GOLETA -- The students call their major "religion on the ground."
One studies a singles group looking for love in a Los Angeles synagogue Friday nights. Another compares Hinduism and Christianity. His master's thesis profiled Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers, as a religious mystic.
A class schedule at the religious-studies department of the University of California at Santa Barbara reads like a road sign in a global village: Islam in America, medieval Judaism, early Christian novels, Taoism and Shintoism, along with related languages from Arabic to Ugaritic.
Tucked inside the humanities building, faculty offices are dotted with Buddhas and prayer rugs, ritual swords and a global selection of sacred texts, all facets of the larger picture: UCSB's religious-studies program brings together the jumble of modern culture and reassembles it under the heading of religion.
Although the standard university approach to the study of religion draws heavily from the Protestant, Catholic and Jewish traditions (not surprising in a country that is, according to the most recent census, 84 percent Christian), Sikhs, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, American Indians and others get equal time here. And although some observers fear that this sort of broad egalitarianism can dilute all religions, many clearly see it as the future. The program has 70 students working toward graduate degrees and about 200 undergraduate majors.
"It is very California," says Barbara DeConcini, executive director of the American Academy of Religion, an Atlanta-based scholarly group of about 8,000 academics. "It's also way ahead of its time. UC Santa Barbara is one of the leading religious-studies programs in any public university or state school. Others have looked to them for how to do it."
Instead of promoting any one religious faith, all are researched and analyzed, says Wade Clark Roof, head of the UCSB's department. Religion is studied by comparison: How is God different for a Hindu, say, than for a Jew?
Roof, a sociologist of religion, is a prime example of how Santa Barbara's program is different from most others. Roof tracks contemporary trends in religion, particularly among baby boomers, and was among the first to notice their "cafeteria" approach to faith and beliefs -- Catholics who allow for reincarnation and Jews who meditate with Buddhist teachers.
His approach to teaching religion is as much a product of constitutional law as it is of modern American culture. The separation of church and state, which makes it illegal to promote religious beliefs or practices in a public school, helped shape the UCSB program.
"Our department has very secular roots," says David Marshall, a comparative-literature professor who is dean of the program. "We approach religion the way we do the study of history or literature. We look at it from every point of view."
He sees religion as an all-purpose major, like literature or history, a way of understanding the world. "If you don't understand religion," he says, "you are not going to understand many of the global issues."
That applies all the way down to the home level as it becomes more and more common to find American families that represent more than one religious faith, Roof adds.
"The definition of religion is broader here than at other schools," says Steve Lloyd-Moffet, who studies Hinduism and Christianity, spending part of each school year at a Greek Orthodox seminary in New York to deepen his understanding of that tradition. "Here, religion is defined as a way to create meaning through symbols."
Even a standard dictionary gets more specific, mentioning God, beliefs and worship. But the absence of such particulars has attracted many of UCSB's students and faculty members.
Ines Talamantez, an expert in indigenous religions, has led about 20 students through doctoral dissertations. UCSB is one of a small handful of schools offering courses in her field.
"I was shocked to see that the school was actually looking for someone to teach Native American studies and related languages," says Talamantez, who is part Apache, part Mexican-American.
She discovered the job was open by reading an ad on a kiosk at Harvard, where she was a student in the late '70s. Now she receives letters from colleges around the country asking whether any of her students are ready for the job market.
The university's professor of Sikh studies, Gurinder Singh Mann, spent 15 years teaching at Harvard University and later at Columbia University in New York, coming to Santa Barbara two years ago.
"The program in South Asian studies compares with any I have seen," Mann says. "The entire department is becoming more and more comprehensive, with offerings not available anywhere else."
Catherine Albanese, a professor of American religion, teaches a course on American spiritualities, a subject treated as a footnote in typical church-history classes.
"When I was in graduate school in the late '60s, the study of American religion meant the study of church history," she says. Her class, by contrast, starts with the transcendentalism movement of Ralph Waldo Emerson's day and continues to the New Age philosophy.
As the country changes and a more diverse population enters public universities, programs built on Christian orthodoxies are coming to seem increasingly narrow, even insensitive. Santa Barbara's approach is by necessity moving into the mainstream.
"The knee-jerk reaction is, if you are teaching religion, you are proselytizing," says Randall Balmer, a professor of American religion at Columbia. The challenge, he says, is to find ways to teach about religion.
"The wise course in a public university is to stay away from classes in theology and move toward a comparative study," he says. Otherwise, "people get prickly."
Rowland Sherrill, chairman of the religious-studies department at Indiana University, says its program is a smaller version of UCSB.
"Religion, for us, is an academic enterprise," he says.
Even admirers, however, advise caution about the trend Sherrill pinpoints.
"There is danger of reducing religion to social studies," says Benjamin Hubbard, head of the comparative-religion department at California State University, Fullerton. "Questions of what the First Amendment permits have raised concerns about proselytizing in public schools," he says.
"But religion is a complex subject. Sacred texts, music, philosophy, architecture are all part of it. They shouldn't be ignored."
In his job, Hubbard sees public university programs starting to overshadow more traditional divinity schools.
"I looked at 85 applicants to fill a position in my department this spring," Hubbard says. "Not one of them went to a seminary. They studied religion as an academic subject."
Current offerings at UCSB reflect the shift in the way religion is taught. Christine Thomas, the school's professor of early Christianity, teaches a course about Jesus by comparing the ways Jesus is understood by several different religions. The reading list includes, "Living Buddha, Living Christ," by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh.
"We hope to communicate a vision of religion that is broader than what students have coming into the program," Roof says.