Religion and American Education: Rethinking a National Dilemma

By Warren A. Nord

Warren Nord's thoughtful book tackles an issue of great importance in contemporary America: the role of religion in our public schools and universities. According to Nord, public opinion has been excessively polarized by those religious conservatives who would restore religious purposes and practices to public education and by those secular liberals for whom religion is irrelevant to everything in the curriculum. While he maintains that public schools and universities must not promote religion, he also argues that there are powerful philosophical, political, moral, and constitutional reasons for requiring students to study religion. Indeed, only if religion is included in the curriculum will students receive a truly liberal education, one that takes seriously a variety of ways of understanding the human experience. Intended for a broad audience, Nord's comprehensive study encompasses American history, constitutional law, educational theory and practice, theology, philosophy, and ethics. It also discusses a number of current, controversial issues, including multiculturalism, moral education, creationism, academic freedom, and the voucher and school choice movements.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781469617459

Warren A. Nord

Warren A. Nord is director of the Program in the Humanities and Human Values and teaches in the department of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Book preview

RELIGION AND AMERICAN EDUCATION

RELIGION AND AMERICAN EDUCATION

RETHINKING A NATIONAL DILEMMA

WARREN A. NORD

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

CHAPEL HILL AND LONDON

© 1995 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

This book was published with the assistance of the H. Eugene and Lillian Youngs Lehman Fund of the University of North Carolina Press. A complete list of books published with the assistance of the Lehman Fund appears at the end of the book.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nord, Warren A. Religion and American education : rethinking a national dilemma /

by Warren A. Nord. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 978-0-8078-2165-7 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8078-4478-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Religion in the public schools—United States. 2. Moral education—United States. 3. Christian education—United States. 4. Church and state—United States. I. Title.

LC111.N67 1994 377′.l′0973—dc20 94-4589 CIP

Portions of this work have appeared previously, in somewhat different form, in The Place of Religion in the World of Public School Textbooks, Educational Forum 54 (Spring 1990): 247-79, © 1990 by Kappa Delta Pi International Honor Society in Education; Religious Literacy, Textbooks, and Religious Neutrality, Religion and Public Education 16 (Winter 1989): 111-21; Taking Religion Seriously, Social Education 54 (October 1990): 287-90, © 1990 by the National Council for the Social Sciences; and Teaching and Morality: The Knowledge Most Worth Having, in What Teachers Need to Know, ed. David D. Dill (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990), © 1990 by Jossey-Bass. and are used here with permission.

07 06 05 04 03 7 6 5 4 3

THIS BOOK WAS DIGITALLY PRINTED.

For Nancy and Jeremy

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

Perspective

The Problem

The Conventional Wisdom

Conclusions, Qualifications, Pious Intentions

A Note on Worldviews

1Religion and Modernity

Religion in the Premodern World

The Reformation

Pluralism

Modern Science and Technology

Economics

Politics

The Secularization of the Modern World

Liberal Religious Responses to Modernity

Conservative Religious Responses to Modernity

Postmodern Responses to Modernity

Conclusions

2The Secularization of American Education

Education in Colonial America

Religion and Nineteenth-Century Schoolbooks

The Common School

Americanism and Democracy

Utility

The Liberal Arts

Higher Education in the Nineteenth Century

The Purposes of Contemporary American Education

Conclusions

3The Constitutional Politics of Religion in America

Religious Liberty in Colonial America

Religion and the Constitution

The Free Exercise Clause

The Establishment Clause

The Separation of Church and State

First Principles

Religious Arguments for Separating Church and State

Conclusions

4Textbooks

History Texts

Economics Texts

Home Economics Texts

Science Texts

Other Texts

Why Is There So Little Religion in the Textbooks?

Conclusions

5Indoctrination

Neutrality

Humanism

Reason and Faith

Indoctrination

Conclusions

A Note on New Age Religion

6Religion and Liberal Education

The Idea of a Liberal Education

The Importance of Religion

The Curriculum

Taking Religion Seriously

Critical Thinking and Truth

Multiculturalism

Textbooks and Primary Sources

Arguments against Religion in Education

Conclusions

7Fairness and Neutrality

The Epistemological Argument

The Political Argument

The Moral Argument

The Constitutional Argument

Teachers, Texts, and Courses

Curricular Neutrality

Arguments against Neutrality

Conclusions

A Note on Prayer

8Academic Freedom

Background

Professional Competence

The Constitution

Indoctrination and Academic Freedom

Academic Freedom in Public Schools

Conclusions

9Evolution and Economics

Scientific Method and Religion

Evolution

Economics

Conclusions

10Religious Studies

Background

Taking Religion Seriously

Theology

Religious Studies and Public Schools

Conclusions

11Religion and Moral Education

Religious Morality

The Secularization of Morality

The Question of Progress

Education as a Moral Enterprise

Character Education—The First Dimension

Liberal Education—The Second Dimension

Pedagogy

Civic Education—The Third Dimension

Moral Philosophy—The Fourth Dimension

Can Education Make Students Moral?

Conclusions

12Vouchers

Educational Choice and Vouchers

The Primary Issue

Other Issues

Ironies

The First Amendment Again

Conclusions

Conclusions

A Summary of Sorts

Resolving the Dilemma, Restoring the Tensions

Our Spiritual Situation

Finally, a Plea for Humility

Postscript: Setting Standards

Notes

Bibliography

Index

PREFACE

From the beginning, many of the most violent battles in our ongoing culture wars have been fought over the proper place of religion in public education. Unhappily, in the heat of battle—in court fights, direct mail campaigns, school board elections, and the dispatches of journalists from the front—public opinion has been all too easily polarized. As a result, we are apt to find ourselves uncomfortably (and uncritically) caught in a dilemma defined by the most militant of the combatants for their own ideological or even tactical purposes.

As the story is usually told, on the one side of our culture wars are those religious conservatives (the Religious Right, or the Radical Right, as their opponents would have it) who believe that American education has been captured by the forces of secular humanism and thus has become godless and hostile to religion. It is their goal to restore religious purposes, practices, and teaching to public education. On the other side are those liberals (or secular humanists) for whom the Religious Right is a dangerous intruder into the secular space of modern public institutions. For them, religion is properly a private matter, irrelevant to the purposes and content of education, and it is their goal to remove any vestiges of religious purpose, practice, and teaching from public schools and universities.

The battle lines of our culture wars run through every community in America, but our dilemma is very much a national dilemma in a more profound way, for it is bound up with the way in which we have constituted ourselves as a nation. The proper place of religion in our public life generally, and in public education in particular, is governed by the Constitution of the United States. For most religious conservatives, America is a Christian (or Judeo-Christian) nation, and to further their ends they would dismantle the wall of separation between religion and government. Most liberals, by contrast, believe that America is a secular, religiously neutral nation, and they would keep the wall of separation high and impregnable.

In logic a dilemma is a specific kind of problem—one that presents us with two equally unacceptable alternatives. Happily, the dilemma I have outlined is a false dilemma; our alternatives need not be drawn in such stark terms. We need not make schools Christian or eliminate all religion from public education; there are alternatives. We need not dismantle the wall of separation or build it higher; there are alternatives. Indeed, we need not be religious conservatives or secular liberals; there are alternatives.

Nonetheless, truths can be found in each of the positions I have sketched. I will agree with those religious conservatives who claim that public education is hostile to religion; indeed, I will argue that students are all but indoctrinated against religion in public schools and universities. But I will also agree with those liberals who claim that it cannot be the purpose of public education to promote religion or allow its practice in public schools and universities. I believe that educators must take religion seriously for a variety of philosophical, political, moral, and constitutional reasons that I will take some care to spell out, but taking religion seriously cannot be a matter of governmental endorsement or practice; we must continue to separate church and state— though not so strictly as some would advocate.

This third alternative, located in what I take to be the Reasonable Center of our cultural politics, is, happily, an increasingly common position—although the voice of reason is often hard to hear above the noise of battle. I should mention, however, that many of my allies in the center fail to appreciate what is involved in taking religion seriously. If justice is to be done, significant changes must come about in the ways we conceive and practice education. Indeed, our problem cuts to the heart—might I say the soul?—of public education and is not easily solved.

As I write, we are caught up yet again in a heated national debate about school prayer. I trust that I do not underestimate the religious significance of prayer in suggesting that whether or not children pray in schools is a matter of considerably less importance than the issue that I will address in this book: the proper role of religious ideas and values in the curriculum of American schools and universities. (Of course I will say something about prayer as well.)

One reason our situation is so difficult is that most educators are not very well educated about religion. The temper of modern intellectual life and the conventional wisdom of professional education are, after all, deeply and pervasively secular. Indeed, here we encounter the most fundamental of our problems: What claim, if any, does religion make on the modern mind? Why, if at all, should religion be taken seriously? What place, if any, should it have in textbooks and the curriculum?

Of course we disagree about all of this profoundly—and this is a fact of no small significance for our discussion. How should public education deal with matters about which the public is so deeply divided? How are we to live with our deepest differences?

I write not as a specialist in religion or education or constitutional law, but as a philosopher and generalist. It has been my intention to expose the deep assumptions that shape our thinking about religion and education and to provide an interdisciplinary overview—a kind of conceptual map—of those ideas and ideals, traditions and worldviews, that clash in our culture wars. No doubt some points of detail and nuance have been lost in trying to cover so much ground, but only by acquiring some perspective on the complex web of historical, philosophical, political, and constitutional relationships that define our cultural location will we acquire the sense of direction that will enable us to make our way through the policy minefields of our culture wars.

My debts are considerable. Maynard Adams’s influence on my thinking and on this book is pervasive and far exceeds the number of notes citing his work. Charles Haynes has been an unfailing source of insight into the relationship between religion and education. In addition, each of the following individuals has read parts or, in a few cases, all of the manuscript, and I have benefited greatly from their advice: David Dill, Martha Dill, John Dixon, David Halperin, Peter Kaufman, David Larson, Robert Michaelsen, Sidney Rittenberg, Benjamin Sendor, Gilbert Sewall, Jonathan Sher, Grant Wacker, and James Wilde. Needless to say, the willingness of friends and colleagues to undertake this task implies nothing about whether they agree with (or find outrageous) the claims I make. David Perry, my editor at the University of North Carolina Press, has provided much-needed encouragement and advice at virtually every step along the way. By her close and careful reading of the manuscript, Trudie Calvert has improved this book in many ways.

My wife Nancy has worked hard to convince me that there is virtue in timeliness as well as in perfection and that it is more important to be read and understood by all concerned than by scholars only. It is due to her that I have finally finished this book and that is as readable as it is. Our son Jeremy was born shortly after I began writing, and all too often he has had to share his father’s time with the computer. His presence has deepened my concern about education and enriched in wonderful, often unexpected, ways my sense of how we find meaning in the world. It is to Nancy and Jeremy that I dedicate this book.

RELIGION AND AMERICAN EDUCATION

INTRODUCTION

Once, when St. Petersburg was still Leningrad, the economist E. F. Schumacher was lost there. Although he was standing near several enormous churches, they didn’t appear on his tourist map. When his interpreter showed him where he was, Schumacher asked why the churches were not on the map. He was told: We don’t show churches on our maps. Schumacher protested that one nearby church was on the map. But that is not a church, he was told. That is a museum. . . . It is only the living churches’ we don’t show. It then occurred to me, Schumacher wrote, that this was not the first time I had been given a map which failed to show many things I could see right in front of my eyes. All through school and university I had been given maps of life and knowledge on which there was hardly a trace of many of the things that I most cared about and that seemed to me to be of the greatest possible importance to the conduct of my life.¹ Just as churches did not appear on his tourist map, so religions had been left off the conceptual maps his education had provided him. Or if they did show up, they did so in ancient times and faraway places, more or less as a museum pieces.

In the last few years, the maps of St. Petersburg have changed. The conceptual maps we provide students in our public schools and universities continue to chart a world without religion.

Perspective

It is a striking fact that in American public schools and universities students can—and most do—earn high school diplomas, college degrees, M.B.A.’s, J.D.’s, M.D.’s and Ph.D.’s without ever confronting a live religious idea. We take it for granted that students can know everything they need to know about whatever they study without knowing anything about religion. Although students may receive a smattering of facts about it here and there, religion is almost always encountered in a historical setting, as a museum piece. They are not likely to confront it as a live option for understanding the here and now. The conventional wisdom among educators is that religion is irrelevant to virtually everything that is taken to be true and important.

This situation is so striking because for all of history—at least until fairly recently in the West—people have oriented themselves in the world by way of religious maps. The idea that the sacred and the secular could be separated and that one could know everything true and important about virtually all aspects of the world without knowing anything about God would have struck most people as nonsense.

No doubt the world has become much more secular, but religion is far from dead, even in the modern West. Garry Wills has suggested that the learned have their superstitions, prominent among them a belief that superstition is evaporating. Since science has explained the world in secular terms, there is no more need for religion, which will wither away.... [Yet] nothing has been more stable in our history, nothing less unbudgeable, than religious belief and practice. Religion does not shift or waver; the attention of its observers does.² Polls consistently show that nine out of ten Americans believe in the existence of God. More than seven out of ten believe in life after death.³ Some 55 percent of Americans say that religion is very important in their lives.⁴ Forty percent value their relationship with God above all else (while only 2 percent say that a well-paying job is the most important thing in their lives).⁵ Based on decades of polling data, George Gallup, Jr., and Jim Castelli claim that America cannot by any stretch of the imagination be described as secular in its core beliefs.⁶ The Swiss theologian Hans Küng asks: Why don’t people openly admit the fact. .. [that the] death of religion expected in late modernity has not taken place.⁷ For the American theologian Richard John Neuhaus, the proposition that America is a secular society is contrary to sociological fact. The American people are more incorrigibly religious than ever before.⁸ And Time magazine began a 1991 cover story on religion in American public life: To say that God is everywhere in American life is as much a statement of fact as of faith. His name appears on every coin, on every dollar bill and in the vast majority of state constitutions. Schoolchildren pledge allegiance to one nation, under him. The President of the United States ends his speeches with a benediction. God bless America.⁹

Here we have something of a paradox. If we are so religious, why does our educational system ignore religion? If seven out of ten of us believe in the immortality of the soul, why does the subject never come up in any course or textbook? Where in the curriculum are religious conceptions of social justice or religious assessments of abortion discussed? If almost everyone believes that God exists—and, presumably, that our hopes for salvation and the meaningfulness of our lives depend on knowing God—how can education ignore this? What could possibly be more important? How are we to account for the absence of living religion from education?

We can quickly dispense with two commonly given answers—though I shall have a good deal to say about them in chapters to come. First, the Constitution forbids the study of religion in public schools and universities. This, of course, is simply false. It is true that the courts have removed the practice of religion from public education, but any number of times the Supreme Court has affirmed the constitutional legitimacy of the study of religion.

Second, religion is too controversial. There is more to this argument. Precisely because religion continues to be a powerful force in our culture, and because we are a pluralistic nation in which people do not agree about religion, the treatment of religion in education is controversial. Still, the fear of controversy is not the primary reason that religion has been exiled from education. The simple proof lies in our universities. Research universities are well insulated from controversy, yet religion is almost as much ignored in universities as in public schools. True, many public universities have departments of religious studies, but most discussion of religion is segregated into those departments so that every other discipline is free to ignore religion. (One will have to look long and hard to find a discussion of the soul in a psychology textbook or of self-sacrificing love in an economics text.) And, because courses in religious studies are always electives, if they are offered at all, students also are free to ignore religion. Indeed, what historian George Marsden claims for Christianity is true of all religion: it has become not only entirely peripheral to higher education but has also often come to be considered absolutely alien to whatever is important to that enterprise.¹⁰

There are two much better reasons for the absence of religion from public schools and universities. First, all of the survey data and American religiosity notwithstanding, Western civilization has become very secular. Religion, in response, has become increasingly, though not entirely, a private matter, disengaged from the dominant institutions, ideas, and values of modern civilization. Religion simply does not play the role in our political and economic life, in our art or our culture, that it once did. We no longer live our lives in the shadow of the village church steeple. For a century, steeples have been overshadowed by skyscrapers, monuments to our secular modernity. Most people have learned to compartmentalize religion so that it has few implications for how we live our lives or how we think about the world in academic disciplines. In fact, we have become so secular that most of us do not find the absence of religion from education particularly striking.

Ernest Gellner has discussed the emergence of ironic cultures in the modern world. In dealing with the frills of life, he argues, in choosing our menus and our rituals, we adopt the colorful and cozy beliefs of religion; but when "serious issues are at stake—such as the production of wealth, or the maintenance of health—we want and expect real knowledge"—that is, the hard, cold knowledge of medical and management science.¹¹

There is a good deal to this. Most of us place our hopes for well-being in the hands of research scientists and economists, engineers and physicians, politicians and psychologists. According to the theologian Don Cupitt, since Darwin, religion has played no part in any major branch of knowledge. Like a coat of arms, he suggests, religious belief may anchor us reassuringly in the past; but it is of little use in the present.¹²

Of course, religion is less relevant for some than for others. Here we come to the second reason for religion-free education. The truth is that intellectuals (and highly educated folk generally) are much less religious than most people (survey data show this as well), and it is intellectuals who write textbooks, shape curricula, and teach teachers. The great majority of scholars view religion as irrelevant to their subjects, and a few regard it as superstition to be combated. The intellectual orthodoxy of our time—of the past hundred years or so—is fully secular. It need no longer be militantly secular because of the widespread assumption that the intellectual and cultural wars of religion have been won. Religion is an anachronism, a museum piece, for most intellectuals.

Mammoth segments of modern life and culture have been secularized. Our intellectual and educational worlds are almost completely secular. And yet most Americans continue to hold on to their religion. True, many are only nominally religious. Still, when all is said and done, religion shows considerable vitality in our culture. Americans not only continue to believe, but almost half of us worship in a church or synagogue or mosque in any given week. Religious voices are still to be heard in the public debate of such issues as abortion, euthanasia, pornography, social justice, civil rights, and war and peace. Our cultural terrain continues to have religious contours though the conceptual maps that modern education provides its students usually fail to show them.

The Problem

What passes for the truth on one side of the Pyrenees, Blaise Pascal once wrote, is taken for falsehood on the other side. For many Americans nothing is so obviously true and important as God and salvation. For other Americans, nothing is so obviously false, so assuredly a matter of blind faith and superstition, as religion. (Of course, America is land of many mountain ranges: there are not just two competing views of what is true, but many.)

We disagree profoundly about the truth, and our disagreements cut to the bone, to what we believe about human nature, history, morality, society, the universe—and reason. How, then, are we to live with our deepest differences? ¹³ What do we teach in public schools and universities when our disagreements about the truth cut so deep? More to the point, what obligation, if any, do educators have to take religion seriously, particularly when it is no longer a part of their worldview?

No doubt everyone agrees that there is some place for religion in education, for we cannot understand history and historical literature without understanding a good deal about religion. I agree, but I am more concerned with the place of religion in the here and now.

What hearing should live religious voices receive in public schools and universities? Should religion be taken seriously as a candidate for the truth? Should scholars and the educational establishment have the right to take some views seriously and ignore others, to define the truth for students when that truth is deeply contested in our culture? Does academic freedom give teachers the right to ignore religion, to teach that it is false—or perhaps to teach that some version of it is true? What right do elected officials have to resolve these problems by determining the shape and substance of the curriculum? What constraints do courts legitimately impose on public schools and universities by way of the religion clauses of the First Amendment? What right do parents have to educate their children religiously, in private schools, in accord with their consciences—and should the state subsidize such a right? What is academically respectable? What is politically acceptable? What is constitutionally required? What is pedagogically sound? What would constitute indoctrination? What are the ethics of education when religion is at issue? These are my questions.

I am not concerned (here) about whether any religion or any secular way of understanding the world is true. I will be obstinately agnostic about that. My problem is this: what should be taught about religion when we disagree profoundly about the truth?

This is a problem in the philosophy of education to which there are analogues. What should students be taught about politics, about the economy, about human psychology, or about morality, when we disagree deeply about them? In many ways the question about religion is more difficult, however. Religion is intensely personal and is of overriding importance to many people. Because it has been ignored in education, and because it has become so much a private matter, most of us have had little practice talking about it in public places. Unlike any of these other matters, the treatment of religion in public education is regulated by the Constitution by way of the religion clauses of the First Amendment. Perhaps most important, religion is sufficiently problematic given the reigning orthodoxies of our intellectual culture that it is very hard for most educators to take it seriously—at least in their own fields.

The Conventional Wisdom

Three fundamental assumptions about religion and modern culture together constitute a kind of conventional wisdom which is deeply embedded in the beliefs and attitudes of modern American educators. Each assumption is controversial within our larger culture, however.

Assumption 1: The secular and the sacred can be separated, and the greater part of our world can be understood in purely secular terms. So, for example, it is possible to understand the mind (and the brain) without reference to the soul; it is possible to understand the economic world without reference to divine justice; it is possible to understand history and nature without reference to God’s purposes. As we shall see, a major theme of modern Western history, perhaps the major theme, is the secularization of the world: what had been understood in religious terms can now be understood in secular terms. God is irrelevant to education.

Response: Needless to say, the divorce of the sacred from the secular continues to be contested. Historically, most all religions have held that the sacred and the secular are wed in virtually all domains of life. Some religious liberals have worked hard to find amicable terms of separation, but their separation remains deeply controversial in our culture.

Assumption 2: Secular ways of understanding the world are religiously neutral; hence secular education is religiously neutral. Most educators, judges, and a good deal of public opinion assume that purely secular accounts of the world have no implications for the truth or falsity of religion. Teaching secular ways of thinking about the world neither promotes nor is hostile to religion. Not to mention the soul in a psychology class is to take no position on the soul; not to mention God in a history class has no implications for whether there is divine purpose in history. Justice Robert Jackson summarized this view nicely when he wrote in Everson v. Board of Education (1947) that public education is organized on the premise that secular education can be isolated from all religious teaching so that the school can inculcate all needed temporal knowledge and also maintain a strict and lofty neutrality as to religion.¹⁴ This claim is crucial, for the Supreme Court has interpreted the First Amendment to require that public schools must be neutral between religion and nonreligion.

Response: Even the most cursory look at modern Western intellectual history reveals a different picture. The cultural and intellectual wars of religion of the last few centuries were not fought over nothing; they were about who was right and who was wrong. It is simply not plausible to argue that religion and its secular opposition were (and are) neutrals who, for several centuries, mistakenly took each other for belligerents.

Arguably, the governing methods, assumptions, and conclusions of much modern secular scholarship are not neutral to religion, but hostile. Of course, some religion is much more compatible with modernity and accommodating to modern scholarship than is other religion: distinctions need to be drawn (and I will draw some). Nonetheless, there are fundamental tensions between most all religion (conservative and liberal) on the one hand and most all secular, scientific scholarship on the other. They claim contested ground. Yet the religious claims to that ground are virtually never heard in public schools and universities, and secular, scientific ways of understanding the world pervade the curriculum.

Assumption 3: Critical reason is the ally of modern secular thought, whereas religion lives and dies by irrational faith. As education must be objective and rational, education must be secular. Religion can be studied, but only in objective—secular—ways. To promote religious belief is to indoctrinate—and indoctrination is not education.

Response. It is true that religion has often gloried in irrationality; but it has just as often claimed the mantle of reason and scholarship. Moreover, in the last few decades many secular scholars have argued that modern science is anything but the epitome of disinterested reason and objectivity; rather, it reflects ideology, power relationships, even faith-commitments. Such postmodern thought typically denies science any special standing as the arbiter of truth. That is, both the equation of reason with science and secular thought and the equation of religion with indoctrination and irrationality are open to question. We need to be very careful in defining reason and faith.

Now, if the sacred and the secular cannot be disentangled, and if (much) modern, secular thought is in fact hostile to religion (rather than neutral), and if religion can be rational or if secular thought is a matter of ideological commitments or faith, then the conventional wisdom of modern American education is profoundly mistaken.

Conclusions, Qualifications, Pious Intentions

It goes without saying that students at all levels should study the secular and scientific ways of understanding the world that define modernity. I do not need to argue this point for American education already does so with great vigor. Instead, I will be concerned to restore the tension between religious and secular ways of making sense of our world. The conventional wisdom of modern American education is deeply controversial if not profoundly mistaken; in either case there are a variety of reasons for taking religion seriously as a part of public school and university education.

There are conservative religious reasons for incorporating religion into public education. Many people believe that America is a Christian nation and that it should be the task of schools to nurture and promote Christian (or Judeo-Christian) beliefs and values. Hence it is almost always assumed that anyone who argues for taking religion seriously must have a religious (and probably a fundamentalist) agenda. I have already said that I will remain agnostic about the truth of religion. In fact, my arguments will be secular and liberal. I will argue that all students should receive a liberal education that takes seriously a variety of ways of making sense of the world, religious ways included, if they are to be informed, reasonable, and responsible individuals. Current American education is profoundly illiberal in its refusal to take religion seriously. Public education should be politically liberal (or multicultural) in the sense that it should give voice to various subcultures—religious subcultures included—which currently have little say in the world of intellectual and educational elites. In effect, the educational establishment has disfranchised large segments of the American people.

And I will argue that on a liberal reading of the First Amendment public education is obligated to take religion seriously. Judicial conservatives typically argue that the Establishment Clause allows the state to promote non-sectarian religion so long as it does so noncoercively; this is a mistaken reading of the First Amendment. Liberals argue, rightly, that the state and public education must be neutral both among religions and between religion and nonreligion. What liberals seldom acknowledge is that by ignoring religion, and by promoting secular views hostile to religion, public education in effect takes sides against religion. Therefore, if neutrality is to be restored as the First Amendment requires, religion must be given its voice. It is not the task of public education to promote any particular religion, or religion generally, but it should not ignore or denigrate religion either.

Historically, political liberalism has underwritten a constitutional framework that allows people to live together peacefully in spite of their deep differences. Properly understood, it should provide a point of agreement between secular and religious folk who disagree about what is ultimately important and how to make sense of the world. Because our culture is so deeply divided, public education should not take sides in our culture wars but should maintain neutrality, treating the contending alternatives fairly. Indeed, only by taking each other seriously can we resolve our national dilemma about religion and education.

It is my hope that I can find enough common moral and political ground with my readers so that we can agree about how religion should fit into education even if we do not agree about the truth of religion (or science). I am not so naive as to believe that everyone can be brought into the fold: no doubt there will be some religious conservatives, some secular liberals, and some members of minority religious traditions who will find the broad middle ground I hope to stake out uninviting. Still, my intention is to make a case that is compelling for people who hold a wide variety of views on religion.

In making a case for religion in public education I do not want to be interpreted as being hostile to science or modernity. Modern science is without a doubt the greatest of all human intellectual achievements, and while much that is new in the world hardly counts as progress, the modern world is, all things considered, a great improvement on the ancient world. Although I wish to raise questions about the truth and adequacy of scientific ways of understanding the world and secular ways of living in the world, it is not my goal to settle them or even to stake out a position on them. My question, as I have said, is different: how should education be structured when we, in our culture, disagree so profoundly about where the truth lies?

I should acknowledge that I have paid far more attention to some aspects of American education than to others. First, I will have much more to say about public education than about private education—though the question of vouchers and parental rights will inevitably bring private schools into the discussion. Second, I am primarily concerned with high school and undergraduate education, for it is after students acquire general skills and before they specialize that they pursue what passes for a liberal education, and it is then that they should be exposed to a wide variety of voices, religious voices included. Third, I will have much more to say about the study of religion than about the practice of religion in the schools. There has probably been more heated controversy over school prayer and religious holidays than over textbooks and curricula. I do not suggest that these matters are unimportant, but I do believe that curricular issues relating to the study of religion are much more important.

Henry Fielding’s Parson Thwackum once announced: When I mention religion, I mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion, but the Church of England.¹⁵1 will not be so particular. I will have more to say about Christianity than about other religions because Christianity has been America’s dominant religion, but it is very important to keep in mind that there has never been only a single religious tradition in America. We are a multicultural, multireligious nation, and the educational implications of this fact are considerable.

Finally, a pious intention. I have intended to write a book as free of technical language as possible. Every discipline is entitled to its specialized vocabulary—disciplines in the humanities as well as in the sciences—but too often these semiprivate languages keep us from understanding each other. Indeed, uncritical specialization is one of the villains in my story. Of course, the vernacular can remain very ambiguous. Words such as religion and humanism and morality have different meanings for different people. We make what sense we can of language given our cultural backgrounds, our worldviews. Such ambiguity can be pointed out—and I will do so at crucial points in the argument—but it cannot be avoided. In this context I might note that throughout the book I will use public education as an umbrella term covering both public schools (K-12 education) and public higher education.

One final item is on the agenda before we leap into the mainstream of the argument. Worldview is one of those quasi-technical, almost-vernacular terms that could stand some clarification, especially as I will be using it a good deal. Hence I close this introduction with...

A Note on Worldviews

When I was a small boy I believed that God’s name was Harold. Did we not, after all, pray: Our Father Who art in Heaven, Harold be thy name? I did not yet know the word hallowed, but I did have an Uncle Harold. I made sense of my experience in terms that were familiar to me; I used my all too meager conceptual resources to render the world meaningful as best I could.

Do two people hear the same thing if one is familiar with symphonic music and the other is hearing classical Western music for the first time? Can the novice hear the bassoon part or the recapitulation or the minor seventh chords or the leitmotif? A musician can pick them out from the background, can discern structure, harmony, and purpose where the novice hears, as William James might have put it, a booming, buzzing confusion. To make sense of and appreciate various kinds of experience, we must have a fairly sophisticated conceptual vocabulary. If we have that vocabulary then we can discern aspects of the world—dimensions of reality, we might say—to which we had been deaf before: we hear music, not just noise.

Consider another example. According to Jonathan Swift, the Lilliputians who investigated Gulliver’s belongings reported back to their King that out of his pocket

hung a great silver chain, with a wonderful kind of engine at the bottom. We directed him to draw out whatever was fastened to that chain; which appeared to be a globe, half silver, and half of some transparent metal: on the transparent side we saw certain strange figures circularly drawn, and thought we could touch them, till we found our fingers stopped by that lucid substance. He put this engine to our ears, which made an incessant noise like that of a water-mill: and we conjecture it is either some unknown animal, or the god that he assures us (if we understood him right, for he expressed himself very imperfectly) that he seldom did any thing without consulting it: he called it his oracle, and said it pointed out the time for every action of his life.¹⁶

Here the problem is not just that the Lilliputians lack the concept of a clock, it is that their conceptual resources are not sufficiently rich to allow them to see Gulliver’s watch for what it is: because Gulliver does nothing without consulting his watch, it must be oracular; because it makes a noise, it must be alive. Because of their lack of mechanical sophistication, they take a machine to be a divinity.

It is one kind of mistake to confuse a pocket watch with a calculator, a symphony with a sonata, the world hallowed with the word Harold. It is a mistake of a different kind to confuse a machine with a divinity, music with noise, the profane with the sacred. In these latter cases, we are confusing orders of reality, rather than two comparable things within the same order.

I will use the term worldview to name the most fundamental interpretive frameworks we use to understand reality. A worldview marks out various orders of reality and illusion, it gives some sense of what is reasonable and irrational, it orients action by defining the concepts in terms of which we discern what is good and bad, it provides the framework within which we have some sense of what might be hoped for and what it is unrealistic to expect. Philosophers, theologians, and scientists who do highly theoretical work often transform aspects of a worldview into formal philosophical systems, theologies, or scientific theories by organizing, clarifying, systematizing, or reforming the fundamental commitments embedded with the more vague and informal worldview of a culture. But as I will use the term, a worldview may be largely unarticulated; indeed, what distinguishes a worldview philosophically is often what goes without saying, what is so basic that it is simply assumed and never questioned. For example, the philosopher John Hick has suggested that the

idea that we have lived many times before and must live many times again in this world seems as self-evident to most people in the hindu and buddhist east as the contrary idea that we came into existence at conception or birth, and shall see the last of this world at death, seems self-evident to almost everyone in the christian and post-christian west. . . . Western religious thinkers have seen . . . little reason to provide arguments for their own assumption that a new human soul is created, or emerges, for every new baby born. That this must be what happened has usually seemed so evident to orthodox christian theologians that they have not stopped to examine or defend its plausibility.

But from the perspective of Indian religion, our Western assumptions seem utterly unreasonable, implausible and unattractive.¹⁷ Our sense of personal identity and the afterlife are basic constituents of our worldview.

It is important to recognize that what makes the respective Indian or Western views of the afterlife so plausible to their adherents is that they are integrated into a way of life; they are not simply abstract propositions to be believed or not. They figure into moral traditions that define what is expected of us, they serve to explain our lot in life, they are assumed in our rituals, they are a part of our emotional sense of what is to be feared or hoped for. That is, worldviews hang together emotionally, behaviorally, and institutionally; they are more than just a set of beliefs.

It has become a commonplace over the last two centuries, since Immanuel Kant, to hold that we do not all experience the same objective world. Instead, we interpret the world, bringing to our confrontation with it a framework for making sense of it. So, for example, the world acquires its color, tone, and texture because we have the sense organs we have (and the worlds of bats and bees must appear quite different to them). Of course, in some sense we all experience the same world; it is not entirely the creation of our sense organs. As Ian Barbour puts it, our "experience isn’t entirely subjective, since we cannot make of it what we will. It is at least in part a ‘given’ which we are powerless to alter, a demand upon us to which we must conform. But, he continues, experience is not purely objective" either, for it is qualified by the memories, feelings and concepts of the experiencing subject. . . . We don’t simply see; we ‘see as.’ In the act of perception, the irreducible ‘data’ are not isolated patches of colour or fragmentary sensations, but total patterns in which interpretation has already entered. Our experience is organized in the light of particular interests. Language itself also structures our experience in specific ways. Indeed, he concludes, what we count as ‘given’ depends on our conceptual framework and the interests which it serves.¹⁸ There is no such thing as uninterpreted experience. We live, as Ernst Cassirer has put it, in a symbolic universe: No longer can man confront reality immediately; he cannot see it, as it were, face to face.¹⁹

As we grow into a language and culture, the interpretation they provide seems natural and inevitable. If we are brought up—as most children initially are—knowing only one tradition, we will come to believe that our language, our distinctions, and our conceptual resources mirror reality; we take ourselves to experience reality as it is. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann have called this the most important confidence trick that society plays on the individual.²⁰ Different languages and cultures (indeed, different academic disciplines and professions) teach people to conceptualize their experiences differently. Knowing what we now know about other languages and cultures, other ways of thinking about the world than our own, our natural tendency to believe we know reality for what it is has become problematic. We are constantly interpreting reality rather than encountering it directly.²¹

A further point of great importance—one to which I shall come back again and again—is that worldviews cannot in any straightforward way be verified or falsified. Any worldview that has come of age will have developed conceptual resources to handle most any contingency; it will possess resilience in the face of potentially falsifying experiences. In fact, for most adherents, their own worldview will define common sense and reality with such self-evident force that it is hard to imagine what could shake their confidence. Claims made within rival worldviews, dimly understood, will seem implausible if not sheer nonsense.

Of course, within a worldview it will often be clear how to go about verifying and falsifying claims. A Hindu can appeal to age-old spiritual traditions to justify belief in reincarnation, a fundamentalist Christian can appeal to scriptural proof-texts to falsify claims about reincarnation, and a scientist may appeal to neurological evidence regarding the dependency of consciousness on the brain and the dissolution of the brain at death to falsify all claims about the existence of consciousness after death.

The problem comes when we attempt to assess contending worldviews and their claims in ways that are not question-begging, for different worldviews have different conceptions of what counts as evidence, as good arguments, and as reasonable. Should moral or religious experience count in verifying the claims of a worldview? The answer is typically no if one works within science but yes if one works within a religious worldview. Why adopt the vantage point of one worldview rather than another in the first place?

There are relativists who say we cannot raise the question of the truth or reasonableness of contending worldviews, for what counts as rational is so systematically ambiguous that any argument will inevitably be question-begging. The whole idea of verifying or falsifying worldviews makes no sense. I am not inclined to agree, and I will have more to say about this.

In summary, a worldview provides people with their most general concepts for making sense of their experience; it defines reality for them. Worldviews may remain relatively implicit or they may become explicit and formally articulated within philosophy, theology, and science. When someone lives within a worldview and is largely unfamiliar with others, that worldview seems natural, a direct encounter with reality rather than one interpretation among others. Worldviews have a coherence that reinforces their plausibility; they are not simply grab bags of abstract beliefs. Their survival requires that they hang together emotionally, institutionally, and intellectually. Although most claims can be tested within a worldview, it is much less clear how one tests the truth of a worldview itself, or how one adjudicates the conflicting claims of competing worldviews.

The historian Alan Gilbert has argued that "the crisis of contemporary Christianity lies not in challenges to the truth of its dogmas, but in the fact that . . . people in a secular culture have become increasingly ‘tone-deaf’ to any orchestration of those dogmas. A secular culture, in short, is an environment in which the very a priori plausibility of a religious worldview is at stake."²² From within what has become the characteristically modern world-view, it is all but impossible to discern religious harmonies in the world. For many folk, securely ensconced within modernity, religion has come to seem implausible, a museum piece, a relic of olden times; they have become tone-deaf to its charms.

1: RELIGION AND MODERNITY

We cannot explain the absence of religion from modern American education by appealing to Supreme Court decisions, the liberalism of the 1960s, or cabals of secular humanists. Modern education, like the culture in which it is embedded, is the product of profound secularizing forces at work in Western civilization over the last several hundred years. Unless we appreciate this history, our analysis will be hopelessly superficial.

In this chapter I will sketch the main plot line of one of the great dramas of modern history: the secularization of modern Western civilization. I will also describe two quite different religious responses to modernity—liberal responses, which draw heavily on modern ideas and values to reinterpret religious traditions, and conservative responses, which reject the religious relevance of modern ideas and values (at least on theological essentials). It is tremendously important to recognize that religion takes many forms, some more at home in the modern world than others. Finally, I will say something about postmodern ways in which intellectuals have made war on modernity for fully secular reasons.

Religion in the Premodern World

Until the beginnings of modernity—in, let us say, the seventeenth century— Western civilization had been, like all others, religious through and through. But as the historian of religion Wilfred Cantwell Smith has shown, the word religion is a peculiarly modern, Western word with no synonyms in most languages at most times. Most cultures have not divided the world up as we now do. Religion is a word we have come to use to categorize culture for our purposes.¹

For us, religion names one aspect of life among many. We take religions to be discrete institutions and systems of belief which stand alongside scientific and political and economic institutions and ideas. We have built intellectual walls of separation between religion and the other institutions of culture. In traditional cultures religion was not so distinguishable but was integrated into the total life of the people. What we now call religious ideas and values pervaded science and politics and economics. Indeed, for the millennium before modernity, the West was called Christendom.²

How religion came to be wrenched out of its traditional cultural context to be remade into a discrete and largely private institution is a large part of the story I have to tell in this chapter. The whole structure of our academic and intellectual life depends on this being an acceptable story, for only if religion can be separated from our academic disciplines is it justifiable to teach them as we do without reference to religion.

All premodern civilizations had some notion of God (or the gods, or the spirit world, or transcendence) such that reality was experienced as richer than modern science now takes to be the case. Much Eastern religion rejected the idea that the transcendent (Brahman, Nirvana, the Tao) was a personal God, but in the West, God was understood by analogy with a person: He, to use the traditional language, created the world, and through His plan nature and history were given purpose. The existence of God rendered the events of this life meaningful (and the events of this life could not, consequently, be understood without reference to God). Although much inevitably remained a mystery, and God was taken to be largely beyond our knowing, we could have confidence that the world is not the result of random events or blind causal laws; it is a place in which all things work ultimately for His ends, toward that which is good.

The concern of the oldest religions was to secure the goods of life—rain, harvest, children, and health; their goal, as John Hick put it, was to keep fragile human life on an even keel.³ But in the first millennium B.C.E. an extraordinary revolution took place across the world as people began to reject life in this world for life in a radically different order of reality—in Heaven, in the Kingdom of God, in Nirvana.⁴ We must live in this fallen world for the time being, but our salvation is to be had in the world to come.

In the old view, the fundamental truths of life are remembered, not discovered. According to the Indian Brahmanas, We must do what the Gods did in the beginning.⁵ Lao Tzu would have us Hold fast to the way of antiquity / In order to keep in control the realms of today. / The ability to know the beginning of antiquity / Is called the thread running through the way.⁶ Veneration of ancestors dominated Confucian thought. In Greek myth, the Golden Age gave way to the Silver and the Bronze. In Jewish and Christian thought, the story of the Garden of Eden and the Fall makes perfection a thing of the past and the present a fallen time. Reformers appear and change takes place, but the goal of the reformers is typically to revive the blessings and wisdom of the past: the Messiah would restore the Kingdom of David; Jesus was the second Adam; and the Protestant Reformers were not creating a new Christianity but returning to the true Christianity of the Church Fathers. Premodern civilizations revered tradition: they idealized the past, the time when God established the world. In the beginning was the truth. The truth is not waiting to be discovered; it has been given.⁷

All of the great world religions have taught the importance of overcoming self-interest and living a life of love, of justice, of reconciliation—indeed, sometimes of renunciation. Our fallen state, they told us, is one of selfishness and self-sufficiency. We are invariably sinful. But we have the ability—with religious discipline, or perhaps with the grace of God—to overcome our sinful selves. Indeed, with salvation we are transformed.

Finally, traditional religion was largely a community affair. No doubt individuals could be saved, but premodern civilization sustained the idea that God’s relationship was with a community of people, not just with individuals. According to the Bible, God often punished—and protected—whole peoples. We were born into a religion; we did not choose it for we were not, as individuals, competent to make these decisions. For a thousand years—until the modern period—almost everyone in the West was born Christian.

On the eve of modernity, religion pervaded the Western world. As James Turner put it, birth meant baptism; adulthood brought marriage by the priest; and life’s journey ended in the churchyard. Indeed, the church was as inevitable as death and taxes, one of which it presided over and the other of which it collected.⁸ In the mass the priest performed the miracle of transubstantiation, changing bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. Prayer was powerful; churches were built on the belief that prayers offered there could help save the souls of their founders languishing in purgatory. Monasteries and convents dotted the landscape. The world was filled with holy relics, holy shrines, holy places, and holy ground. People made pilgrimages. The liturgical calendar dictated the activities of life, and holidays were holy days, religious festivals.

The world was populated with supernatural beings. Martin Luther threw his ink bottle at Satan, and thousands of women were burned as witches. Everyone believed in providence: there was no chance or accident in the world. Outbreaks of plague were understood as God’s punishment for the sinfulness of people. Dreams were prophetic. Everyone believed that the world was only a few thousand years old, and most everyone believed that the end could not be far off. Even into the seventeenth century, according to Margaret Jacob, virtually every English scientist or promoter of science from Robert Boyle to Isaac Newton believed in the approaching millennium, however cautious they may have been in assigning a date to its advent.⁹

On some accounts kings ruled by divine right—and popes occasionally excommunicated them to bring them to their knees. Bishops helped elect the Holy Roman Emperor and cardinals conducted foreign policy. Keith Thomas reminds us that during this time,

Clerics played a dominant part in the censorship of the press, the licensing of school-masters and doctors, and the government of the universities. In an age without radio, television or (until the mid-seventeenth century) newspapers, the pulpit was the most important means of direct communication with the people. Contemporary sermons discussed not just theology, but morals, politics, economics and current affairs generally. The Church’s tentacles stretched out through the ecclesiastical courts, which exercised a wide jurisdiction over marriage and divorce, defamation, the probate of wills and every conceivable aspect of private morality.¹⁰

Justice was discerned through oaths and ordeals in which God guaranteed the soundness of the verdict. The church regulated the economy through canon law and interfered with supply and demand by setting just prices. Strangest of all, it was widely believed that the pursuit of self-interest was a sin and that poverty was holy.

The greatest theme of the artist was the life and death of Christ; the greatest task for the architect was to build a cathedral; the greatest work of litera ture in the thousand years before modernity was Dante’s account of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.

In such a world, James Turner tells us, the answers to all questions of any importance, elaborated in a thousand tales, sermons, treatises, and summas, led back ultimately to God. Without some sort of God, the world disintegrated into incomprehensibility.¹¹ In such a world unbelief was all but unthinkable.

For most of us this is a foreign world.

The Reformation

No man had a greater influence on the shape of the modern world than Martin Luther. Leszek Kolakowski has written that whatever happened in European history after Luther is, as we see it retrospectively, hardly conceivable without him: wars and philosophy, national movements and literature, religious conflicts and the reform of the Roman Church, economic development and education.¹² Of course, things did not always turn out as Luther intended; Kolakowski calls Luther the accidental father of modernity.

The theological origin of the Reformation is to be found in Luther’s overpowering sense of sin and his redeeming experience of grace. We are saved, Luther declared, not through our works or the works of the church, but by the mysterious and unmerited grace of God.

In medieval Catholicism the church was the intermediary between humankind and God, proclaiming the authoritative reading of Scripture, channeling God’s grace through its sacraments, and regulating the lives of the people. Luther and the Reformers would have none of this. For them the church separated us from God; we confront God and Scripture directly and receive His grace (or damnation) as individuals, not as children nestled in the arms of the church.

If salvation is a matter of grace, if there is nothing we can do to earn it (sinful creatures that we are), then the Catholic emphasis on penance, monasticism, and the heroic life of virtue made little sense. What is important is not how we live but what we believe by the grace of God. The Reformation, Charles Taylor tells us, brought the affirmation of ordinary life: The fullness of Christian existence was to found within the activities of this life, in one’s calling and in marriage and the family.¹³ (Luther left the monastery and married a nun.) With this new emphasis on grace, faith, and belief (rather than works, law, and tradition), religion began to withdraw to private places, leaving the public world free to be secular.

The Reformation secularized much of daily life. In the first half of the sixteenth century, according to Steven Ozment,

cities and territories