by Michael Tang, Premier Christianity
The number of theology departments in the UK have halved in a decade, with the University of Exeter the latest to make deep cuts. Michael Tang argues that the knowledge factories are closing at the very moment our culture is hungriest for wisdom
Last week the University of Exeter, a Russell Group institution, announced that it was weighing deep staff cuts, with the humanities taking the heaviest blow – and theology and religious studies among the most exposed subjects.
Francesca Stavrakopoulou, one of Britain’s best-known scholars of religion, is among those calling for the subject to be saved. The think tank Theos has named the moment plainly: the imminent collapse of theology and religious studies in this country. Their figure is the one that stays with me. Two decades ago, there were more than 40 departments teaching the subject across the UK. Today that number has roughly halved.
This decline runs back to the early 2010s, to raised tuition fees and a narrowing sense that a degree is worth only what it later earns. And yet the arrival of Artificial Intelligence has done something that the long, slow decline never quite managed. It has forced an old question into the open: What was theology ever for?
The search for meaning and knowledge
The instinctive defence, the one Theos itself reaches for, is that AI raises enormous questions about meaning, agency and responsibility, and that we need the humanities – and theology in particular – to help us answer them.
That is true, but perhaps it also concedes too much. It leaves theology looking like a service department for other people’s dilemmas; useful in the way a good reference library is. If that were the whole case, AI really could replace it, because AI is an extraordinary reference library.