USU preparing to set up religious studies program

LOGAN — Officials at Utah State University are pressing forward with plans to formulate a broad-based religious studies program, with the long-range goal of offering an undergraduate degree in the discipline.

Philosophy professor Richard Sherlock told the Deseret Morning News earlier this week that funding for one academic "anchor" chair in broad-based religious studies has already been secured. Fund raising is progressing for a second chair focused on the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to be named after the late LDS historian Leonard Arrington.

A third chair in Islamic religious studies is on the drawing board, and Asian religious studies will be an integral component of the program as well.

Sherlock said enough USU faculty members from a variety of disciplines now teach classes involving religious studies that a full-blown department is coming at an unspecified future date. Utah is believed to be the only state in the nation that does not offer an undergraduate degree in religious studies at a public university.

"To this point, any student who wants to major in religious studies has to leave the state. We want to change that, " he said, adding he believes there will be "significant interest among students" in such a program.

The lack of a degree-granting religious studies program has long been lamented by some in Utah academia, he said, while others prefer to keep the discipline outside the purview of a secular university setting. Sherlock said the University of Utah tried not once, but twice, several years ago to establish such a program, but internal politics and polarization within the faculty over the role of research and teaching about the LDS Church scuttled the effort.

Some were convinced it was a front for an apologetic focus on "Mormon studies" while others believed it was an attempt to foster public criticism of the faith, he said. Properly structured, such a program "doesn't need to do either of those things. What it will do that some Latter-day Saints may be concerned about, it will present a series of courses that will challenge some of (the faith's) assumptions" as well as those of other established faith traditions, he said.

"That's what universities should do."

Though Sherlock believes the controversy over Salt Lake City's Main Street plaza revealed a continuing deep division among Utahns regarding the role of the LDS Church in public life, he's convinced residents are open-minded enough to embrace a program that would examine all faiths, including the Latter-day Saints.