Right Goes Giddy Wild Over (Not) Catching Reza Aslan in a Lie

… flipping around Twitter a few moments ago, I noticed that the right-wing blogs are all giddy about supposedly catching Aslan misrepresenting his academic credentials. So they’ve got him, and all that.

I first saw it here at First Things. But it seems to go back to this post by Joe Carter at Get Religion. The gist of the attack is that Aslan lied about his academic credentials, specifically his academic degrees which give him some basis to write authoritatively about religion.

But when you read into it, it’s based on a kind of embarrassing lack of understanding of the intersection of various fields of study, particularly when it comes to the study of religion.

The big ‘lie’ is that Aslan says he’s “a PhD in the history of religions”. But, but … he got his PhD in a sociology department!!!!! Liar!

I’m sorry. This is silly. Plenty of ‘historians’ - as in working academic historians - have degrees in sociology. How common that is generally depends on methodological framework you work in. This is especially so in the academic study of ‘religion’ since people study the topic sometimes in History Departments, other times in separate Religion Departments and sometimes in Sociology or Anthropology Departments. And this doesn’t even get to programs of religious instruction where you’re possibly studying theology but might also be studying from a history-based disciplinary focus. This is not a ‘lie’ unless you’re really clueless or just hunting for gotchas.