At a recent conference on Metal and Religion professor Marcus Moberg, following Bruce D. Forbes categorizations of the way scholars study Popular Culture and Religion, outlined three categories with which scholars engage with the metal and religion. The first, “Religion in Metal”: exploring ways religious ideas, themes texts, and images are used as inspiration. The second, “Metal in Religion”: looking at examples of religious people or groups who have adopted metal music as a vehicle for religious expression. And the third, “Metal as Religion”: studies argue that for some metal functions as a kind of religion with all that entails. This course is structured around examples drawn from each methodological category, which will be used not just as interesting case studies in of themselves, but as springboards to discussions about the ways we study religion more broadly.
