What shall we tell the children?
If you’ve read many of my posts, you may have noticed that I have a love-hate relationship with the New York Times. It is, for better or for worse, our “national newspaper”, so I feel some obligation to read it. I find both its daily reporting and regular columnists predictably naïve and one-sided. (I’ve since come to realize this has been the NYT’s long history.) However, many of its guest and second tier columnists can be very good.
I had such an experience recently when I discovered Kwame Anthony Appiah, who writes The Ethicist column for the Times. Appiah was born in London to distinguished parents. His English mother was an art historian and writer and his father was from Ghana where he was an important politician and diplomat. Appiah grew up in Ghana but returned to England for education, earning his PhD at Cambridge. After teaching at several American Ivy League schools, he is now professor of philosophy and law at NYU.
Despite his presumed ivory tower character, Appiah can also be surprisingly practical and realistic, as his Ethicist column demonstrates. However, where I first encountered him was in a recent guest essay he wrote, “Students in Texas Need Something, but It’s Not the Ten Commandments.” The title refers to new laws in Texas and elsewhere requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments in their classrooms. Texas also passed a law encouraging schools to set aside class time for prayer and reading of religious texts.
The Texas legislation has already been suspended by court order in parts of the state and more challenges and appeals are underway. As Appiah says, “It’s all part of a battle over how to draw the border between church and state.” Of course, this struggle has been going on for a long time. But Appiah’s insight is that something more complicated is making this puzzle difficult to solve.
Beneath the surface of this quarrel, though, lies a deeper, murkier problem: Nobody — not legislators, not judges, not scholars — can quite agree on what religion is. How can you address church-and-state controversies if you’re not sure what the “church” part refers to?
Most of us are unaware that religion is a relatively new idea. Ancient Hebrew, for instance, had no word for religion, nor do many Native Americans or other indigenous peoples. Of course, the ancient world was filled with what we would call religious practices, beliefs, deities, etc. Everybody participated in them to some degree or another. But lumping them into such a category was unknown. It was simply a dimension of daily life.
It was also the case that ancient people generally were very tolerant and accepting of foreign beliefs and practices. It was common to recognize that the same god went by different names among different peoples. Similarly, people recognized similarities among mythic stories and traditions. It wasn’t until this tolerance began to wane that religion became a thing.
The exclusivism of first Judaism, and then of Christianity and Islam, introduced the notion that some people’s gods and beliefs were right and others wrong. Antisemitic pogroms, the Crusades, and the wars of the Reformation were among the first conflicts between religions, rather than tribes or nations (though those were often involved as well).
Then, in the modern era, religion became one of many means of classification. People could be labeled with their religion. Religions could be studied and evaluated. The idea of “Hinduism”, for example, is really a creation of Western academics and missionaries, lumping a wide range of Indian gods, practices, and spiritual traditions under a single umbrella. It was conflicts with Muslims, Christians and others that led many Indians themselves to adopt the classification and identity.
Religion took on another twist in the West with the rise of secularism, especially in the United States. Not only did countries begin eschewing official state religions but growing numbers began to opt out of having any religion at all. But what that meant was that people began rejecting having a religious label in the modern sense of the word.
Did that mean they didn’t have beliefs or practices comparable to those people have had since prehistoric times? Not necessarily. Thus, we increasingly see the phenomenon of people identifying themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” And this is the conundrum Kwame Anthony Appiah is pointing to when it comes to the idea that we can separate “church and state.”
In his essay, Appiah summarizes over a century of modern attempts to define religion. None of them have stuck because they have all either been too narrow or included too much. A definition that includes belief in “spiritual beings” would exclude some forms of Buddhism or Taoism. But a view that religion means a “system that supports social cohesion and provides psychological comfort” could include “patriotism or even psychoanalysis”, says Appiah. As a result of this muddle, “the definitional perplexities are as persistent as ever. And they help explain the political theater you see in Texas today.”
As Appiah concludes his essay, he says that legislating religious ideas or practices is missing the point, which the Constitution’s framers actually understood pretty well.
But the correct approach isn’t to decree, once and for all, what does or doesn’t count as religion; it’s to ask how a plural democracy can accommodate competing visions of the good. Ours is a nation of technocratic managerialists and natural-law traditionalists, Baptists and Buddhists, nationalists and cosmopolitans. The task is to live together across these divides.
Religion, whatever else it may be, is one dimension of that challenge. What students need — in Texas and everywhere else — is not a government-issued decalogue but a civic education sturdy enough to meet that challenge.
Europeans, especially, are often puzzled about the church/state struggle in the US. In many countries there, religion is taught in public schools as an academic subject just like math and language. I’ve thought for a long time that this would be an excellent practice here. The problem, of course, is that this would expose the real agenda of the religion-in-schools crowd. They don’t want religion taught with academic neutrality but as “truth.”
The larger question that Appiah raises, however, is what do we even mean by religion. The classic notion that it is represented by a long list of organizations with members and with set beliefs and worship practices is rapidly fading.
Many claim a religious label because of family background even if they haven’t participated in that religion in decades. Today, a growing number are “religious” by participating in various religious traditions but may not claim “membership” in any of them. Then there are those who regularly practice mediation or yoga, which can have a meaningful spiritual dimension while not necessarily aligning one with a specific religion. And there are those who claim their weekly hike in the woods is just as spiritually enriching as spending an hour in Sunday worship.
Clearly, the word “religion” points to an important dimension of human life. But clinging to the narrow definition of it developed centuries ago is now just confusing us. That ancient people had no such word, but certainly had what we now call religious traditions and practices, tells us that the word’s relatively recent appearance came with an agenda which no longer fits our world.
The decline in participation in “organized religion” could support the case for religion in the schools. This wouldn’t be to proselytize for one “right” religion but to introduce students to the world’s religious heritage. From there students could be guided in exploring their own questions and beliefs and in developing a spiritual and moral grounding for their own lives.
By participating in such conversations—with their teachers, other adults, and others their age—students will also learn, as Appiah says, to “accommodate competing visions of the good.” This, of course, is not what fundamentalists are interested in, since they’re convinced their beliefs are “right.” But Appiah is right that developing such an attitude is essential if democracy is to survive. And that’s going to take much more than putting up on school walls thousands of soon to be ignored copies of the Ten Commandments.
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6 thoughts on “What shall we tell the children?”
Here’s a recent post on the Frederick Buechner Quote of the Day: AT ITS HEART, I think, religion is mystical. Moses with his flocks in Midian, Buddha under the Bo tree, Jesus up to his knees in the waters of Jordan: each of them responds to something for which words like shalom, oneness, God even, are only pallid, alphabetic souvenirs. “I have seen things,” Aquinas told a friend, “that make all my writings seem like straw.” Religion as institution, as ethics, as dogma, as social action—all of this comes later and in the long run maybe counts for less. Religions start, as Frost said poems do, with a lump in the throat, to put it mildly, or with the bush going up in flames, the rain of flowers, the dove coming down out of the sky.
As for the man in the street, any street, wherever his own religion is a matter of more than custom, it is likely to be because, however dimly, a doorway opened in the air once to him too, a word was spoken, and, however shakily, he responded. The debris of his life continues to accumulate, the Vesuvius of the years scatters its ashes deep and much gets buried alive, but even under many layers the tell-tale heart can go on beating still. Where it beats strong, there starts pulsing out from it a kind of life that is marked by, above all things perhaps, compassion: that sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside another’s skin and for knowing that there can never really be peace and joy for any until there is peace and joy finally for all. Where it stops beating altogether, little is left religiously speaking but a good man, not perhaps in Mark Twain’s “the worst sense of the word” but surely in the grayest and saddest: the good man whose goodness has become cheerless and finicky, a technique for working off his own guilts, a gift with no love in it which neither deceives nor benefits any for long.
Great quote. I don’t always resonate with Buechner but this is spot on. What he doesn’t say is that such a view of religion overturns orthodox Christianity with a thud. Of course, as I’ve been saying, the church has been doing that on its own for some time. “At its heart … religion is mystical.” But at its heart, Christianity is not. However, in “teaching” religion that dimension of experience would be introduced. Who knows what the outcome might be?
As a former teacher and educational administrator and as a lifelong learner, I wholeheartedly support the idea of religion being taught as a part of an educational curriculum. Simultaneously the Bible could also be taught as literature. From my perspective these practices would help the “student” begin to differentiate the unique components of religion, spirituality, human development, culture, and values. Sadly, as you and Appiah point out, this is not necessarily happening. I am witnessing first hand in our local school board race how the “right” or Christian Nationalists are seeking to gain more power to dictate a back to basics approach in the classroom and a focus on Christian religion and perspective! UGH!
I’ve never looked into it but I am curious if such an idea has ever been seriously entertained here in the US. It’s hard to believe that it hasn’t been somewhere. I suspect that its absence now is a leftover from when it was just assumed that everybody “went to church”, so religious institutions took care of it. I wonder what it would take to introduce the idea of religion as a subject to be taught. Of course, churches would be some of the most ardent opponents. In Europe though, I know that there are options for religion classes: Protestant, Catholic, and some kind of non-affiliated. So, I suppose something similar could be worked out here. Most school systems probably would see such an ideas as a nightmare to implement, and another hit to their budgets.
Churches teach indoctrination, not education. Actual biblical and religious education in the public schools would raise the hackles of fundamentalists, as Mr Mortensen describes. And for understandable reasons: I remember a saying from a professor when I went to college 40+ years ago: “True education is a destabilizing process”. No conventional religionist wants their religious ideology destabilized, which is why neither liberal (in my direct experience) nor (obviously) fundamentalist Christians are keen on teaching historical/critical/literary scholarship to their members, though they might have different reasons for not doing so.
A very late response just to affirm what you say here. Unfortunately, what you say could apply to much of education, and it seems to be getting worse. Perhaps from middle school, and certainly in high school, one could make the case that some “destabilizing” ought to begin occurring. Because destabilizing experiences are, of course, what make us think, by confronting us with completely new experience or by challenging what we assumed to be true. But with the advent of NCLB and “teaching to the test”, encouragement for creative and original thinking has largely evaporated. But even in college I think it has become a struggle, especially with students’ “will this be on the test?” preoccupation.
In any case, you’re certainly right that churches of all persuasions are reluctant to “stir the pot” of their members’ beliefs. Because that has been the emphasis: beliefs. Imagine if instead the emphasis was put on experience and knowing God rather than having the right ideas about God. Well, one can always dream.