K.L. Noll begins his recent essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education with a relatively uncontroversial clarification of what the academic study of religion represents:
Religious study attempts to advance knowledge by advancing our understanding about why and how humans are religious, what religion actually does, and how religion has evolved historically. (The latter is my subdiscipline.) Of course, each religion provides its own explanation about why and how the religion exists, but their answers to these questions depend on truth-claims advanced by the religion itself.
He then, however, goes on to insist that theology, while potentially academic, does not actually advance knowledge:
Whereas the theologian advances ideas about the religious value of ritual, religious study attempts to advance knowledge about ritual. Moreover, research suggests that most religious participants either do not know or do not care about the theologian’s ideas concerning the ritual’s significance. They are content to construct their own ideas about ritual, which reveals an irony many theologians fail to comprehend: Not only are the theologian’s ideas about ritual irrelevant to the religion researcher, they are irrelevant to most religious people.
In sum, the religion researcher is related to the theologian as the biologist is related to the frog in her lab.
Read more at the Chronicle of Higher Education.