this post was submitted on 31 May 2026
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At the graduate-level, religion. As long as you aren't going to a Christian college specifically. But like Harvard Divinity School, UC Berkeley, etc are cool. At that level, they've weeded out the undergrads who write "Christianity is true because the bible said so" and you're not studying theology so you have a lot more interdisciplinary work with people of different religious backgrounds. Even atheists who study a certain niche religious group or time period like any anthropologist would.
It's more about religious people and what they believe, how that is affected by their culture and background, how they and it interfaces with society, etc. There's even room in there for Marxists. Look up the Dalit Buddhist movement and see how they used religion as a way to shed their oppressed caste status. There's plenty of class analysis to be had in similar scenarios, even now.
Look at how Zen Buddhism was used as a tool to steel the nerves of Japanese kamikaze pilots and how almost every Zen temple in Japan except the Soka Gakkai (who are weird in their own right) were fascist collaborators. How Japanese Christians were treated relatively better than Buddhists in the American internment camps, etc.
oooo that sounds interesting, it's just a specialization within sociology it sounds like?
Religious Studies is its own field that encompasses history, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, etc. It's distinct from theology in that its from the outsider perspective, meaning you may or may not believe in the religion you study, but you aren't coming at it from a personal relationship with God, from a devotion toward Shiva, etc.
It's just the application of all those disciplines to religion specifically. You can be a philosopher/"theologian" who goes very deep into Buddhist Hermeneutics, a historian who focuses on animal rights within a certain tradition/time period and knows little of the present, a sociologist who examines how religion functions among the poor of a certain society, etc.
I know a professor who was working on a book about superstition and the disorganized religions of sailors, how their myths and beliefs about the sea developed even cross-culturally among sailors from different countries. Another was working on a comparative book about sports, boxing specifically, and how sports communities mirror certain behaviors of religious groups. Another was looking at medicine within Daoist and Native American religious ceremonies that were later adopted as mainstream medicine. One focused specifically on the concept of the Good Samaritan and the use of the archetype in literature. Another focused on cross-examining philosophical similarities between religious terrorist cells from Christianity, Buddhism, the Aum Shinrikyo cult, and what motivated them (the motivations typically being material, with scripture being used as justification after the fact). There's a lot of stuff going on in the realm of Islam-Jewish relations right now, as you can imagine.
It's very open ended and you can go more heady and abstract, or more grounded and applicable to finding solutions. I'm sure it helps to understand why and how the Falun Gong operate in order to stop their spread, for example. Or the Jonestown people. Or Christian terrorists in the USA. And so on.
For something relatable to Hexbears, how closely related the Church and the Tsarists were in Russia, which was part of the reason for the extremely harsh reaction toward them after the Russian Revolution. Eventually pissing off the common people enough to dial it back. Looking at how religion intermingles with politics and class interests.