timelines and shapes the budgets and fellowship requests described below.

Funding for Religious Studies Research

Religious studies is funded mostly through humanities and social-science programs, not a dedicated agency. As in other humanities fields, much of the support is for individuals (fellowships, stipends, travel for archival work and fieldwork) and for institutional or collaborative projects. The following funders are among the best-documented:

• National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) — created in 1965 and described as the only US federal agency dedicated to funding the humanities. NEH supports research, education, preservation, and public programs, and its fellowship and research programs are relevant to many projects on religious texts, history, and culture. Applicants commonly need to plan for NEH’s data-management requirements; see NEH data management plans and the note on NEH Summer Stipends and the institutional nomination cap.
• American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) — a nonprofit federation of learned societies, founded in 1919, that administers competitive fellowship and grant programs for humanities and humanistic social-science scholarship, including programs with the Henry Luce Foundation.
• Henry Luce Foundation — a private foundation with a Religion and Theology program that describes its aim as fostering fresh thinking about religion across diverse social and cultural contexts and promoting public-facing scholarship. It makes awards to research universities, divinity schools, and seminaries, including responsive grants and requests for proposals; check the foundation’s site for current program rules because they have changed over time.
• Andrew W. Mellon Foundation — a leading private funder of the humanities; see Andrew W. Mellon Foundation humanities and arts research funding.
• John Templeton Foundation — funds research on questions at the intersection of science, philosophy, and religion; see John Templeton Foundation research grants. Because some foundation funders have stated outlooks or priorities, researchers should read the terms and keep their own independence of design, analysis, and reporting; see the overview of private foundation funders.
• Other sources — national research councils outside the US, university and society travel grants, and area-studies and language-training programs.

Whatever the funder, applicants should check whether the program supports confessional or faith-formation activity, since public agencies and many foundations fund scholarship about religion rather than religious activity, and should describe their project in terms of research questions, evidence, and methods.

Professional Societies and Journals

Several societies organize the field and run conferences, publish journals, and set ethical and professional guidelines:

• American Academy of Religion (AAR) — the principal professional association for the academic study of religion in North America, with thousands of members worldwide, including professors, independent scholars, teachers, and students. It publishes the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and holds an annual meeting, which since 2011 has run concurrently with the meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL).
• Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) — a scholarly society focused on the critical study of the Bible and related literature.
• Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR) — a society centered on social-scientific approaches, which publishes the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.
• International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR) — an international federation of national and regional associations, which sponsors the journal Numen and international congresses.
• European Association for the Study of Religions (EASR) and British Association for the Study of Religions (BASR) — regional and national bodies with their own conferences and publications.

Other prominent journals include History of Religions and many tradition-specific titles. Researchers should check each journal’s scope and its approach to peer review, and consider open access options where funders or institutions require them.

Religious Studies and Research Administration

For research administrators, humanities projects have a different shape from laboratory grants. Budgets are dominated by personnel time (release time, fellowships, stipends), travel, language study, archival access, translation, and publication costs rather than equipment. Fieldwork with religious communities may require IRB review, sometimes at several sites, along with local permissions and, abroad, research permits. Funders may require data management planning even for text-based and archival work. Offices that support the humanities generally need to understand fellowship rules, institutional nomination limits, and sabbatical or leave policies in addition to standard award administration. For a map of how this discipline sits among the others, see the overview of the branches of science.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is religious studies in simple terms?

Religious studies is the academic study of religion from a neutral, evidence-based standpoint. Scholars describe and compare what religions teach and what people do, and explain how religion interacts with history, society, and the mind, without trying to prove or disprove any belief.

What is the difference between religious studies and theology?

Theology is generally pursued from within a tradition, reasoning about its beliefs, while religious studies treats religion as an object of historical and social-scientific study and does not require the scholar to be a believer. The two overlap, and some institutions teach both.

Do you have to be religious to study religion?

No. Students and scholars of religious studies come from a range of religious and non-religious backgrounds. The field evaluates work by its evidence and reasoning, not by the researcher’s own beliefs.

What are the main branches of religious studies?

Commonly listed areas include history of religions, textual and philological study, phenomenology of religion, sociology, anthropology, and psychology of religion, philosophy of religion, and comparative religion, plus newer areas such as lived religion and the cognitive science of religion.

What methods do religious studies scholars use?

They use the methods of their parent disciplines: archival and historical research, language-based textual analysis, ethnography, surveys, experiments, and philosophical analysis. Research with human participants typically goes through ethics review.

Who funds religious studies research?

Funding comes mainly from humanities and social-science sources, such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies (including programs with the Henry Luce Foundation), and private foundations such as Mellon and Templeton, along with national research councils and institutional awards.

What jobs can you get with a religious studies degree?

Academic roles require a PhD. Graduates also work in education, writing and publishing, museums and archives, nonprofit and community work, public policy, and research administration.

Related Guides

This guide is part of a series on academic disciplines from a research-administration perspective. See also What Is Sociology?, What Is Anthropology?, What Is Psychology?, What Is Linguistics?, What Is Archaeology?, and What Is Philosophy of Science?.