Stephen Prothero is among those who have been advocating adding the study of religion to the curriculum of American public middle and high schools for some time. With the March 13 release of his latest book, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know--And Doesn't (Harper Collins, ISBN: 9780060846701), he seems to have caught the attention of the mainstream media. (This is not a book review, which is a good thing, since my copy is on order.)
Several newspapers have run articles on his book, and the issues it addresses, and CNN went so far as to feature as "insta-quiz's" some of the questions Prothero, chair of the Religion Department at Boston University, has been posing to his students over the last few years. He reports that only 17% of his students could pass a very basic test on the world's religions.
I ask them to list the four Gospels, Roman Catholicism's seven sacraments, and the Ten Commandments. I ask them to name the holy book of Islam. They do not fare well.
[...]they inform me that Ramadan is a Jewish holiday, that Revelation is one of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, and that Paul led the Israelites on the Exodus out of Egypt. This year I had a Hindu student who couldn't name one Hindu scripture, a Baptist student who didn't know that "Blessed are the poor in spirit" is a Bible quote, and Catholic students unfamiliar with the golden rule.
-- Prothero, "Worshiping in Ignorance," Chronicle of Higher Education, March 16, 2007 (Full article)
[If you want to see if you fare any better than Prothero's students on his 15-question test, an interactive version is available on the MSNBC-Newsweek website. Link to quiz.]
Okay, but in an era when many Americans can't find Europe on a map, why should we care whether or not they can name a Hindu holy book, or distinguish a Bible quote from one of Benjamin Franklin?
Unfortunately, U.S. citizens today lack this basic religious literacy. As a result, many Americans are too easily swayed by demagogues. Few of us are able to challenge claims made by politicians or pundits about Islam's place in the war on terrorism, or about what the Bible says concerning homosexuality. This ignorance imperils our public life, putting citizens in the thrall of talking heads and effectively transferring power from the Third Estate (the people) to the Fourth (the press).
-- Prothero, op cit.
Now we're talking. This brings it out of the ivory tower of academia and into the realm of the nitty-gritty of electoral politics. As recently as the eve of the mid-term elections, in a diary on Daily Kos, Markos "kos" Moulitsas Zúniga cited seven-term Alabama congressman, and then chairman of the House intelligence subcommittee on technical and tactical intelligence, Terry Everett's inability to enumerate the differences between Sunnis and Shiites as idiocy, going so far as to proclaim:
This is why Republicans can't do anything right. This is why everything they touch turns to crap.
-- Markos "kos" Moulitsas Zúniga, "Idiots," Daily Kos, Oct 17, 2006 (Link to kos's diary)
And kos might well have added that the Congressman was far from alone among his colleagues on the hill and in the agencies crafting mid-east policy in his ignorance of the religious beliefs which influence people, governments, movements, and events in that region. The inspiration for kos's remarks are found in an op-ed piece which ran the same day in the New York Times by Jeff Stein, Congressional Quarterly's national security editor, in which the congressman's response to the question about the differences between Sunnis and Shiites was reported. He had been asking the same question to a host of government officials for a long time, with consistently disturbing, if predictable, results. He notes:
After all, wouldn’t British counterterrorism officials responsible for Northern Ireland know the difference between Catholics and Protestants? In a remotely similar but far more lethal vein, the 1,400-year Sunni-Shiite rivalry is playing out in the streets of Baghdad, raising the specter of a breakup of Iraq into antagonistic states, one backed by Shiite Iran and the other by Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states.
[...]
But so far, most American officials I’ve interviewed don’t have a clue. That includes not just intelligence and law enforcement officials, but also members of Congress who have important roles overseeing our spy agencies. How can they do their jobs without knowing the basics?
-- Stein, "Can You Tell a Sunni from a Shiite," New York Times, October 17, 2006 (Full article) [Despite it's age, I recommend Stein's article as a "must read."]
Which brings us back to the issue at hand. How can we, as citizens, hold our government officials accountable without ourselves having at least a basic understanding of the religious and cultural influences which are becoming such enormous factors in the issues we face both at home and abroad. Those proposing a religious studies curriculum in the public schools argue that this logic leads to the conclusion that our schools cannot but fail to prepare the next generation of citizens and voters without providing them at least a basic knowledge of these religions and cultures.
Prothero, who in the quoted article can't resist pointing out the irony of a country in which such a vast majority self-identify as Christian yet cannot answer simple questions about even their own religion, is also quick to acknowledge that to teach about religion in a more effective way in our public classrooms is going to require both conservatives and progressives to give ground on positions they have traditionally held.
Progress on this score will take compromise, too. The secular left will need to yield on the dogma that religion has no place in the public square. The religious right will need to give up its desire to use our nation's classrooms for proselytizing purposes.
-- Prothero, op cit.
In fact, the proposition may well face more opposition from the religious right than from professional educators or progressive partisans. Typical of the position of teachers' groups is the following:
Knowledge about religions is not only a characteristic of an educated person, but it is also absolutely necessary for understanding and living in a world of diversity. Knowledge of religious differences and the role of religion in the contemporary world can help promote understanding and alleviate prejudice. Since the purpose of the social studies is to provide students with a knowledge of the world that has been, the world that is, and the world of the future, studying about religions should be an essential part of the social studies curriculum. Omitting study about religions gives students the impression that religions have not been and are not now part of the human experience. Study about religions may be dealt with in special courses and units or wherever and whenever knowledge of the religious dimension of human history and culture is needed for a balanced and comprehensive understanding.
-- "Position Statement and Guidelines of the National Council for the Social Studies" as quoted in Religious Liberty in the Schools: Teaching About Religion", First Amendment Center, 2007 (Link to online edition)
It is noteworthy that the quote above is taken from a publication of the First Amendment Center, which not only considers the teaching of religion in the abstract, but provides educators a "how to"!
This is not to say that opposition on civil libertarian and ethical grounds is absent. Susan Brooks Thistlewaites, President of Chicago Theological Seminary blogged passionately in that vein:
The study of religion can’t be something the government can prescribe "for your own good" like limiting the amount of trans-fat in food (and some would say even the fat limitations are intrusive on our freedom of choice). The faith dimension of religion would rightly rebel at such intrusion.
Religious pluralism cannot be maintained except when faith is completely free of government interference and you cannot neatly separate religion and faith. And we must protect not only the freedom of religion, but also the freedom from religion. There are those who believe, with a great deal of evidence on their side, that religion does a lot of harm and they want nothing to do with it. That view must also be respected.
--Thistlewaite, "Learn About Other Faiths? Yes. Mandatory? NO!," Washington Post's "On Faith" blogs. (Link to full article)
I fully expect moderates and progressives, and certainly conservatives, to line up at both extremes of this debate. It is certainly among those issues on which reasonable persons can legitimately and in good faith disagree. I hope that all of us can resist any initial reflexive reactions, and seriously consider the arguments on both sides on their merits. The stakes are simply too high. It's not just a matter of avoiding the idiocy in the quoted dKos lament, nor even improving the effectiveness or integrity of our public education system. It may well be a matter of survival in an era when religious forces have enormous influence, and are poorly understood, among our leaders, and the populace at large.
Postscript: By way of full disclosure, the diarist jgilhousen is The Rev. John-Mark Gilhousen, an Augustinian priest, and longtime Democratic party activist and community organizer.
