© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/15700682-12341463 Method and Theory in the Study of Religion (2019) 1-41 brill.com/mtsr METHOD THEORY in the STUDY OF RELIGION & Objectivity Discourse, the Protestant Secular, and the Decolonization of Religious Studies Travis Warren Cooper International Studies, Butler University, 4600 Sunset Avenue, Indianapolis, IN 46208 twcooper@butler.edu Abstract This article documents a complex genealogy of objectivity discourse that has shaped the study of religion in the modern academy. Analyzing data derived from a 2015 sur- vey administered to Big 10, Research 1, and Ivy League religious studies institutions in the United States, the study posits a provisional taxonomy of neutrality language. The debates about positionality and self-disclosure in religion classrooms, as explored in the taxonomy, is evidence of the pervasive epistemic framework of the “Protestant sec- ular.” The article proposes that religious studies, as a hybrid discipline, may address the status of the academy as an agent of the secular state by acknowledging its complicity in regimes of power and engaging in the rigorously critical, robustly ethnographic, and concertedly reflexive study of its own institutions and practices. Rather than removing objectivity discourse from religious studies, the article concludes by arguing for retain- ing a modified form of objectivist realism as a productive, decolonized ideal. Keywords objectivity discourse – identity – the Protestant secular – religious studies – the state – hegemony – pluralism In The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, Slavoj Žižek addresses the insistence of intellectuals to engage in language games about positions on the existence of beings of a “superempirical order” (Smith 2003: 98). To a hypothetical scholar, Žižek poses a question: “OK, let’s cut the crap and get down to basics: do you believe in some form of the divine or not?” In