It’s surprisingly easy to throw away an expensive career that once held much promise. It really involves just a two steps: spend thousands of dollars earning a Ph.D. in religious studies, and take a job in a seminary. It’s disheartening to watch colleagues going through this as seminaries contract, then close. I know how it feels personally. You’re suddenly aware that your years and years of training have made you practically unemployable. If you do find a job it won’t pay as well. Chances are you won’t enjoy it either. Having taught in a seminary will mark you in academia as one of those “uncritical believers,” and, well, nobody wants to touch one of those. While I would’ve taken a regular seminary job after my doctorate, my wife remembers me lying awake at night asking “Am I cutting off my career if I take a job at Nashotah House?” The answer: yes.
I’ve been watching colleagues have their worlds torn apart as seminaries try to figure out how to stay open when institutional churches are dying. Megachurches don’t require a seminary degree to run—natural grifters do it quite well with no advanced education, thank you. But mainstream churches have been losing members, and therefore financial support, for years now. And seminaries supply a commodity no longer in demand. This may have been a trend when I started out back in the eighties. If so, nobody told me about it. I walked into this career naive and came out jaded and cynical. My motives were to help other people. It’s getting harder and harder to find jobs where you do that any more. At least while being able to keep body and soul together.
Thing is, it takes years to earn the degrees you need to teach in a seminary. You have to think ahead. When I started out, trends suggested a huge glut of jobs in the teaching market. That never panned out, of course, as human predictions seldom do, and the decline in jobs has been pretty steady over the past thirty years. Back in the eighties seminaries were doing okay. Growing, even. I do hope it didn’t have anything to do with me, but I hit this surprisingly fragile market at just the wrong time. After having been overboard without a life preserver myself, it pains me to watch colleagues facing the same fate themselves. Religion hasn’t disappeared—it’s simply taken on new forms. Those forms don’t require seminary. Those of us who followed the rules on how to teach religious studies, however, somehow find ourselves in disposable careers.
