Religious Literacy and the Public Schools

Sometimes I think we may never get the issue of religion and the schools sorted out. Years ago, it may be remembered, the Supreme Court offered us sage advice on the subject, in the form of (a) a command to cut out a lot of praying, and (b) a challenge to rachet up a lot of studying, especially of religion’s influence on history and culture. We did not take up the challenge seriously because we were too busy railing against the command.

 What makes knowledgeable educators question whether religion can really become a subject for study rather than for indoctrination is precisely the kind of curricula that religious folks like to dish out. Consider, for instance, the popular elective course developed by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools. Some 300 school districts across almost 40 states offer this particular course, in the name of “biblical literacy.” Say what?

 The only real “literacy” this course supports is theological literacy, blatantly and unapologetically transmitted with a shockingly narrow view of divine inspiration, a mindless substituting of creationism for science, and an indiscriminate glomming onto archeology to prove the historicity of biblical texts. At best, students may come away from the course with a better knowledge of the many pretentious claims that sincere but naïve Christians make about their “Book of Books” from time to time. But they will get no help at all learning how the Bible has indeed played important roles in history, for good when it has been understood correctly, and for ill when it has not (e.g., when it has been used to defend slavery, the undervaluing of women, the divine right of kings, violence, and thought control).

 It is no wonder that especially thoughtful teachers and educational administrators in public schools and universities have expressed to me over the years that “it just isn’t worth the hassle” to introduce the subject of religion into an already crowded field of distributional, diploma, and degree requirements. And hassle there certainly will be, whenever the study of religion is given precedence over formation in religion. It will come from many quarters.

 Parents will worry that their children may be led astray from their faith foundations. Religious leaders will fret over their respective traditions not being presented as they themselves would do it (a big criticism of the NCBCPS course is that it’s too Protestant). Principals and deans will resent the inevitable conflicts and controversies because they take up too much of their time. Faculty sell-outs to secularism will fight for dear life to keep religious studies out of the schools altogether, no matter what the approach. And adding to all these flaps will be students who are hacked off that their religion course wasn’t a gut course after all.

 The best way to bring something constructive from all these hassles will be to get beyond the dubious idea that what students in this country most need is biblical and not  religious literacy. Why is this idea dubious? Because Americans now live in the most religiously pluralistic nation on earth, as part of an emerging global order too many of whose problems are lately arising from inter-religious conflicts. In this new situation, all of us need much more knowledge than we now possess of many religious traditions and not just one, in order to understand better the increasing numbers of people whose beliefs and actions are shaped by them. Hopefully, filling in the gaps will require so much of us that we will have neither time nor energy left for indoctrinating anybody into anything.

 We will get really serious about the honest study of religion in the schools until we are ready to leave the tasks of formation and indoctrination to religious rather than to publically-supported and funded institutions. Public schools in particular do not perform these tasks well anyway, so letting go of the expectation that they should is likely to prove a lot less difficult than we might think it will be. To use a favorite bible verse for a little different purpose, “the hour cometh and now is” to provide students with rigorous courses on religion which include, but are not confined to, studying the Bible.

 What it will take to make the courses rigorous is not hard to imagine: good teachers, up to date textbooks (shipped on time), carefully developed lesson plans, a super-abundance of reference materials --- all the usual stuff. But what will make the courses interesting to boot is their encouragement of both a respectfulness toward religious traditions different from one’s own, and a willingness to question even the most foundational convictions of those traditions in the search for capital T truth, called by many names, as many as there are religions seeking to understand and to live in accordance with it.