Academic Overview

Why Study Religion?

The undergraduate major in the Study of Religion offers students the opportunity to understand how and why religion plays such a central role in virtually every aspect of human society around the globe. Students explore the histories, texts, and practices of many of the world’s religious communities and consider both the profound ways in which religion has worked historically and how it continues to inform and affect the cultural, political, and ethical debates of the current moment.

Religion asks questions that touch every aspect of human life. The academic study of religion is self-consciously interdisciplinary, drawing upon the methods and insights of literary studies, historiography, social analysis, and cultural comparison. As such, students complete courses in a wide range of departments in which religious phenomena are analyzed. Moreover, the study of religion highlights how religious identities demand sustained critical analysis, intersecting complexly as they do with race, class, gender, and ethnicity, among other categories of affiliation and identification. A good percentage of our students choose this major in combination with a second major field, a minor, or related language study.


What have UCLA students done with a Study of Religion major?

Given the many ways the major helps students understand so much about our world, students have used the major to enter a wide variety of professional fields after graduation. In a recent survey of our students, we learned that many went into:

  • Legal professions
  • Counseling professions – e.g. social work, psychology
  • Health professions
  • Business
  • Education – e.g. teaching in K-12 schools and on to PhD programs
  • Marketing, writing and communications
  • Management
  • Nonprofit or non-governmental organizations (NGOs) 
  • Advertising and publishing      
  • Government
  • Religious vocations (minister, imam, etc.)
  • And more!

If you have any questions about the Study of Religion major or minor, please contact our Academic Advisor, Beth Kraemer, at bdkraemer@humnet.ucla.edu.