Did you catch this FOX news interview this morning with the scholar who wrote a book about Jesus? I linked to it on Twitter, but never had a chance to carry the conversation to this blog. Well, lots and lots of other people linked to the interview and now his book is on top of Amazon. Just saw an interview with him on CNN. Seems like a sweet guy. Slate says he was prepped for that interview. More at the New Republic.
43 thoughts on “The Odd Fox News Interview and the Amazon Backlash”
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Apt. 11d 
I can’t imagine he even needed to be prepped; I’m sure he was totally savvy about what would happen. This is a splashy, Random House book, not an academic press; he’s not really a NT/Jesus scholar and this looks to be a rehash of earlier works by Crossan and other historical Jesus people. The book might be fine – his other major one, No god but god (a popular work on Islam) was fine as well – and he has enough money to pay research assistants for it to be thorough. And since I haven’t read it I can’t rule out the idea that his perspective is new; my take is just based on the fact that his PhD is in sociology of religion, he teaches in creative writing, and he published it with Random House.
This doesn’t mean the Fox host wasn’t an idiot, but I imagine his pitch for the book was “I’m a Muslim! Writing about Jesus!” The only surprise was that they didn’t release it at Christmas or Easter.
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hmmm… I saw some of my facebook friends commenting on this, but I thought it was yesterday… I have to check it out!
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Interesting interview, both because of the interviewer’s hostility and because of Aslan’s indisputable lies about his credentials. See http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2013/07/30/is-reza-aslan-off-the-hook/ Among other things, Aslan claimed, “I am a professor of religions, including the New Testament–that’s what I do for a living, actually.” No, he’s a creative writing professor. That’s not the same thing.
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What he said about himself was reasonable shorthand for a popular audience (and the excerpt is a little unfair – I think his “that’s what I do for a living” referred to all of the stuff before that). He teaches a course on Islam (I believe), his PhD is in religious studies and sociology, he worked with a well-known scholar of religion on it, he has a MA or MTS in religion, he knows NT Greek. So, as a religious studies scholar myself, I would not say it’s an “indisputable lie.” He’s more like someone who trained as a Civil War historian writing on World War I, and the work sounds like a common mix of journalism and scholarship that often appears in works for popular audiences.
Anyway, no one would be nitpicking his credentials like this if he weren’t Muslim, which is what’s stupid on Fox’s part. What I found fault with for him was that he responded to the initial question – a very ordinary question RS professors get from students all the time about how your own religion affects what you study and teach – defensively, and not as an educator would. And I think that was because he was after the free publicity. But who knows.
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It is entirely unprecedented in public discourse for anyone to say that it is “reasonable shorthand” for someone who got a PhD in sociology and now teaches creative writing to say that he is a “professor of religions, including the New Testament.” He is NOT such a professor, any more than the Fox News host herself.
It is not “nitpicking” to say that people shouldn’t describe themselves as a professor in one discipline when they are actually a professor of a completely unrelated discipline. Academia isn’t a free pass where, once you’re in somewhere, you can now describe yourself as a professor of anything you like.
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He should have said something more general (i.e. “I’m a professor and a scholar who has studied the New Testament”), but that seems like a really strange thing to fixate on. Speaking in an interviewer and getting the phrasing right isn’t easy.
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Likewise, anyone who calls Nietzsche a philosopher is also a liar, since he was a professor of philology, with a PhD in philology. The man has four degrees, a BA in religious studies, an MA in theological studies from Harvard div school, and a PhD in the sociology of religio, with a committee mostly from religious studies, and was an assistant professor of religious studies before getting tenure in a creative writing department, where he also occasionally teaches classes on religion. He writes and earns a living from writing books about the history and sociology of religion. Stating he is a professor of religion is at most a mild misstatement only for the most pedantic of pedants. A more accurate label would be that he is a public intellectual and scholar of religion, but I don’t think his actual statements were necessarily all that far off.
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You can’t really count a BA in this game.
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Sure, but leaving out the BA he has an MA and a PhD in “religion,”* which is pretty much as academically qualified as you get in a field.
*Since ‘religion’ isn’t the name of a discipline, we generally take this to be the topic, as it’s commonly accepted for people to list the topic of their degree instead of their discipline in colloquial speech, particularly if it’s something that can be studied from multiple disciplines.
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I agree with your general point (except maybe “public intellectual” seems a bit of a stretch since nobody ever heard of anything he did except appear on Fox news).
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Well, maybe wannabe-public intellectual is a more accurate term.
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BI, to repeat, having a PhD in a tangentially related field (sociology of religion is not the same thing as history of religion, FYI) does NOT mean you get to call yourself a professor in that field when you do not, in fact, have a professorial position that has anything whatsoever to do with religion in any sense.
It would be as if Greg Mankiw (Harvard economist and Bush adviser) somehow ended up as a creative writing professor, but wrote a book attacking Obamacare and then went on TV to claim that “I’m a professor of healthcare, it’s what I do for a living, actually.” I don’t think nearly as many people would be as eager to say that such a statement was close enough to the truth, because after all Mankiw had a degree in economics and that degree had something to do with healthcare too and who cares what you’re really a professor of if you wrote a whole book about it, doesn’t that count?
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I’d hope they’d ask him instead what alternative to Obamacare could possibly pass Congress at this point because as near as I can tell the official Republican position on health care for people under 65 is now nihilism.
Yes, he isn’t a professor of religion, but you’re hanging a great deal of weight on a really small nail. Departmental affiliations, courses taught, and research fields are often very different. If “professor of religions” is on his business card or CV, that is a problem. But if he just said it that way in an interview, it’s hardly proof of him being a liar. People often make errors like than when speaking. In fact, in the NYT article above, the quote is given as “scholar of religions,” which seems correct. I’m not sure who got the quote right.
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People do make errors when speaking, but it’s pretty rare to mis-identify your job title so wildly. In fact, I’d ask you to find another example in all of recorded TV history, but that seems an unfair challenge.
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It’s not a wild mid-identification. Before saying “professor of religions” he used the phrase “scholar of religions,” which I take it you aren’t arguing is inaccurate. He’s been asked to repeat himself lots of times on the same or related questions, which is a very old technique to get somebody flustered enough to say something wrong.
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If Mankiw got a PhD in public policy or economics with a focus on healthcare, and was an assistant professor of healthcare policy who then got tenure in a creative writing department but still taught classes on healthcare policy and did extensive research on healthcare policy and published multiple books on the topic, I would have absolutely no problem with him referring to himself as a ‘professor of healthcare.’
As to the history/sociology thing, I’m not sure how that’s a scandal. Aslan has a PhD in sociology of religion with an historical focus, and extensive formal training in the history of religions. He never said he had a history PhD, simply a PhD in the history of religion (colloquially speaking), which is true.
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I somehow just noticed his name is Aslan. Shouldn’t it be Tash?
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har har
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I don’t think he said he was a professor, right? I think he said he was a scholar. I think that one can be a scholar and not be affiliated with a particular university. I give the term “scholar” a whole lot of wiggle room. To me, a scholar is someone is reads a lot of books on a particular topic and spends a great deal of his/her time examining a particular subject over many years. I don’t even feel strongly that that person needs a PhD to call themselves a scholar.
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The crew over at the Skeptical OB has been giving The Feminist Breeder endless grief over the fact that TFB calls herself a “public health scholar” despite being only mid-way through her program for a master’s in public health. Given the awful risks that women and babies face from the sort of care that TFB promotes, I think it is fair to give her grief over her calling herself a scholar, but I suppose in other fields, the stakes aren’t quite as high.
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If you listen to his interview, my transcript is precisely correct, to wit, he said the words, “I am a PROFESSOR of religions, including the New Testament–that’s what I do for a living, actually.”
Lame excuses aside, that is just a lie. He is a professor of a completely different field. Getting a PhD in a field does not entitle anyone to claim to make a living as a “professor” of that field, otherwise lots of unemployed PhD’s could call themselves professors.
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He said “scholar of religions” just before that.
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So? Using an arguably correct term at one point doesn’t mean you get to lie about your job title later.
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By the way, any fair analysis would find that answer misleading too — he said, “I am a scholar of religions with four degrees, including one in the New Testament . . .” The clear implication is that all four degrees are in religion, but one of his degrees (and the one on which his academic career is based) is a Master in Fine Arts from the University of Iowa’s creative writing program.
A minor point, but it fits in with the pattern of exaggerating his credentials. An honest person would have said, “I am a scholar of religions with three degrees in that area.”
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I have to admit, I sort of side with WT here. I looked him up as I was listening to the interview, and I found his bio to be a bit vague. I don’t doubt his scholarship, but given that he used his credentials as support, they could have been a bit more … traditionally accepted (bad word choice–not sure what I mean). I guess my inner traditionalist academic is showing here.
I would have liked him to actually explain what his historical research shows. I think the interviewer was an idiot, no doubt, and she was appealing to the very worst in their viewership (OMG, a Muslim! Eek!) But I had greater expectations of his CV after his protestations.
(And yes, I got his book and look forward to reading it.)
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I doubt his scholarship and won’t read the book. He appeared on Fox to boost his book and that’s not a good sign for either. I still don’t understand the weird focus on those couple of sentences. If he’d actually written what he said in a CV, it would be one thing, but talking to the press live isn’t the same.
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By the way, I didn’t provide all of the transcript. Lauren Green had said, “Why would you be interested in the founder of Christianity?”
He said, after a pause, “Because it’s my job as an academic.”
Creative writing professors do NOT have the “job as an academic” of studying Jesus.
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The interviewer never asked him a substantive question. From the superficiality and nature of her questions, I surmised that she had not read the book to be able to draw conclusions on what his research showed, or even ask questions about possible gaps. She was armed with the complaints from others, which were vague and not at all specific. He mentioned several times that his findings went against what those who were criticizing and mentioned the extent of his research. I found the substance not at all disingenuous. A better interviewer would have been armed with specifics and the capability to counter them without needing to rely on the vaguely worded critiques of others.
As to his claims for credibility. I think WT protests to much. I get the general point that Aslan’s title as Prof. of Creative Studies at first blush does not seem to imply vast credentialing in religious studies (often not its own field). But further investigation shows he is thus credentialed. I’m not sure WT’s background (academia or no), but certainly there are many academics who teach in some subjects and do research in others. For example, one of my colleagues in Political Science is an expert on John Paul Sartre. His was a professor of international relations, but most of his scholarly writing was about Sartre and he was a scholar of his writings and work. It WAS his job as professor to study Sartre (as he received tenure and promotion on the basis of his scholarly writing), just as much as it was his job as an professor to teach international relations. His job did not require him to do both at the same thing.
Academic jobs (professor jobs) require three things: teaching service, administrative service to the college, and research productivity. The disciplines do not clearly prescribe/proscribe what sorts of writing must be produced, except to set out broad expectations in terms of scholarly output and publication credentials. Given his publication record, the scholarly merits of his work, and the research methodological standards he holds himself to, he most certainly is a scholar of religions. He is also a professor, which implies much more than a mere teaching persona.
Not only that, he’s on the Council of Foreign Relations. In addition to an Ph.D, he also has an M.F.A. He doesn’t just teach at Riverside, he’s taught classes in religion, for example, at U. of Iowa. His C.V. teaches a great deal about the many hats that academics can wear.
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He may wear different hats, but, sadly, one hat he most definitely does not wear is “professor of religion.” Your defense is completely disingenuous — there are law professors who do some economic research, for example, and who have PhD’s in that field, but you would never ever catch one of them saying, “I am a professor of economics.” Nor would you ever catch an economics professor claiming to be “professor of law.”
Academics do indeed write articles or books that cross disciplinary boundaries, but it is a huge no-no to claim to actually be a “professor” in a completely different department than your own. I can’t believe anyone familiar with academia would be stupid enough to say that claiming a professorship in a completely different department is ever OK.
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I have been enrolled or employed at one university or another for over 20 years and I’ve never heard anybody raise a fuss like this except an undergraduate who got a bad grade and was trying to belittle a TA. While it is true that claiming an affiliation they never had is a big problem, I can’t see the case that he was doing that from that transcript. This is something only Germans do.
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Let me repeat it for the third time: he claimed to be a “professor of religions.” Why are you having a problem seeing that he is claiming the wrong departmental affiliation here?
I’m only raising a fuss because I am in such disbelief that anyone is defending such a blatant lie. If you’ve been around academia for 20 years, find me one other example of a professor in one department claiming to be a professor in a completely different department. Just one.
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In any normal discussion, pointing out that someone claimed to be a professor in a different department would cause everyone else to say, “Yeah, for sure that was wrong of him to say that.” Then there would be no fuss. Instead, we have several commenters of putatively different identities all claiming that it’s no big deal/
Are all these commenters really Aslan in disguise? I find it hard to believe that anyone other than Aslan himself would want to die on this particular hill.
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I’m over, healthy and happy, on a different hill. How do you get “claiming the wrong departmental affiliation” from that brief statement in the context of a larger statement about his expertise in the midst of a hostile interview. He’s claiming an area of study, not a department. I’ve already allowed that he was inaccurate to use the phrase he did, but I don’t see the leap from there to deliberate fraud or blatant lie. And this is my last unless you actually address that.
As for your claim of “putatively different identities,” most of us have been leaving comments on this site with these same identities for several years.
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“From the superficiality and nature of her questions, I surmised that she had not read the book to be able to draw conclusions on what his research showed, or even ask questions about possible gaps.”
Practically nobody ever really reads “hot” books. The trick is to gracefully disguise that fact.
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What everybody else said, and also, he teaches a religious studies course (that is, he is, or at least recently has been, the professor in a religious studies course). Juergensmeyer, his PhD advisor, is a huge name in the sociology of religion and well-recognized as a religious studies scholar. And religious studies is by nature an interdisciplinary field – in my dept we have an ethicist, a theologian, a ritual expert, and a historian, but religious studies courses at my university are also sometimes taught by profs in African American studies, sociology, political science, and English.
So I’m just trying to explain my field, which is, to put it mildly, not very well understood. Of course to be fair no one agrees on what exactly it should be anyway!
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So, I asked Steve what he thought about this discussion. He’s a historian, even though he’s not a professor of history anymore. He will cut you, if you call him a history buff.
He said that reviewers gave this book a “meh” review, though he would eventually check it out. He also said that the field of history has a long tradition of being open to writers of all disciplines, even those outside of academia. Some of the best history books have been written by non-academics. So, he (and most others in his field) wouldn’t judge the quality of his book by the guy’s degree or formal affiliation.
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Here is a comment from first things first from his thesis advisor, Mark Juergensmeyer:
Mark Juergensmeyer
July 29th, 2013 | 9:19 pm
Since i was Reza’s thesis adviser at the Univ of California-Santa Barbara, I can testify that he is a religious studies scholar. (I am a sociologist of religion with a position in sociology and an affiliation with religious studies). Though Reza’s PhD is in sociology most of his graduate course work at UCSB was in the history of religion in the dept of religious studies. Though none of his 4 degrees are in history as such, he is a “historian of religion” in the way that that term is used at the Univ of Chicago to cover the field of comparative religion; and his theology degree at Harvard covered Bible and Church history, and required him to master New Testament Greek. So in short, he is who he says he is.
But anyways, WT hasn’t substantively addressed any of the points people have made, he’s simply been repeating the same comment over and over again. I’m not sure his style of commenting deserves lengthy, well thought out responses. But anyways. I could refer to myself as a “scholar of China” even though I don’t and will not ever have a PhD in “China.” That is not the name of a discipline of study. The closest I could come would be to get a PhD in Chinese/East Asian studies or some such dept, which itself is an interdisciplinary field which includes people trained in other departments, including the one I am currently in. I work with a professor in an East Asian studies department who has a PhD in sociology and also does historical work. He is not *in* the sociology department, however he is a sociologist, and calling him a professor of sociology would not be a misrepresentation of what he does. He is also frequently referred to, by other historians, as a social historian, is a member of history professional associations, publishes in history journals, and advises history PhD students. If he went on a TV show where someone questioned how, as a European, he could write about Chinese history, he could say, “because I am a professor of China, and of Chinese history,” and no one in the fields of history, China studies, or sociology would blink an eye. If people who had no knowledge of these fields and a personal vendetta against him because of his ethno-religious background kicked up a fuss about it, then most people would assume it was for other reasons than their concern with maximal credentialing integrity.
Or, maybe a simpler way to put it. If religious historians are fine with Aslan’s credentialing claims, then I don’t how anyone else really has the ability to contradict them.
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I have seen zero evidence that religious historians, or anyone with the slightest competence in any academic field, is fine with a creative writing (!!) professor calling himself a “professor of religion, including the New Testament.”
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East Asian studies isn’t as completely wildly 100% different from history as creative writing is from a religion department. So try again with an analogy that makes at least a little sense.
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WT–Aslan has taught different things at different places. For instance, this past academic year, 2012-2013, he was a visiting professor at Drew’s Center on Religion, Culture and Conflict. That would seem to indicate that at least for this past academic year he was a professor of religion at Drew.
http://www.drew.edu/crcc/programsinitiatives/wallerstein-distinguished-visiting-scholars
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Thanks — you’re the first person who came up with an actual reason to think that Aslan wasn’t lying through his teeth about his “job.”
Everyone else: you still have no excuse. You know it’s not kosher to claim to be a professor in a completely different department, and yet without any evidence, you defended Aslan just for ideological reasons.
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It’s still not very good evidence, of course. If he was talking about the Drew affiliation, he could have said, “For one year, I was a visiting scholar at a center that includes religion among the ‘many disciplines’ that it addresses.” Instead, he claimed to be a professor of religion, current tense, and specifically including the New Testament.
So the best case so far is that Aslan was improperly extrapolating a one-year affiliation to the current day and was claiming a professorship in the New Testament that apparently has never existed at all.
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If I was the host of a dinner party and this conversation was happening, I would clear my throat, say something banal like “agree to disagree,” and then pour everyone a large glass of whiskey. I don’t think anyone can say anything to change WT’s mind, so let’s move on to another subject.
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