Hm, whether a scientist is religious should bear little relation to studying religion or anything adjacent to it. For historians it'd be more obvious I think:

Hm, whether a scientist is religious should bear little relation to studying religion or anything adjacent to it. For historians it'd be more obvious I think: it would be foolish to ignore religion since it's an artifact of human history. A historian who is an atheist can still study and compare religions. But what about science? While the object of religion itself, i.e. the supernatural, is outside the scope of the scientific method, the existence of religion and religious practices themselves is not. What if there's a biological cause of religious belief? What if religious belief is a side effect of the same brain structures that make humans social animals, or that makes capable of language, or conscious, or something like that? As long as you're not making a religious argument, religion as a human artifact should be fair game for science. The risk could be to offend religious people, of course.