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.

Pharmaceutical Morality

Just off the phone with your doctor, you head straight for the pharmacy to pick up a dose of the not so felicitously named “morning after” pill. (Better: “Emergency Contraceptive Pills.”) Within earshot of just about everybody in the store, you are told that your new pharmacist’s conscience prohibits him from honoring your physician’s request.

Since the morning after pill has a 72-hour window of effectiveness, at most, what do you do now? Throw a fit? Leave the store with a paper bag over your head? Call your doctor in a panic and ask him to ring up another pharmacy? Confess to your minister what you and your partner been doing all this time in secret?

This particular pharmacist’s dubious moral stance rests upon the medically disputed notion that ECPs cause the uterus to contract and expel an implanted egg after the fashion of the abortion pill Mifeprex (also known as RU 486.) What makes his position dubious is that ECPs act only to delay ovulation and fertilization, or to block the implantation of a fertilized egg in the wall of the uterus. Since, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, a woman is considered pregnant only after implantation (the conceptus cannot develop and thrive without it), blocking the implantation serves only the purpose of contraception, not of abortion.

What went wrong at your pharmacy, therefore, is that on private moral grounds, your pharmacist made a medical decision (not to fill your prescription) that runs counter to prevailing medical opinion. There is nothing heroic about this action. Pharmacists have no business deciding moral issues for their customers in advance, in this case by finessing medical science altogether. Basically, they need to get out of the way while the rest of us, from both moral and medical communities, keep on talking.

So, let’s talk. One thing that does indeed make it difficult to assess whether people have a moral right to use ECPs is that we cannot be sure whether in any particular case, a feared conception has in fact occurred. Morally rather than medically speaking, preventing ovulation or fertilization is a quite different issue from that of preventing implantation of what has in fact been fertilized, but we cannot know for sure in particular cases whether it is the first or the second kind of prevention that an ingesting of the medication in question accomplishes. Does this make erring on the side of caution more defensible?

Perhaps, but this possibility leads straightaway to a second difficulty: we have no consensus in our society about when a human life (or, expressed more theologically, “ensoulment”) properly begins. By way of examples, for some it begins only with the first movement or with viability, in utero; for still others it begins only with the first breath after delivery. But if it does indeed begin with fertilization, then our misguided but conscience-driven pharmacist may still have a point. Upon this assumption, ECPs that block implantation (but not ovulation or fertilization) would indeed have lethal consequences for an actual and not merely potential human life, the view of the medical establishment to the contrary notwithstanding.

Even granting this latter assumption, however, will not dissolve the complexity of this issue. For another moral consideration is surely the circumstances under which conception may have occurred. For example, was it the outcome of a long-standing pattern of indifference to any serious thinking about the consequences of sexual behavior at all? Here, going for the ECPs would seem only to reinforce a continuing opting out of responsibility for ensuring that one’s actions bring no harm to others. One reason that sex isn’t for kids is that fooling around with it only makes for more kids, not intimacy, no matter how mature the bigger kids may think they are.

Perhaps, though, the conception --- if it occurred at all --- resulted from a single lustful act of two faithful lovers whose momentary passion swept away their usual cautions and preparations. Or from a simple forgetfulness to take THE pill. Or from a faulty condom. Or, more horrifically, from rape or incest. Do considerations like these add weight to the old adage that circumstances alter cases? I think so. If not in all cases, at least in some of them. With this qualification, though, the question still remains: from a moral perspective, are there any circumstances that might allow us to interfere with preserving human life?

Unfortunately, the pharmacist who is the subject of this meditation would like to decide all of these thorny issues for everyone by decree, and refuse access to ECPs altogether. Hopefully, instead of trying to undermine much needed dialogue on this very difficult moral issue, he and his fellow true believers will quit preaching and meddling long enough to join us in it.