The Scientific Study of Religion

"The Religious Studies community, especially as it is represented by the American Academy of Religion, has to a large degree continued to espouse a form of postmodernism, largely, it appears, in order to provide room for religion and humanistically inspired socio-political agendas as part of the Religious Studies enterprise. By curtailing the scientific agenda with its search for testable hypotheses about religion, or some element or aspect thereof, the student of religion, it seems, is justified by postmodernism in seeking---or is at least permitted by it to see---something other than mundane knowledge about religious belief of behavior."

- Donald Wiebe "The Scientific Study of Religion and Its Cultured Despisers"