When I first decided to go into full-time freelancing, my freelancing mentor -- the intrepid and way-too-smart Dr. Greta Perel -- suggested that I start doing some informational interviews with other writing freelancers to find out about how I should be preparing and professionalizing myself in the transition from assistant professor to freelancer.
In addition to contacting people I knew and people whom I had some other kind of connection to (fellow university alumni, etc.), I started some light investigoogling (a phrase I picked up from my dear friend Nate McKee, Director of Learning Technologies at the University of Washington) of copyeditors whose work focused on the kind of work I wanted to specialize in: book-length manuscript copyediting, including academic books and dissertations.
Over and over, I kept seeing a qualification that these random freelance copyeditors whose (amazing well-developed) websites I was perusing had in common: a background in religious studies.
Many of them had undergraduate degrees in RS. Some of them had graduate degrees, including PhDs and MDivs. Part of why I found this so interesting is that I, too, have an undergraduate degree in RS. In fact, I knew I wanted to be a theology major by the time I was a sophomore in high school. Unfortunately, I also knew that I wanted to counter my small-town rearing by going to a gigantic state university and getting lost in the crowd. I ended up in an RS major that was more sociology than theology, and while that was fine, it wasn't enough to keep my interest, so I added the English major and went to grad school to become a professor of rhetoric and writing studies rather than the Hebrew Bible (my first and true passion).
But how did so many of us RS majors end up on the same path, post-college?
The obvious answer: There just aren't a lot of tenure-track jobs in RS, and graduate programs that are likely to give you entree to such a job are really competitive. (NB: Let's be honest about the fact that that's more or less how small humanities disciplines work when it comes to jobs. School and, to a far lesser degree, program reputation are far more valuable than dissertation topic, publication record, and especially teaching achievements.) So, we end up outside RS. But why do we end up as freelancing copyeditors and not, say, ministers or social workers?
The market answer: Religious people read. A lot. And a variety. There's no shortage of monthly devotionals or religious novels or group-study materials to be edited. And if you're an editor at a religious publisher who has the choice between a copyeditor who has 10 years of experience in, say, business writing or a copyeditor with three years of experience and a background in religion, you might be more likely to go with the person who has a deeper familiarity with the material.
The skills answer: If there's one thing a background in religious studies can do, it's teach people how to read texts carefully. This works on at least two levels that are relevant for copyediting.
First, we're taught to read for meaning and significance. If the verse is translated such that Jesus as "angered" rather than "indignant," how will that change the meaning of this passage? In this regard, we're also excellent researchers. If you've got a question about a religious text, trust me: at least fifty other scholars in that religion have also had that question, and they've each published articles if not books on it, so you better do your research before you declare that a text means what you say it will.
Second, we're taught to read for minute details. The placement of a comma might make a world of difference for the meaning of a certain teaching. If Jesus is said to have "wept" in one passage and also to have "cried" in another, is that a difference that matters, or is that just an example of synonyms? These questions matter far more in religious explication than they do in, say, a resume I'm copyediting, but I've been trained to ask them, nonetheless.
The probably-true-but-don't-bank-on-it answer: We're honest and diligent workers, fearful of being caught as sinners in the hands of an angry G-d.
Ultimately, I'm not sure why so many of us RS-minded folks are interested in freelance copyediting. When I was an undergraduate, I was in an RS class in which everyone had to have their term papers workshopped by the rest of the class. My paper was about Chaucer and Paul Tillich's notion of "ultimate concern." The professor of the class -- whom I couldn't stand -- introduced my paper by saying, "All you people with literature-and-religion papers should start a club. You're everywhere."
LOL sry bro.