CSER is a research division of the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, New York. According to the terms of its charter, CSER is a nonprofit educational organization working to promote and defend freedom of inquiry in all areas of human endeavor. Humanistic in outlook, the membership of CSER includes scholars embracing secular as well as a variety of religious perspectives.

Since 1983, the Committee has worked to promote humanistic and critical approaches to the study of religion, and to foster the public understanding of religion in the United States and abroad. Its members include biblical and Quranic scholars, experts in the history of religion, archaeology, philosophy, and the natural and social sciences. It has sponsored educational programs and conferences in America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America since 1984.

With this history in view CSER adheres to the following vision of its role:

• CSER locates its values in the humanistic thought of the American and European Enlightenment and the liberal critical traditions of post-Enlightenment culture. It honors the principle of free inquiry in all areas of knowledge, and freedom from religious encroachment in public life and public education. In concert with its parent organization, the it encourages the critical study of religion in schools and universities using impartial and cross-disciplinary methods. While acknowledging that political systems across the globe express divergent cultural values, it sees the modern perception of human rights and civil liberties as originating in conversations which were normally critical of established religion. CSER has purposely sought to highlight the work of liberal and critical religionists, innovators, heretics, atheists, freethinkers, and humanists who have challenged religious traditions to explain and defend their structures, doctrines, moral theory, and political commitments. CSER sees these values expressed among its intellectual progenitors-from Epicurus to Feuerbach and Popper--who have confronted dogmatic forms of religion through their discourse or in their scientific work.
• The Committee recognizes that the inheritance of the Enlightenment entails appraisal of the Enlightenment itself. It regards the critical appraisal of discourse and meaning as a bridging principle between the modern and postmodern world and one which postmodernism has used effectively in challenging the scientific absolutism and “historicism” of the modern period. Its examination of religious ideas and structures is not defined by particular modes of analysis or approaches to meaning. While the Committee comprises a wide diversity of approaches to the study of religion, it rejects parochial and apologetic methods.
• While acknowledging the putative legitimacy of all forms of historical and literary criticism, CSER nonetheless insists that ideas are located in history and have an impact on people living in diverse societies and in particular social and political circumstances. To this extent, the academic values it champions are those most likely to have an influence on belief systems, either by clarifying the nature of belief, the origins and warrants of beliefs, or the effect of beliefs on individuals and their political communities. It possesses no “list” of acceptable methods and encourages innovative approaches to the study of religion consonant with its values.
• Traditionally critical of religious fundamentalism and the pseudo-scholarly methods that support it, CSER also notes the excesses of postmodern and New Age sectarianism and the academic eclecticism that makes the irrational and the rational, the esoteric and the universal, the merely personal and the unavoidably public, coequally valid and indifferently true “meta-narratives” without general cogency. It is committed to the view that because humankind is historical, the products of culture and civilization will always be subject to judgements of a historical nature and do not achieve validity merely through popular assent, private interpretation, or individual experience.
• CSER is committed to enhancing the public understanding of religion and to the fair assessment of the role of religion in society. It carries forward into the twenty-first century Jefferson’s anxious concern that an “uneducated public be led not astray by unscrupulous clerics,” and that the voice of the people in a secular democracy be an authentic and informed expression of conscience and choice. Through the example of its seminar, conference, and publication program, it has petitioned the academy to be an honest broker of ideas in theological and religious studies: neither to tantalize the public with spurious “discoveries” nor to lure them into the esoteric attractions of new gnosticisms, lost sayings, faith-based medicine, sham science, and paranormal adventuring.
• CSER is committed to the principle that both religious and secular ethics are subject to critical appraisal and discernment. It respects the fact that the world’s religions have played a significant role, alongside secular philosophies, in the construction of moral ideals. CSER thus believes that this role must be evaluated in terms of scientific, cultural, and intellectual change and should not represent a fixed point in the history of moral thought.