Speaking at a Bhakti-Yoga
conference in March, 2025 at Harvard, Krishma Kshetra Swami said that scholars
who are devoted to the academic study of religion are also undoubtedly also
motivated by their religious faith, even if it is of a religion other than what
the scholar is studying. The Swami himself was at the time both a scholar of
Hinduism and a Krishna devotee. He was essentially saying that his academic
study of Hinduism was motivated not just by the pursuit of knowledge, but also
by (his) faith. He also stated that he, like the rest of us in daily life, typically
separated his various identities, including that of a professor and a devotee
of the Hindu god, Krishna. Although his two roles not contradictory in
themselves, a scholar’s own religious beliefs, if fervently held, can act as a
magnet of sorts by subtly swaying the very assumptions that a scholar holds
about the phenomenon of religion (i.e., the knowledge in the academic discipline).
To be sure, personally-held ideology acts with a certain gravity on any scholar’s
study in whatever academic field. Religious studies, as well as political
science, by the way, are especially susceptible to the warping of reasoning by
ideology because beliefs can be so strongly held in religion (and politics),
and the impact of such gravity can easily be missed not only by other people,
but also by the scholars themselves.
To be sure, a scholar’s study
of a religion, especially one’s own but also another religion, can enrich the
person’s own religious faith and religiosity. The process can be referred to as
faith seeking understanding. As a student at Yale Divinity School, I quickly
became well-versed in faith seeking understanding because the school was
self-consciously producing what could be called scholarly priests. This
is not to say that reasoning or cognition lies at the core of a religious
faith. Especially in a religion in which God is held to be a kind of
theological love, emotion, as in Augustine’s Confessions, can be said to
be more relevant than anything in religion within the limits of reason alone
can reach, even though religious faith, and thus love, is theological rather
than psychological in genre.
I didn’t grasp a more serious
downside to Yale’s focus on (Christian) faith seeking understanding until
decades later when I was a visiting research scholar at Harvard. More than one divinity
student there asked me if it was true that Yale’s divinity school was a kind of
a cult. At first, the question shocked me, but as I reflected on the
observation and my own experience of Yale’s divinity school, I was astonished
that students at Harvard, the other school, could be so insightful about Yale from
a distance. I remembered the Christian professor’s uneasy emotional reaction in
a seminar on the Gospel of Mark when I had asked a question that implied that
the orthodox interpretation of a passage could be wrong. In thinking up to the
question, I had been following the way of reasoning rather than allowing any
external contours to circumscribe where logical reasoning was taking me. Along
the lines of Clifford Geertz, I was bracketing, or epoché, my own religious
beliefs in academic context, but clearly the professor was not.
During another semester, I was
glad when the evangelical-Christian professor of Christian environmental ethics
enthusiastically embraced by offer to set up a dialogue between him and the
Archdruid of North America in the Common Room at the divinity school, but I was
dismayed when most of the Episcopalian students quickly bolted from the room at
the outset and then a few weeks later when that very professor told me, “It
takes having a certain character to get a Yale diploma.” Invited a Druid leader
had, unknown to me, crossed a line. Decades later, when I was back at Yale to
audit a seminar as an alumnus on Jonathan Edwards, I was impressed that the
divinity school had established a Hebrew Bible masters degree and yet not at
all surprised when more than one Jewish student confided to me that even then
Jewish students didn’t feel comfortable in the school that could still be
characterized as a Christian cult having Calvinist “elect” overtones regarding
insiders and outsiders. Even though I was hardly a neopagan, my use of reason
beyond the confines of the Nicene Creed in what I took to be a school in an
academic institution had flagged me early on at Yale as an outsider at Yale’s
divinity school, and thus was still the case decades later when I returned to
study Christian theology again. That the insiders are actually outsiders from a
true Christian perspective of humility and inclusion was lost on the faculty
and especially the dean of Yale’s institutionally-encased cult as late as 2025.
The staying power of a cult’s
organizational culture, including such vehemently-held and wielded passive-aggression
against insiders who are deemed as outsiders, astounded me as I left Yale for
the last time on May Day, 2025. That culture,
I submit, resonates with that of Yale itself, for after Jonathan Edwards, an
alumnus, taught there, found himself the butt of not one but two pamphets by
Yale’s president Clap, who was critical of what he mistook as Edward’s lauding
of George Whitefield’s revivalist movement in the First Great Awakening.
As described in detail later by
Timothy Dwight’s grandson, “Mr. Clap, in reply to this, in a letter to Mr.
Edwards, dated April 1, 1745, enters seriously upon the task of showing that
Mr. Edwards’ assertion—‘that Mr. Whitehead told him, that he intended to
bring over a number of young men, to be ordained by Messrs. Tennents, in
New-Jersey,’—connected with the assertion –that Mr. Edwards himself supposed,
that Mr. Whitefield was formerly of the opinion, that unconverted ministers
ought not to be continued in the ministry, and that Mr. Edwards himself supposed
that Mr. Whitefield endeavoured to propagate this opinion, and a practice
agreeable to it:--was equivalent to Mr. Edwards’ saying, that Mr. Whitefield told
him, ‘that he had the design of turning out of their places the greater
part of the clergy of New-England, and of supplying their places with ministers
from England, Scotland and Ireland.’ Mr. Edwards, in a letter to Mr. Clap, of
May 20, 1745, after exposing in a few words, the desperate absurdity of this
attempt, enters on the discussion of the question—Whether he ever made such a
statement to Mr. Clap?—with as much calmness as he afterwards exhibited, in
examining the question of a self-determining power; and with such logical precision
of argument, that probably no one of his readers ever had a doubt left upon his
mind, with regard to it:--no, not even his antagonist himself; for he never
thought proper to attempt a reply.”[1]
That even such a Yalie as Jonathan Edwards—indeed, one of Yale College’s
residential colleges is named after Edwards—would have as an antagonist a
president of Yale testifies to Yale’s culture, which I found centuries later to
be just as vindictive.
In 2025, after I had suggested to the secretary of the head librarian of Sterling Library that the security guards who walked though the main reading room every 20 minutes or so could keep the undergraduates from talking especially in the aisles, I received an angry email from a manager in that library’s security department, threatening me that if I didn’t cease from making “frivolous complaints” about the library’s security department, she would have me blocked from using the library even though I was officially auditing a course as an alumni. Indicative of systemic corruption and a negative view of alumni among Yale’s non-academic employees, the head librarian wrote to me in support of her subordinate. I had showed the security manager’s angry email to a Yale police employee, who was concerned enough to want to have a word with the woman. So, it is significant that the head librarian supported that manager. It is also very significant that the security manager, whom I had never met, did not heed the involvement of Yale’s police on my behalf, for she sent me another such email after I had left Yale and thus could not have been making any further complaints. I suspect that higher Yale officials, perhaps including even the dean of the divinity school, were behind that manager’s attempt to expunge me from campus. At the very least, throwing alumni, who return for a semester to learn more, under the bus does not bode well for alumni donations, but Yale’s Development Office’s director and the director of the Yale Alumni Association could care less when I brought this problem to their attention in 2025. Perhaps Yale had grown too wealthy and thus could afford its non-academic employees’ hostile disrespect towards alumni who return to campus. You had your chance seems to be the attitude.
Between the respective times of Edwards and myself, Yale’s then-seminary was so off-putting in the 1830s to a twice-escaped slave that not only racism but also a culture of vindictiveness towards certain guests being deemed outsiders can be attributed to Yale. Although a local law forbid the enrollment of Black students from other states to any college or university in New Haven, Yale’s “Christian” seminary—later the divinity school—allowed the ex-slave to audit courses so he could go on to be a minister with some knowledge of theology, but with the unnecessary stipulations that he could not check out library books and could not even talk in the classes. The dean of Yale’s “seminary” at the time could not claim that he was just following the law. Instead, he perpetuated the organizational culture of treating some insiders as outsiders, and doing so with spite. So, a pattern is clear from looking across the centuries with regard to the incredible staying-power of an anti-Christian organizational culture at Yale. Jonathan Edwards had had enough that he never returned after Clap’s public criticism; I’ve had enough that I will never return to Yale, and I wonder if the escaped slave who audited two-years of Yale seminary courses ever returned to thank the school for having muzzled him in the classes and not trusted him with library books. By mid-2025, enough of Yale’s faculty, faculty-administrators, and non-academic employees had mastered passive-aggression so well that courses should perhaps be offered on it there even in the “Christian” divinity school. That most of those who are first are last, and the last, first, seems to have been utterly lost on those institutional perpetuators of Yale’s cult.
2. Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” The Works of President Edwards, Vol. 4 (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1864), pp. 313-321, p. 316.
