Bangor University has announced that its school of theology and religious studies will close in 2013, merging with the theology department at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David in a cost-cutting exercise.
With university budget cuts of £200m planned, the loss of the department is unlikely to be an isolated case. At the University of Birmingham's school of philosophy, theology and religion, one of the largest in the UK, up to a third of staff are facing redundancy, while the University of Sheffield's biblical studies department was also threatened with closure last year. Universities are under pressure to make immediate and drastic savings, and theology seems to be failing to make the case for its survival as a discipline worth studying.
Many will argue that if anything is going to be cut, theology departments are a pretty obvious target. Theology doesn't cure cancer, build skyscrapers or even produce books that anyone in their right mind would want to read. Thomas Paine said that theology "is the study of nothing", while science fiction writer Robert A Heinlein, in a memorable metaphor, likened it to "searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there".
Anyone who has grappled with the torturous passages of Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica will certainly have some sympathy for this position, and Aquinas's musings on such obscurities as whether a mouse or a dog that eats a consecrated Eucharistic host receives the body of Christ, are certainly not a great argument for the continued public funding of theological education.
But it turns out that today's undergraduates don't all agree that theology is self-serving, insular and ultimately useless to anyone not planning to become a priest. The number of students opting to study the subject has been growing in recent years. The Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (Ucas) reported that applications for religious studies and theology courses increased by 7% this year and Durham, Manchester, and Edinburgh have all seen a rise in applications over and above this figure. Such an increase can't be down to a growth in religious vocations alone – something else must be going on.
One answer may be that these are high-quality courses, offering a solid grounding in arts and humanities subjects and a level of interdisciplinary study that is hard to find elsewhere. The soon-to-be-closed department at Bangor offers the expected modules in church history, philosophy of religion, comparative religion and Bible studies, but students can also take a much wider range of classes in history, linguistics and visual culture. The syllabus even stretches as far as film studies, with a course titled "Salvation in Celluloid", and another on the representation of Jews in film. These are specialist modules, no doubt, but they encompass a broad range of valuable historical and cultural material.
Indeed, it is perhaps the case that students opting to study theology are fully alert to the importance of the subject, as Cif Belief's own Tina Beattie has put it, as "a formative influence in the making of the western world in its beliefs and values and its forms of artistic and cultural expression".
While it might be argued that straightforward religious history, preferably with an eye to the wider social and cultural impact of religion, will do this just as well, without a basic understanding of theology, historians of religion would lack the tools to do their job properly. The same may be said of scholars of literature, philosophy and the history of art, working with an intellectual inheritance indelibly marked by religion and its theological complexities.
While the president of the National Secular Society, Terry Sanderson, has said that "if theology disappeared from human memory, no one would notice", it is in fact crucial to large areas of academic study and has an important role to play in the arts provision of our universities.
The arts and humanities have been the first to suffer in the initial wave of higher education budget cuts after Peter Mandelson ringfenced more "utilitarian" Stem subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) under the previous government. The trend of treating universities as factories for delivering graduates that meet the staffing needs of business and industry, and cutting subjects that are deemed superfluous to this, looks set to continue.
While there is certainly a debate to be had about what university should be for, the value of knowledge for its own sake should be defended and maintained as a central principle in our universities. If we accept that theology is a "useless" subject because it has a nebulous practical application, that principle will be severely undermined, to the profound detriment of higher education in Britain.