Bruce Feiler - Where God Was Born, Abraham, Walking The Bible

Can You Teach Religion Without Endorsing Its Claims?
Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Stanley Fish resumes his discussion of religion in schools over at the NYT:

In a March 31st Op-Ed column I critiqued Professor Stephen Prothero’s claim (quoted in Time magazine’s April 2nd issue) that the “academic study of religion … takes the biblical truth claims seriously and yet brackets them for purposes of classroom discussion.” I questioned how anyone could take something seriously by leaving it at the door or putting it on the shelf. And I said that in the absence of its truth claims – claims like salvation is through belief in Jesus Christ who rose from the dead and redeemed us by taking upon himself all our sins – a religion was nothing more than a set of stories and ritual practices bereft of any transcendent meaning of which they would be the expression. You can teach those stories and practices – just as you might teach the stories and practices of baseball (which is, I know, the religion of some people) – but you wouldn’t, I insisted, be teaching religion, only its empty shell.

He goes on to report that he was criticized, with his responders arguing that you could teach the truth claims of religion as historical and cultural facts without either believing or disbelieving in them, and teaching the exclusive truth claims of a religion as matters of fact goes against the principles of liberal democracy and liberal education.

I stipulate to the usefulness of teaching the bible as an aid to the study of literature and history. I’m just saying that when you do that you are teaching religion as a pedagogical resource, not as a distinctive discourse the truth or falsehood of which is a matter of salvation for its adherents. One can of course teach that too; one can, that is, get students to understand that at least some believers hold to their faith in a way that is absolute and exclusionary; in their view nonbelievers have not merely made a mistake – as one might be mistaken about the causes of global warming – they have condemned themselves to eternal perdition. (“I am the way.”) What one cannot do – at least under the liberal democratic dispensation – is teach that assertion of an exclusive and absolute truth as anything but someone’s opinion; and in many classes that opinion will be rehearsed with at best a sympathetic condescension (“let’s hope they grow out of it”) and at worst a condemning ridicule (“even in this day and age, there are benighted people”).

In short, what one cannot do is teach a religion as true, because as Patrick Tharp notes, to do so would be to teach a singular truth – “All religions can’t be taught as truth, only one” – and a chief tenet of liberal education (it is a religion too) is that a range of religious views should be taught in the sense of being noted and indexed in the manner of sociology or anthropology.

I have to say that I don't quite see the problem here. First, I don't believe that just because one religion claims to have truth doesn't also mean that another religion can't also have truth. Plenty of religions teach that religions can coexist with other religions. Even the first of the Ten Commandments says there should be no other god before me, not that I am the only God. I also disagree with the notion that teaching religion without endorsing its claims is teaching an empty shell. We teach Marxism, for example, without endorsing all its claims. We teach different philosophies without endorsing all their claims. We teach tyrants without endorsing all their claims. The principal argument for teaching religion in school is borne out in the importance of religion in the world today. Without teaching religion we simply are not equipping our students to understand and be able to cope with the world. And that, after all, is the main purpose of education.

Labels: Religion in America

Posted by B Feiler at 8:03 AM
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