Monday, March 31, 2008

Getting It Right On Bible Courses In Schools

If a recent decision of the State Board of Education in Texas is any indication, there are a lot of ways not to get this right. After approving "broad guidelines" for an elective course on the Bible in high schools, the Board apparently then found itself flummoxed by the Texas Legislature's initial mandate that left unspecified whether all school districts will or will not be required to offer the course in the first place. Both bodies are leaving this question for the State's Attorney General to answer. In the meantime, the Board of Education is delaying proposing specific curriculum requirements and content standards for the recommended course until the A.G. answers it.

Where might we begin sorting through a mess like this? With a state legislature's malfeasance in passing yet another law with easily spotted bugs in it? With an Attorney General forced to muck around with issues that properly should have been decided by educators, not educational administrators and not school bureaucrats, in the first place? With a School Board bogged down because of an unwillingness to take fully into account what freedom of religion does and does not imply for the teaching of religion in our schools? For now, I'll settle for a few thoughts on the latter.

My first thought is that it is a good thing for high school students to have an opportunity to study the Bible's impact on history, literature, and culture, in a separate course devoted to just this subject. My second is that it is not a good thing to offer a Bible course in any context that even remotely resembles a devotional or a proselytizing one, particularly of the sort revered by Bible-massaging evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants who believe to the depths of their souls that its pages "containeth all things necessary for salvation," and that only they, of all the sacred scriptures of all the world's religions, does this. My third thought is that Bible courses that incorporate my first thought are likely to be good courses, and that Bible courses that do not incorporate my second thought are not.

And so it bothers me some that the Texas Board of Education has not yet seen fit to be very explicit about what sort of Bible course it will be that their kids and grandkids will be letting themselves in for. One of the most popular around the country these days, put together by a National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, has already been analyzed and found wanting by a number of religious studies scholars whom I know and respect, and if I may be bold to say so, my own reaction to its voluminous materials is even more negative than some of theirs. Those for whom this course appears to be lacking in solid scholarship can make a good case for looking elsewhere.

Devotional, proselytizing approaches to Bible study may be acceptable in churches (even though I think they still make for largely irrelevant Christian education), but they have no place in public education, lower, higher, or anywhere in between. And until the Texas Board comes out and says this in no uncertain terms, I hope that school districts will find a way to hold back all the God fearing, frothing at the mouth, washed in the blood Christians in their communities who can't wait to have at all the impressionable young infidels in their midst. The intention of the Texas Legislature in 2007 seems clearly to have been in the direction of asking for a course that focuses on the contributions the Bible has made to human culture, not a course that indoctrinates. It might have helped had the potential contribution been defined bi-modally, that is, in the direction of emphasizing just as strongly the contributions that culture has made to the formation and the transmission of the Bible. But at the very least, the Legislature has made possible a rigorous study of the Bible in secondary schools, in contrast with an inappropriate invasion of them by religious zealots who should be focusing more on their day jobs. Hopefully, the Board of Education will quickly head off any prospect of the latter.

In the final analysis, though, what the world needs now is not just a spreading of Scriptural Christianity across the land(s), but also a new openness to how the Lord and Giver of Life is already embodied in human nature generally and is manifest wherever men and women devote themselves sacrifically to seeking and finding what is truly Holy. Hey, legislators and school board members: how about a little more attention to the religious experience and the religions of all humankind, and not just Christians'?

Monday, March 17, 2008

The Churning Of Religious Affiliation

Recently, the highly respected Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released a well-researched study on religious affiliation in America. Its findings yield an interesting mix of confirmation, surprise, and questions for further reflection. In the first place, the study confirms a prevailing opinion of researchers that a large majority of Americans identify themselves as religious, but not always in the form of institutional --- or, in Protestant Christian terms, "denominational" --- loyalty. In my words and not Pew's, we seem to be able to move on rather easily, without much anxiety or guilt, from the religious affiliation or non-affiliation of our childhood, to make our own affiliative choices in adulthood. Second, the Pew report offers further confirmation of two other well-established beliefs. One is that mainline Protestantist denominations continue to decline, while non-denominational Protestant groups continue to grow. The other is that the single fastest growing religious category of people in America is the category of "unaffiliated."

One surprise from the Pew study is that religious affiliation may be even more fluid than previously supposed. Not only do we feel a lot of freedom to move our affiliations around, whenever we choose; we actually do move them around, and in large numbers. 40% of Baptists and Lutherans have done so, as have more than 50% of Methodists, Presbyterians, and Pentecostals. Another surprise is that being raised without a religious affiliation does not seem to have the negative effect across peoples' life-span that religious leaders often assert that it does. Apparently, over half of those with this so-called deficit in childhood have made their way into a religious affiliation as adults. Finally, although defections among American Catholics have been written about for years, I at least am somewhat surprised at the extent of the disaffiliation, at least as the Pew report computes it --- upwards of 7.5%.

Possibly, this latter finding is better regarded as a confirmation finding, of the "I knew it all along" sort. Certainly, there are reasons not to be surprised by Catholics' leaving their parishes in droves --- authoritarianism, sexism, pedophile priests, to mention the more florid ones. But I still have some doubts about the stats. As does the Pew report itself, which acknowledges the possibility of a significant undercounting of currently affiliated Catholics, for one thing because of its researchers' difficulties reaching Hispanic, illegal immigrants currently in the country. If most of these folks are Catholic, as may be presumed, then the percentage slide of Catholics in America that the Pew study posits may not in fact be as steep. There will be those, of course, for whom this is a non-issue. People who are here illegally, I can hear them saying no matter how hard I try to shut my ears, have neither a religion nor a personhood worth counting for anything.

The previous paragraph opens out on the fact that the Pew Forum study raises important questions to think about with regard both to its accuracy in general and to the meaning of the trends it does seem to confirm clearly. With regard to the former question, and by way of further example, people who believe that this country has always been and always should be Christian can breath a sigh of relief that the Pew statistics yield at least a superficial level of support for their perspective; roughly 80% of Americans are still identifying themselves as Christians. But to me it is curious that this research has turned up no significant increases in the number of Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus in the population, even though many noted writers about religion in America --- Harvard's Diana Eck comes to mind immediately --- have been touting significant increases at least in the latter three groups for some time.

And with respect to the question about further implications, I for one was struck by Pew's finding that fully a third of marriages in this country are between spouses who at least say that they belong to different religious groups. I wonder just how "different" these differences are, whether or not they are mattering very much, and if they are, how these couples are dealing with them, if they are dealing with them at all. It will take more than just a poll or a questionnaire to secure meaningful answers to these questions. But it is "the bottom line" of this report that is likely to generate the most reflection in the weeks to come, the so-called churning of religious affiliation that is emerging as a major feature of American religious life. Is the trend --- if it is indeed a trend --- something to bemoan or to celebrate? My first reading of the Pew Forum report inclines me toward the latter.

Monday, March 03, 2008

Toward A Christian Perspective On Globalization

One thing that church history makes plain is the ease with which Christianity's original and relatively simple message, about God's love for all and our obligation to be loving to all in his name, can be deformed into an impenetrably thick system of rationalizations for channeling that love only to some, beginning most typically with the system's perpetuators. Old arrangements, based upon ideas of special covenants conveying special privileges, get quickly re-established, and any remnant of a sense of solidarity with every other human being on the planet becomes overwhelmed by demands to hunker down in one's own family, tribe, nation, and especially, sect --- at least, for as long as neither gets in the way of individual members' enjoying all the purely personal blessings they falsely believe to be their divinely bestowed entitlements. For churches and other religions infected with such ideology, global thinking reduces to little more than strategizing for conquest, held captive by worldly values incapable of articulating a vision beyond that of competitiveness, aggression, and letting the best interests of most of the world's peoples go unmet by default.

Christianity is saying less than it should be saying these days about so many of the crucial issues affecting human life on a global scale --- the scale that at least for the immediate future is our only meaningful point of reference. By way of illustrations: the current East-West conflict, between a long-disrespected Islamic culture and a long self-posturing Christianized and democratized one, is becoming something to be dealt with only in the form of battles to be won, not differences to be reconciled. The problem of climate change is being dumbed down to little more than intermittent anguish over declining seaside property values on the part of potential owners more than willing to profit from what has brought about some of the most telling changes in the first place. The decimation of species across the planet continues to fuel mostly fruitless debates between people not green enough to change their own life-styles all that much and people too floridly green to consider any strategies other than violence as the way toward redeeming the environment. Mass migrations from a combination of genocidal political policies, erosion of economic opportunities, and hopes for a better life in general are being greeted more as intrusions than with welcomes, with the tragic consequence that humankind --- once referred to as God's people --- remains mired in the very state of alien-ation to which the Gospel message is supposed to offer a corrective.

And then there is the global economy, the world that one of my favorite columnists, Thomas Friedman, eloquently assures us is no longer flat, and in which it is no longer profitable to act like flatlanders. "Profitable" is the key word here. The value added to human life by means of the present cobbled together system of economic globalization is value measured primarily by the profits the system generates --- to those who have and exercise power in and over it. The system exhibits decidedly less concern about the countless numbers of powerless workers and families affected by it, except perhaps by pausing occasionally to remind everyone that, as if by some mysterious and transcendent force of nature, goodies generated at the top will inevitably trickle all the way down to the bottom, and always in proportion to genuine need and worthy expectation. Yeah, sure.

One big reason why Christianity's voice in matters like these is at best halting and at worst non-existent is that too many of the churches representing it are too preoccupied with too many churchy things, and getting them done the right way, e.g.: building bigger and more impressive housing with which to tempt away more and more of other churches' members; enveloping people of all ages into entertaining and sometimes even spiritual programs, from womb to tomb; transmitting beliefs and moral precepts with such persuasiveness that no one need suffer even a momentary impulse to question anything; and ensuring that no door will ever be darkened by anyone unworthy to associate with the general membership. The amount of energy committed to ventures like these, 24/7, is truly awesome, to such an extent that it almost takes on the appearance of petty grousing to wonder whether our churches are prepared to help all that much in dealing with the really important, global matters of concern to everyone everywhere. Hopefully, in the wondering comes the message all over again: God's desire is that all shall be saved, and that salvation includes nothing less than peace, justice, and community for everyone in this life as well as the next.