GOLETA — The students call their major "religion on the ground." One studies a singles group looking for love in a Los Angeles synagogue Friday nights. Another compares Hinduism and Christianity. His master's thesis profiled Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers, as a religious mystic.
A class schedule at the religious studies department of UC Santa Barbara reads like a road sign in a global village: Islam in America, medieval Judaism, early Christian novels, Taoism and Shintoism, along with related languages from Arabic to Ugaritic. The array of ethnic faces here is as vast as on any University of California campus. But a closer look at the faculty, dressed in turbans and Indian jewelry, hikers' vests and slouched sport jackets, illuminates the sweep of this program.
Tucked inside the Humanities building, a California-rustic box of stucco and glass, their offices are dotted with Buddhas and prayer rugs, ritual swords and a global selection of sacred texts, all facets of the larger picture they are trying to create: UC Santa Barbara's religious studies program brings together the jumble of modern culture and reassembles it under the heading of religion.
Though the standard university approach to the study of religion draws heavily from the Protestant, Catholic and Jewish traditions (not surprising in a country that is, according to the most recent census, 84% Christian), Sikhs, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Native Americans and others get equal time here. And though some observers fear that this sort of broad egalitarianism can dilute all religions, many clearly see it as the future.
"It is very California," says Barbara DeConcini, executive director of the American Academy of Religion, an Atlanta-based scholarly group of about 8,000 academics. "It's also way ahead of its time. UC Santa Barbara is one of the leading religious studies programs in any public university or state school. Others have looked to them for how to do it."
Facing the Pacific, on a bluff laced with trails leading down to the beach, the school has always seemed to catch the winds of change along with the ocean mists. Richard Hecht, a keeper of the department's history, remembers the impulse that led to the school's unconventional approach.
The program's founder, D. McKenzie Brown, was an expert in India's politics and history and, says Hecht, he wanted religion courses on campus because he felt his students needed to know more about that part of life in India. Exposure to the country's religious life, Brown believed, would help them understand its social problems. That was in 1958.
