Abstract
If we value religious tolerance and autonomy, we must breach the silence about religion in public schools, and add a comparative religious education to the compulsory curriculum at the high school level. This education would expose students to a variety of religious beliefs in a fair manner by allowing religious denominations themselves to participate in deciding how their beliefs are presented to students. The major obstacle to the implementation of such an education is the objection of religious conservatives and fundamentalists that it would violate neutrality. Not only is a comparative religious education able to survive the criticisms that religious conservatives routinely make against a liberal education, but the inclusion of such an education is the only way to make a liberal education truly neutral. This education would provide the recognition of the importance of religion in general and of conservative religions in particular that religious conservatives complain is lacking from the status quo compulsory curriculum in public schools.
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Notes
For instance, in a 1992 poll by Princeton University, 60 percent of those surveyed believed that “religion can answer all or most of today's problems.” Robert Booth Fowler, Allan Hertzke, and Laura Olson, Religion and Politics in America (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999), 23. In a 1987 Gallup poll, 54 percent surveyed reported that religion is “very important” to their lives and an additional 32 percent reported that religion was “fairly important” to their lives. George Gallup, Jr., The People's Religion: American Faith in the '90s' (New York: MacMillan, 1989), 35.
An excellent case for teaching religion separately from other subject matters is also made by Warren Nord, Religion and American Education: Rethinking a National Dilemma (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
In Mozert, Christian fundamentalist parents objected to the required reading for grades 1–8 of a textbook series intended to promote critical thinking and expose students to a variety of religious and moral worldviews. The federal appeals court rejected their claim. See Mozert v. Hawkins County, 827 F. 2d 1058 (6th Cir. 1987). Criticisms of religious conservative arguments in Mozert are made by Amy Gutmann, “Civic Education and Social Diversity,” Ethics 105 (April 1995): 557–79; and Stephen Macedo, “Liberal Civic Education and Religious Fundamentalism: The Case of God v. John Rawls?” Ethics 105 (1995): 468–96. Defenses of the religious conservative position in Mozert are made by Shelley Burtt, “Religious Parents, Secular Schools: A Liberal Defense of an Illiberal Education,” Review of Politics 57 (1995): 52–71; and Nomi Maya Stolzenberg, ““He Drew a Circle That Shut Me Out”: Assimilation, Indoctrination and the Paradox of Liberal Education,” Harvard Law Review, 106 (1993): 581–667. Here and throughout the paper, I use the term religious conservative to describe religious believers who are at least skeptical of attempts in liberal education to expose students to a variety of religious and moral beliefs.
Gerald Dworkin, The Theory and Practice of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 18; Harry Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of the Person,” in The Inner Citadel, ed. John Christman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 65.
Nord, Religion and American Education, 310; Warren Nord and Charles Haynes, Taking Religion Seriously Across the Curriculum (Nashville: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1988), 175.
There are limits, of course, to how much sympathetic imagination a religious education should promote. A religious education, for instance, should not require or encourage students to participate in religious rituals because such participation may conflict with their current religious beliefs and obligations. Charles Haynes and Oliver Thomas, Finding Common Ground: A Guide to Religious Liberty in Public Schools (Nashville: First Amendment Center, 2001), 75.
Robert J. Nash offers anecdotal support for this point. Courses that Nash taught on religion at the University of Vermont introduced his students to Christian fundamentalist perspectives and personal narratives. Nash found that many students grew more sympathetic to the absolutist convictions of fundamentalists, and became “a little bit clearer about the hidden content and impact, of their own modernist/postmodern educational narrative.” Robert Nash, Faith, Hype and Clarity: Teaching About Religion in American Schools and Colleges (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999), 36.
See Harry Brighouse, “Civic Education and Liberal Legitimacy,” Ethics 108 (1998): 719–45.
To be autonomous, we need not engage in constant critical scrutiny of our beliefs or even accept the value of autonomy. Autonomy only requires that we have engaged in significant critical and informed reflection about our beliefs at some point in our lives. A Christian fundamentalist adult, for instance, can be autonomous even if she rejects the value of autonomy as long as she has received exposure to alternative beliefs and reflected critically upon her fundamentalist beliefs during her education.
There has been much debate in recent years among liberals concerning the forms of neutrality that the policies of a liberal state must conform with. Must liberal policies be only neutral in intent or neutral in effects as well? Does neutrality require that the policies of a liberal state respect the different conceptions of the person and community many religious conservatives hold? As essential as this discussion is, it is possible to respond to the neutrality critiques that religious conservatives might make against a religious education without getting involved in these debates. This section attempts to show that even if we take for granted that the neutrality criteria that religious conservatives invoke are all legitimate, we can still conclude that a religious education would not violate neutrality.
Francis Schaeffer, A Christian Manifesto (Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1981), 24. Tim LaHaye argues that liberal education supports “self-autonomy” or “the idea that children are their own authorities.” Tim LaHaye, The Battle for Public Schools (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1983), 80. For additional descriptions of the religious conservative position, see Richard Manatt, When Right is Wrong: Fundamentalists and the Public Schools (Lancaster, PA: Technomic Publishing House, 1995), 44ff.; Burtt, “Religious Parents, Secular Schools,” 64; and Nord, Religion and American Education, 169ff.
Smith v. Board of School Commissioners of Mobile County, F.2d 684 (2d Cir. 1987), 691. The federal district court judge Brevard Hand agreed with the parents that these passages violated the Establishment Clause, and enjoined the use of 44 textbooks approved by the Alabama Board of Education. The decision was overturned on appeal to the federal appeals court.
Paul Vitz, “Traditional Values in Public School Textbooks,” Public Interest 84 (1986): 79. People for the American Way, an organization created in part to counter Christian fundamentalist efforts to determine public school curriculum, concluded in a study of high school textbooks that: “(the) texts do not treat religion as a significant element in American life … it is not portrayed as an integral part of the American value system or as something that is important to individual Americans. In particular, most books give the impression that America suddenly turned into a secular state after the Civil War.” Nord, Religion and American Education, 140.
Stephen Carter, The Culture of Disbelief (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 200–10; Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids: Eerdsman, 1984).
Several liberal political theorists put forth this claim as well. See Macedo, “Liberal Civic Education and Religious Fundamentalism,” 473–77; Burtt, “Religious Parents, Secular Schools,” 66; and William Galston, “Liberal Purposes,” in Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed, Nancy Rosenblum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 101.
Stolzenberg, “He Drew a Circle That Shut Me Out,” 613.
LaHaye, Battle for Public Schools,. 80.
Stolzenberg, “He Drew a Circle That Shut Me Out,” 617, 628.
Edgar A. Towne, “Fundamentalism's Theological Challenge to Churches,” in What Makes Fundamentalism So Attractive?, ed. Marla Selvidge (Elgin, IL: Brethren Press, 1984), 34.
Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, The Governance of Curriculum (Alexandria, Virginia: ASCD, 1994), 21.
Vitz, “Traditional Values in Public School Textbooks,” 84. Paul Gagnon found that most high school textbooks public schools use emphasize themes in Judaism and Christianity religious and social liberals favor such as love and justice, but neglect themes such as sin, salvation, damnation, and millenial beliefs that religious conservatives place strong emphasis upon. Nord, Religion and American Education, 140.
Warren Nord, Religion and American Education, 200, cites a range of surveys indicating that a significant percentage of American college students and adults are ignorant of essential facts about their own faith.
Since the religious education I endorse will take place at the high school level, the children discussed and referred to in this section are high school students.
The religious conservative could claim that disregarding their non-liberal views of the parent-child relationship is not problematic because it violates their self-respect, but because it threatens their salvation. The parents in Mozert argued that if the state provided their children with a liberal education, it might lead to their own eternal damnation. The state must clearly avoid imperiling the salvation of a believer when only that believer's interests are at stake. But religious believers cannot acquire a right over others by claiming that God will eternally damn them if they do not possess that right. For instance, we clearly would not accept a slaveholder's claim that he has the right to own slaves because God wants or allows him to.
But perhaps the religious conservative uses the neutrality argument not because he subscribes to the value of neutrality, but merely because he wishes to point out the hypocrisy of the liberal position. The problem with this use of the neutrality argument is that it provides no positive support for the right of the religious conservative to determine his child's education. Given the compelling goals of promoting autonomy and tolerance, the religious conservative would still need to prove on secular grounds that parents or religious communities have strong, exclusive rights over the child's religious upbringing even if a religious education did violate neutrality.
Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925); see also Meyer v. Nebraska 262 U.S. 390 (1923).
Insuring students' religious tolerance and autonomy is an important educational goal, but it is not the only important educational goal. Since religious schools serve an array of important educational functions, it would be foolish to base their legitimacy solely upon whether they do as good a job as public schools in promoting religious tolerance and autonomy. At the same time, the importance of insuring students' autonomy and tolerance entails that the state ought to require religious schools to provide some relatively objective discussion of a variety of religious traditions.
Abington School District v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963), 220.
A. John Simmons, Moral Principles and Political Obligations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 170.
Fred Berger, “Gratitude,” Ethics 85 (July 1975): 298–309, 304.
Some religious conservative parents might respond that preventing their children from exposure to other religions is altruistic because they are trying to secure eternal salvation for their children. But this response misses the point. An action is only altruistic if the benefactor can legitimately assume that the recipient wants the benefit. Parents who prevent their children from learning about other religious views cannot legitimately assume that when their children become adults they will believe religious salvation is possible or that they will believe that salvation can be achieved through their parents' religious belief system.
Several communitarians make this critique of liberalism in general and liberal education in particular. See Daniel Bell, Communitarianism and Its Critics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 126; Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1981), 216ff.; and Richard Baer, “American Public Education and the Myth of Value Neutrality,” in Democracy and the Renewal of Public Education, ed. Richard John Neuhaus (Grand Rapids: Eerdsman, 1987), 21.
Religious believers can even derive self-respect from religions with an emphasis upon original sin and predestination, as George Eliot explains in her depiction of the pious Mr. Bulstrode in Middlemarch: “He was doctrinally convinced that there was a total absence of merit in himself; but that doctrinal conviction may be held … with intense satisfaction when the depth of our sinning is but a measure for the depth of forgiveness, and clenching proof that we are peculiar instruments of the divine intention.”
Ronald Goldman, Readiness for Religion: A Basis for Developmental Religious Education (London: Routledge, Keegan and Paul, 1965), 55.
Goldman, Readiness for Religion, 33.
Public education should provide some discussion of religion at the elementary level as long as this discussion does not threaten students' initial stable identity, and involves the concrete aspects of religion that elementary school students are capable of understanding. Discussing the significance of religious holidays and studying the personal narratives of important religious leaders satisfy both criteria. See Nord and Haynes, Taking Religion Seriously Across the Curriculum, 61–63.
I use the term religious studies scholar to refer to scholars who do not begin their examination of religion from a sectarian standpoint, but approach different religions from a neutral or objective standpoint.
Clearly, the state must establish boundaries upon what information denominations can provide to students. For instance, the state should not allow denominations to provide students with critiques of other religions because this conflicts with the goal of promoting tolerance. Haynes and Thomas, Finding Common Ground, 75, 90.
Nord, Religion and American Education, 311.
Vincent Branick, “The Attractiveness of Fundamentalism,” in What Makes Fundamentalism So Attractive? 22.
1 Tim. 2: 8–15.
Jeffrey Pasley, “Not-So-Good-Books,” The New Republic (April 27, 1987): 20–22, at 21.
Nord, Religion and American Education, 158.
Several prominent organizations such as the First Amendment Center of the Freedom Forum, and the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development are currently performing this function.
Nord, Religion and American Education, 156.
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Lester, E. A More Neutral Liberal Education: Why Not Only Liberals, But Religious Conservatives Should Endorse Comparative Religious Education in Public Schools. Polity 39, 179–207 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.polity.2300053
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.polity.2300053