The Recent Growth of Academic Studies in Religion and Spirituality Around the World
The academic study of religion and spirituality has undergone a remarkable transformation during the last century, and especially during the last several decades. What was once a relatively small field centered largely in European and North American universities has become a vast, international, interdisciplinary enterprise involving historians, theologians, philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, archaeologists, linguists, neuroscientists, historians of art, scholars of literature, and increasingly researchers in the sciences. The change is not simply a matter of there being more books, journals, universities, and scholars. More fundamentally, the very question of what it means to study religion has changed. Religion is no longer treated primarily as a collection of doctrines belonging to a limited number of major traditions. Increasingly, it is studied as a complex human phenomenon expressed through institutions, rituals, identities, cultures, political movements, mystical experiences, moral systems, artistic traditions, social relationships, and individual searches for meaning.
The origins of modern academic religious studies can be traced to nineteenth century Europe. The development of comparative religion, the history of religions, anthropology, philology, archaeology, and the emerging social sciences created new ways of examining religious traditions without necessarily accepting their supernatural claims. Scholars such as Max Müller, Émile Durkheim, James Frazer, William James, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Rudolf Otto, Mircea Eliade, and many others approached religion from very different perspectives. Their work established the principle that religion could be investigated systematically as part of human history and culture.
For much of this early period, however, the academic study of religion was heavily shaped by European assumptions. European Christianity often provided the implicit point of comparison, while Asian, African, Indigenous, and Middle Eastern traditions were frequently studied as examples of an imagined evolutionary progression from supposedly primitive religion toward more sophisticated forms. The academic study of religion was therefore international in subject matter long before it was genuinely global in intellectual perspective.
That situation has changed substantially.
The modern field has increasingly recognized that the traditional categories through which religion was studied were themselves historical constructions. The term “world religions,” for example, remains useful, but scholars increasingly recognize that it can conceal enormous diversity within Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and other large traditions. Local religious practices, Indigenous traditions, folk religions, new religious movements, popular spirituality, blended traditions, and individual religious identities have therefore received much greater attention.
The transformation can be seen particularly clearly in the development of international scholarly organizations. The International Association for the History of Religions, founded in 1950, now brings together dozens of national and regional organizations and describes itself as the largest international association devoted to the academic study of religion. Its 2025 World Congress in Kraków was particularly significant because its theme was “Out of Europe: Studying Religion(s) in Interconnected Worlds.” The conference explicitly examined how the European origins of the academic concept of religion affected the way religion has been studied throughout the world.
This represents an important intellectual development. The field is increasingly studying not merely religions around the world, but the history of the way human beings have studied religion itself.
The globalization of religious studies
One of the most important changes has been the geographic expansion of scholarship. Universities throughout Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East have become important centers for research into religion and spirituality. Scholars in these regions increasingly investigate their own traditions rather than relying upon European or American scholars to interpret them.
This has produced a two-way transformation. Western scholars have gained access to perspectives that were previously marginalized, while scholars from the Global South have increasingly challenged assumptions embedded in Western theories of religion.
Brazil provides one particularly interesting example of the expansion of religious studies. Scholarship there has grown considerably, while Christianity, Afro-Brazilian religions, Indigenous traditions, Pentecostalism, Spiritism, Catholicism, and new forms of spirituality have provided rich fields of investigation. Similar developments can be found throughout Latin America, where religion is increasingly studied in relation to colonialism, indigenous identity, political change, migration, social inequality, and modernization. Contemporary scholarship has also challenged the assumption that modernization necessarily produces the decline of religion. Research into Indonesia, China, and other societies demonstrates that religious change can follow quite different paths from the Western European experience.
Africa has become particularly important to the contemporary study of Christianity and religion. The extraordinary growth of Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa has forced scholars to reconsider older theories that assumed Christianity was essentially a European religion that was exported to Africa. African Christianity is now increasingly understood as an intellectual and cultural force in its own right, with African theologians and religious scholars contributing substantially to worldwide discussions of theology, mission, spirituality, Pentecostalism, biblical interpretation, social justice, and the relationship between Christianity and traditional African religious cultures.
The same development can be seen in Islamic studies. Muslim societies are no longer treated simply as objects of Western scholarship. Scholars located in Muslim-majority countries and Muslim intellectual communities around the world increasingly participate in defining the questions being asked about Islam, Islamic history, Qur’anic interpretation, Islamic philosophy, mysticism, law, politics, gender, modernity, and contemporary Muslim identity. The growing interest in decolonizing Islamic studies is part of this larger transformation.
Asia has likewise become an enormous center of religious scholarship. Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Confucianism, Daoism, Shinto, East Asian popular religions, and numerous local traditions are now investigated not merely through Western comparative categories but through their own intellectual histories and cultural contexts. Scholars increasingly recognize that Asian traditions cannot adequately be understood simply by placing them into categories originally developed to describe European Christianity.
The rise of interdisciplinary study
Perhaps the most important characteristic of contemporary religious scholarship is its interdisciplinary character.
A religion can no longer be adequately understood from theology alone. Historians investigate how religious beliefs developed. Anthropologists examine rituals and communities. Sociologists study religious institutions and social change. Psychologists investigate religious experience and belief. Philosophers examine concepts of God, consciousness, morality, and ultimate reality. Political scientists investigate the relationship between religion and political power. Archaeologists examine ancient religious practices. Linguists study sacred languages and texts. Neuroscientists investigate the relationship between religious experience and the brain.
This has created a much broader intellectual understanding of religion.
William James’s nineteenth century and early twentieth century investigations of religious experience anticipated one important dimension of this development. Today, psychologists and neuroscientists are investigating meditation, prayer, mystical experience, altered states of consciousness, religious conversion, ritual behavior, compassion, and the psychological effects of religious belief. These studies do not necessarily attempt to prove or disprove the supernatural claims of religion. Instead, they ask what happens to human beings when they engage in religious or spiritual practices.
This distinction has become increasingly important. Academic scholarship generally attempts to distinguish between studying a religious claim and affirming or denying that claim. A scholar can investigate what Christians believe about resurrection without attempting to prove whether the resurrection occurred. A scholar can study Buddhist meditation without deciding whether enlightenment is metaphysically real. A scholar can examine mystical experiences without determining whether they originate in God, the brain, or some combination of psychological, cultural, and spiritual factors.
This methodological neutrality has allowed religious studies to become increasingly accessible to scholars who are themselves religious, spiritual, agnostic, atheist, or secular.
The enormous expansion of the study of spirituality
Another important development is the growing distinction between religion and spirituality.
For much of academic history, religion was primarily studied through institutions, doctrines, scriptures, clergy, and formal communities. Increasing attention is now being given to spirituality as an individual or experiential dimension of human life.
The contemporary academic study of spirituality therefore examines meditation, contemplation, mystical experience, pilgrimage, nature spirituality, mindfulness, near death experiences, psychedelic spirituality, spiritual but not religious identities, personal practices of meaning making, and the search for transcendence.
This development reflects a larger transformation in modern societies. Millions of people continue to identify with traditional religions, while others describe themselves as spiritual without belonging to a religious institution. Still others combine elements from several traditions. Academic scholarship has consequently become interested in what happens when traditional boundaries between religions become porous.
The result is a much more complicated picture of religious identity. A person may simultaneously draw upon Christianity, Buddhism, meditation, psychology, Indigenous spirituality, environmentalism, or contemplative practice without seeing these as contradictory. Contemporary religious studies increasingly regards such combinations not simply as anomalies but as important expressions of modern religious life.
The study of Indigenous religions
One of the most significant developments has been the growing scholarly attention given to Indigenous religious traditions.
For centuries, Indigenous religions were frequently classified by Western scholars under categories such as “primitive religion,” “animism,” or “tribal religion.” Contemporary scholarship increasingly recognizes that such classifications often reflected European assumptions rather than the actual complexity of Indigenous traditions.
Indigenous scholars and communities have increasingly participated in determining how their religious traditions should be studied and represented. Oral traditions, relationships with land, ancestral memory, ecological knowledge, ritual practice, sacred geography, storytelling, and community identity have therefore become much more prominent areas of research.
The result is more than the addition of another category to the academic study of religion. Indigenous scholarship has challenged some of the basic assumptions underlying the discipline, particularly the assumption that religion is primarily a matter of beliefs held by individuals. Many Indigenous traditions understand the sacred through relationships among people, ancestors, animals, land, community, and cosmos. Recent scholarship therefore increasingly asks whether Western categories such as “religion,” “nature,” “spirituality,” and even “human” adequately describe these traditions. The growing attention to Indigenous traditions has become part of what scholars call the decolonial turn in religious studies.
Decolonization and the transformation of the discipline
Perhaps no intellectual development has been more important in recent religious scholarship than decolonization.
The basic question is straightforward but profound: What happens when the people who were historically studied as “the Other” become active participants in defining the academic study of religion?
The question has led scholars to reconsider textbooks, university curricula, research methods, terminology, institutional structures, and assumptions about what constitutes legitimate knowledge.
The issue is especially prominent in Africa. South African scholars, for example, have examined the continuing influence of colonialism on theological education and religious studies. Contemporary scholarship argues that decolonization cannot simply mean adding African authors to an otherwise unchanged curriculum. It may require reconsidering the intellectual assumptions through which knowledge itself has traditionally been organized.
This movement is also occurring elsewhere. Recent scholarship has explicitly examined how the “data” of religious studies have been shaped by Western categories and has challenged the assumption that traditional academic categories are neutral.
The significance of this movement extends beyond questions of representation. It is changing the questions scholars ask. Rather than asking only, “What do these people believe?” researchers increasingly ask, “Who created the category of religion being used here? Whose interpretation has been treated as authoritative? What historical circumstances shaped this knowledge? And what alternative understandings have been excluded?”
The academic study of religion is therefore increasingly becoming reflexive. Scholars study religion while simultaneously studying the history and limitations of the discipline itself.
The transformation of comparative religion
Comparative religion has also changed dramatically.
Early comparative religion often attempted to identify universal patterns. Scholars compared myths, gods, rituals, sacred texts, sacrifices, initiation ceremonies, and concepts of salvation in an effort to discover the common structure of religion.
Contemporary scholarship is more cautious. Scholars recognize that comparing religions can illuminate genuine similarities, but comparisons can also impose artificial categories upon traditions that developed independently.
The older “world religions” model is therefore being supplemented by approaches emphasizing particular cultures, historical contexts, migration, networks, and interactions. Recent scholarship explicitly challenges the traditional World Religions Paradigm because it can obscure the diversity of religious expressions within and between large traditions.
This does not mean that comparative study has disappeared. Quite the opposite. Comparison remains one of the most powerful methods available to religious scholarship. But contemporary comparison is more likely to ask how two traditions became similar or different within particular historical circumstances rather than simply searching for a universal essence called “religion.”
Religion and globalization
Globalization has also transformed the field.
Migration has carried religious traditions across national boundaries. Christianity has become increasingly shaped by Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Islam has developed enormous communities throughout Europe and North America. Hinduism and Buddhism have acquired new forms in Western societies. Judaism has developed multiple expressions across different national environments. Indigenous spiritual traditions have entered international conversations concerning ecology and human rights.
Religion can therefore no longer be studied simply within national borders.
A Pentecostal church in Lagos may have connections with churches in London and Houston. A Buddhist meditation center in California may draw upon teachers and texts from several Asian traditions. A Muslim community in Paris may maintain intellectual and family connections with North Africa, Turkey, the Middle East, or South Asia. A Hindu temple in the United States may simultaneously function as a religious institution, cultural center, community organization, and transmitter of diasporic identity.
Religion has become increasingly transnational.
Religion and politics
The apparent secularization of the modern world also produced an enormous expansion of scholarship concerning religion and politics.
During parts of the twentieth century, many scholars assumed that modernization would progressively marginalize religion. Yet the persistence and sometimes dramatic resurgence of religion forced scholars to reconsider this assumption.
Religious nationalism, political Islam, Christian nationalism, Hindu nationalism, Jewish religious politics, Buddhist nationalism, Pentecostal political movements, and religiously inspired social activism have all become major fields of research.
Religion is now studied not simply as a private matter of belief but as a force that can influence elections, political parties, constitutions, social movements, nationalism, international relations, migration, civil conflict, peacebuilding, and human rights.
This has made religious literacy increasingly important for political science and international affairs. Understanding contemporary societies often requires understanding the religious ideas that shape their citizens.
Religion, science, and the natural world
The relationship between science and religion has also become a major academic field.
Earlier discussions often focused narrowly on historical conflicts, particularly Galileo and Darwin. Contemporary scholarship is much broader. Researchers investigate cosmology, evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, environmental science, climate change, genetics, consciousness, medicine, and bioethics.
The questions are increasingly philosophical as well as theological. What does science tell us about human nature? What is consciousness? Does the universe possess purpose? How should technological power be morally constrained? What does evolution mean for religious understandings of creation? How should human beings relate ethically to other forms of life?
Environmental concerns have also generated new research into religious understandings of nature. Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Indigenous traditions, Islam, Judaism, and other traditions are being examined for their teachings concerning creation, stewardship, interdependence, ecological responsibility, and humanity’s relationship to the natural world.
The study of mysticism and contemplative experience
The academic study of mysticism has also expanded considerably.
Earlier scholarship often treated mysticism as a specialized subject within theology or religious history. Contemporary researchers examine mystical experience comparatively and interdisciplinary. Christian mystics such as Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, Julian of Norwich, and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing are studied alongside Jewish Kabbalists, Sufi mystics, Hindu Vedantins, Buddhist contemplatives, Daoist practitioners, and Indigenous spiritual traditions.
The question has shifted from simply asking what mystics taught to asking what mystical experience might tell us about human consciousness, language, selfhood, perception, and the nature of reality.
This has produced interesting connections between religious studies, psychology, philosophy of mind, neuroscience, and contemplative studies.
Digital religion
The rise of the internet has created another entirely new field.
Religion increasingly exists online. People attend worship services through livestreams, listen to sermons and lectures through podcasts, participate in online prayer groups, study sacred texts digitally, follow spiritual teachers on social media, and form religious communities with technologies like Zoom without sharing a physical location.
Scholars therefore increasingly study digital religion as a legitimate area of religious life.
Artificial intelligence is now beginning to introduce another dimension. AI can answer questions about sacred texts, generate religious commentary, assist with translation, create religious images, simulate conversations with historical religious figures, and become part of personal spiritual practices. This raises questions that religious scholarship is only beginning to explore. What happens when machines become participants in religious education? Can artificial intelligence mediate spiritual experience? What constitutes religious authority when anyone can obtain an apparently authoritative answer instantly? How might AI change the interpretation and transmission of sacred traditions?
These questions are likely to become a major part of religious studies during the coming decades.
The academic study of secularism
An especially interesting development is that scholars are now studying secularism itself with much greater intensity.
Earlier academic thinking sometimes treated secularization as the natural endpoint of modernization. Contemporary scholarship has increasingly questioned this assumption. Instead of asking simply why religion is disappearing, researchers ask how the categories of “religious” and “secular” were constructed historically.
The result has been a deeper examination of European secularization, colonialism, modern nation states, constitutional law, religious freedom, public education, science, and political authority.
The study of secularism has therefore become almost as important as the study of religion.
The growth of historical and archaeological scholarship
The expansion of archaeology, textual criticism, linguistics, and ancient history has also transformed religious studies.
Archaeological discoveries have changed our understanding of ancient Israel, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, early Christianity, and Second Temple Judaism. Manuscript discoveries, including the Dead Sea Scrolls and other ancient documents, have enabled scholars to reconstruct the diversity of religious ideas that existed before and during the formation of biblical and later religious traditions.
Modern textual criticism has likewise demonstrated that sacred texts often developed through long processes of composition, transmission, editing, translation, interpretation, and canonization.
Consequently, contemporary religious scholarship increasingly distinguishes between the historical development of a tradition and the way that tradition later understood its own origins.
This has been particularly important in biblical studies. Scholars now investigate how Judaism developed, how early Christianity emerged from its Jewish environment, how the New Testament writings circulated, how the biblical canon developed, and how later theological doctrines evolved.
The study of lived religion
Another major development is the movement from studying official religion to studying lived religion.
The distinction is crucial. Official theology may say one thing, while ordinary people may practice something more complicated.
A Christian may pray to saints even though their denomination emphasizes direct prayer to God. A Muslim may combine formal Islamic practice with local cultural customs. A Hindu family may combine temple worship, household rituals, astrology, festivals, meditation, and modern secular practices. A Buddhist may meditate without belonging to a formal Buddhist institution.
Lived religion studies what people actually do, not simply what religious authorities say they should do.
This has made the field much more attentive to women, children, families, migrants, minorities, popular culture, ordinary rituals, food, clothing, pilgrimage, music, art, sexuality, marriage, death, and everyday experiences of the sacred.
Gender and religion
The academic study of women and religion has expanded enormously.
Earlier religious scholarship was frequently written by men and concentrated on male theologians, clergy, philosophers, and political leaders. Contemporary scholarship has recovered the experiences and intellectual contributions of women throughout religious history.
This has led to new studies of women mystics, female theologians, women in early Christianity, women in Islam, women in Judaism, Hindu women, Buddhist nuns, Indigenous women, women in African religions, and women’s participation in religious movements.
Gender studies have also transformed the study of religious texts. Scholars increasingly investigate how assumptions about gender influenced the interpretation of scripture and how religious traditions have themselves contributed to changing understandings of gender.
Religion, psychology, and human consciousness
Another rapidly developing area concerns the relationship between religion and the human mind.
Researchers investigate why humans form religious beliefs, how rituals influence psychological states, why people experience awe, how prayer affects attention and emotion, why communities form around sacred symbols, and how religious identity develops.
The scientific study of meditation and contemplative practices has grown particularly rapidly. Practices originating in Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, and other traditions have become subjects of psychological and neurological research.
This creates an interesting meeting point between ancient religious practices and modern scientific methods. A practice may have originated as a religious discipline intended to transform consciousness, while modern researchers investigate its effects on attention, stress, emotion, cognition, or social behavior.
Religion and the human search for meaning
Underlying all these developments is an increasingly broad academic question: Why do human beings search for meaning?
Religion is increasingly studied as one of the ways human beings respond to fundamental questions concerning existence. Why are we here? What is the nature of consciousness? Why is there suffering? What constitutes a good life? What happens after death? Is there an ultimate reality? How should human beings treat one another? What gives life meaning?
These questions cannot be confined to theology. They belong simultaneously to philosophy, psychology, anthropology, literature, history, neuroscience, and the study of religion.
This is one reason the academic study of religion remains important even in increasingly secular societies.
From the study of “religions” to the study of humanity
The deepest transformation may therefore be conceptual.
The academic study of religion began largely by asking, “What do religious people believe?”
It gradually expanded to ask, “How did religions develop?”
Then it asked, “What functions do religions perform in society?”
Today it increasingly asks, “What does religion reveal about human beings, culture, consciousness, society, power, history, and the search for meaning?”
That is a much larger question.
The field has consequently moved from a relatively narrow discipline concerned primarily with ancient texts and major religious traditions toward an enormous network of interconnected disciplines concerned with virtually every dimension of human existence.
The 2025 International Association for the History of Religions World Congress provides an excellent symbol of this transformation. Its theme, “Out of Europe: Studying Religion(s) in Interconnected Worlds,” explicitly recognizes that the academic study of religion originated within a particular European intellectual environment but has now become a genuinely global enterprise. The Congress itself marked the 125th anniversary of the first international congress devoted to the study of religions, held in Paris in 1900.
The significance for the future
The growth of religious and spiritual studies is likely to continue because religion has not disappeared from the modern world. Instead, it has changed form.
Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Sikhism, traditional African religions, Indigenous traditions, and countless other traditions continue to evolve. At the same time, new spiritual movements, secular forms of spirituality, meditation communities, ecological spirituality, psychedelic spirituality, online religious communities, and individualized combinations of religious traditions are emerging.
The academic study of religion must therefore study both continuity and transformation.
It must understand ancient Mesopotamian religion and artificial intelligence, the Hebrew Bible and digital spirituality, Buddhist meditation and neuroscience, African Christianity and globalization, Islamic theology and migration, Indigenous spirituality and environmental ethics, Christian mysticism and consciousness studies, and secularism and the modern search for meaning.
Perhaps most importantly, contemporary religious studies increasingly recognizes that no single civilization possesses the complete intellectual vocabulary necessary to understand religion. European scholarship contributed enormously to the development of the modern discipline, but Asian, African, Middle Eastern, Latin American, Indigenous, and diasporic scholarship is now helping reshape its assumptions and methods. The resulting field is more pluralistic, more interdisciplinary, and more self-critical than it was even a generation ago.
The great historical significance of this expansion is therefore not simply that more people are studying religion. It is that humanity is developing increasingly sophisticated ways of studying its own deepest questions.
Religion is no longer being examined solely as a matter of faith. It is being studied as history, culture, psychology, philosophy, politics, art, literature, ritual, identity, community, consciousness, morality, ecology, and the human search for transcendence.
In that sense, the modern academic study of religion has become something larger than the study of religion itself. It has become one of the major ways in which humanity studies what it means to be human.