Faith-Based Folly

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No one should have been surprised by a recent survey demonstrating that the United States — where religion flourishes as in no other developed country — is also one of the most religiously ignorant nations on earth.  The study, by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, indicates that many Americans know little about the religions they practice and  even less about other faiths. To add insult to injury, atheists know more about religion than most believers.

Simple facts unkown to a majority of Americans would fill a book (say, the Bible or Koran). Fewer than half of us know that Martin Luther launched the Protestant Reformation, that the Jewish Sabbath starts on Friday night, or that the Dalai Lama is a Buddhist. It’s all reminiscent of the old Sam Cooke song beginning with the line, “Don’t know much about history….” 

The reason no one should have been surprised is that Americans are equally ignorant about general history. National Constitution Center polls, for instance, have found that only four in ten Americans know that freedoms of religion and of the press are guaranteed by the First Amendment. Why would we expect a knowledge-challenged public to know more about religion than any other aspect of history?

The answer is that Americans (with the exception of atheists like me) tend to boast about the nation’s religiosity. That’s why it comes as something of a shock to learn  that we’re ignorant about faiths we claim to respect. Even I was surprised when the Pew researchers reported that a majority of Jews don’t know that the towering 12^th-century philosopher Maimonides was a Jew, and that a majority of Catholics don’t know that their church teaches the doctrine of transubstantiation.

Predictably, the results have prompted a new chorus of calls, from people of many religious and political persuasions, for a public school curriculum that teaches children about religion and the role of religion in history — including non-Western religions. Nothing is more predictable in American life today than the demand that schools “do something” about problems that families and other institutions, like churches, are obviously failing to address.

The First Amendment prevents schools from preaching religion but not from teaching about religious beliefs  in a cultural and historical context. What is constitutionally permitted, however, is not necessarily wise. After the Pew study was released, Charles C. Haynes, director of the Religious Freedom Education Project at the Newseum in Washington, argued that “schools need to take religious literacy seriously,” even as he acknowledged that efforts to incorporate instruction about religion in public schools could “trigger a new round of culture-war conflicts over religion content.” That’s an understatement.

In September, the Texas Board of Education passed a resolution (PDF) criticizing history textbooks for promoting a “pro-Islam/anti-Christian bias.” Apparently some members of the board objected to books describing the Crusades as “violent.” It’s easy to make fun of the Texas board members, because they are the same people who removed Thomas Jefferson from a list of influential revolutionary writers because he originated that detested phrase “wall of separation” between church and state. Nevertheless, the shenanigans in Texas would probably be repeated in many areas of the country if  schools tried to develop the sort of religious studies curriculum envisioned by many well-intentioned religious liberals.       

Stephen Prothero, in his influential 2007 book Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn’t, envisions courses dealing with the historical and cultural role of various religions as a good starting point. But Americans don’t agree about religion, except for the majority’s sense that it’s better to believe in God than not.

How on earth — for public schools are not situated on some heavenly plane — can an ordinary teacher be expected to explain the vast and subtle differences, both within and between faith communities, about the role of religion in American history? This does not even take secularists into account, and 16 percent of Americans — a much larger minority than Jews, Muslims or Hindus — are unaffiliated with any faith. I, for one, think every schoolchild should know that the framers deliberately omitted mentioning God in the Constitution — that whatever their religious beliefs, the founders feared any attempt by temporal rulers to claim divine authority.  

Philip Roth, in a 1961 speech at Loyola University, precisely described the dilemma that surely awaits any public school trying to package religious beliefs or history in a fashion that wouldn’t start fistfights. He observes that:

If one is committed to being a Jew, then he believes on the most serious questions pertaining to man’s survival — understanding the past, imagining the future, discovering the relations between God and humanity — that he is right and the Christians are wrong. As a believing Jew, he must certainly view the breakdown in this century of moral order and the erosion of spiritual values in terms of the inadequacy of Christianity as a sustaining force for the good. However, who would care to say such things to his neighbor?

And who would care to have an elementary or high school teacher — someone probably lacking the sophisticated knowledge of comparative religion informing the best college courses — explain to children why traditionalist Catholics call the Reformation a heresy or why Jews don’t believe Jesus was the Messiah?  This is a mission beyond the resources of America’s hard-pressed public schools and teacher training institutions.

Public schools do have a mission to promote civic tolerance, but no new comparative religion curriculum is needed for that. How about this? On the first day of school, the principal says, “Welcome back, boys and girls, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, and anyone I’ve overlooked. You’re all here to learn, you’re all equal under the U.S. Constitution, and if I hear about any of you making religious, racial or ethnic slurs, you’ll answer to me personally.” That’s essentially what teachers said in my day, although they only mentioned what were then the Big Three —Protestants, Catholics and Jews.

Religious literacy was up to our parents, who didn’t deliver perorations about the need for “religion in the public square,” but sent us for private instruction in our respective faiths. I was raised a Catholic in a small town with few Jews, but I always knew the Jewish Sabbath began on Friday night. How? Because I read books, and in some of those books, Jewish characters observed the Sabbath. If public schools fulfill their core tasks of instilling literacy and intellectual curiosity — the remedy for all forms of cultural ignorance — the rest will follow.

Susan Jacoby is the author of Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism and The Age of American Unreason.