March
8 - Sometimes dumb sounds cute: Sixty percent of Americans can't
name five of the Ten Commandments, and 50% of high school seniors
think Sodom and Gomorrah were married.
Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston
University, isn't laughing. Americans' deep ignorance of world religions
- their own, their neighbors' or the combatants in Iraq, Darfur
or Kashmir - is dangerous, he says.
His new book, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know
- and Doesn't, argues that everyone needs to grasp Bible basics,
as well as the core beliefs, stories, symbols and heroes of other
faiths. (See WhoAreTheSikhs.com.)
Belief is not his business, says Prothero, who grew up Episcopalian
and now says he's a spiritually "confused Christian."
He says his argument is for empowered citizenship.
"More and more of our national and international questions
are religiously inflected," he says, citing President Bush's
speeches laden with biblical references and the furor when the first
Muslim member of Congress chose to be sworn in with his right hand
on Thomas Jefferson's Quran.
"If
you think Sunni and Shia are the same because they're both Muslim,
and you've been told Islam is about peace, you won't understand
what's happening in Iraq. If you get into an argument about gay
rights or capital punishment and someone claims to quote the Bible
or the Quran, do you know it's so?
"If you want to be involved, you need to know what they're
saying. We're doomed if we don't understand what motivates the beliefs
and behaviors of the rest of the world. We can't outsource this
to demagogues, pundits and preachers with a political agenda."
Scholars and theologians who agree with him say Americans' woeful
level of religious illiteracy damages more than democracy.
Ignorance
To The Extreme
Salem, Massachusetts Witches Trial
"You're
going to make assumptions about people out of ignorance, and they're
going to make assumptions about you," says Philip Goff of the
Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at Indiana
University in Indianapolis.
Goff cites a widely circulated claim on the Internet that the Quran
foretold American intervention in the Middle East, based on a supposed
passage "that simply isn't there. It's an entire argument for
war based on religious ignorance."
"We're impoverished by ignorance," says the Rev. Joan
Brown Campbell, former general secretary of the National Council
of Churches. "You can't draw on the resources of faith if you
only have an emotional understanding, not a sense of the texts and
teachings."
But if people don't know Sodom and Gomorrah were two cities destroyed
for their sinful ways, Campbell blames Sunday schools that "trivialized
religious education. If we want people to have serious knowledge,
we have to get serious about teaching our own faith."
Prothero's solution is to require middle-schoolers to take a course
in world religions and high schoolers to take one on the Bible.
Biblical knowledge also should be melded into history and literature
courses where relevant. He wants all college undergrads to take
at least one course in religious studies.
He calls for time-pressed adults to sample holy books and history
texts. His book includes a 90-page dictionary of key words and concepts
from Abraham to Zen. There's also a 15-question quiz - which his
students fail every year.
But it's the controversial, though constitutional, push into schools
that draws the most attention.
In theory, everyone favors children knowing more. The National Education
Association handbook says religious instruction "in doctrines
and practices belongs at home or religious institutions," while
schools should teach world religions' history, heritage, diversity
and influence.
Only 8% of public high schools offer an elective Bible course, according
to a study in 2005 by the Bible Literacy Project, which promotes
academic Bible study in public schools. The project is supported
by Freedom Forum's First Amendment Center, a Washington, D.C., non-profit
that promotes free speech.
The study surveyed 1,000 high schoolers and found that just 36%
know Ramadan is the Islamic holy month; 17% said it was the Jewish
day of atonement.
Goff
says schools are not wholly to blame for religious illiteracy. "There
are simply more groups, more players. Students didn't know Ramadan
any better in 1965, but now there are as many Muslims as Jews in
America. It's more important to know who's who."
Also today, "there is more emphasis on religious experience
as a mark of true religion and less emphasis on doctrine and knowledge
of the faith."
Still, it's the widely misunderstood 1963 decision by the U.S. Supreme
Court that may have been the tipping point: It removed devotional
Bible reading from the schools but spelled out that it should not
have been removed from literature and history.
"The decision clearly states you can't be educated without
it, but it scared schools so much they dropped it all," Goff
says.
"Schools are terrified of this," says Joy Hakim, author
of several U.S. history textbooks. She's in her 70s but remembers
well as a Jewish child how she felt like an outsider in schools
that pushed Christianity in the curriculum.
But she says the backlash went too far. "Now, you can't use
biblical characters or narrative in anything. We've stopped teaching
stories. We teach facts, and the characters are lost."
Religion, like the arts, has become an afterthought in an education
climate driven by "the fixation on literacy and numeracy -
math and reading," says Bob Schaeffer of the National Center
for Fair & Open Testing, a group critical of the standards-based
education movement. "If the ways schools, teachers, principals
and superintendents are judged all depend on math and reading scores,
that's what you're going to teach," he says.
Still, it's a tough tightrope to walk between those who say the
Bible can be just another book, albeit a valuable one, and those
who say it is inherently devotional.
The First Amendment Center also published a guide to "The Bible
and the Public Schools," which praised a ninth-grade world
religions course in Modesto, Calif., and cited a study finding students
were able to learn about other faiths without altering their own
beliefs. But it also said the class may not be easily replicated,
and required knowledgeable, unbiased teachers.
Leland Ryken, an English professor at evangelical Wheaton College
in Wheaton, Ill., tested a 2006 textbook, The Bible and Its Influence,
underwritten by the Bible Literacy Project. Ryken favors adding
classes in the Bible and literature and social studies. But he cautions,
"Religious literacy and world religions are not the same as
the Bible as literature. It's a much more loaded subject, and I
really question if high school students can get much knowledge beyond
a sense of the importance of religion."
The 'Bible and Its Influence' has been blasted by conservative Christians
such as the Rev. John Hagee (the conservative first embraced and
then rebuked by U.S. Senator John McCain under public pressure),
pastor of the 18,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio. Hagee
calls it "a masterful work of deception, distortion and outright
falsehoods" planting "concepts in the minds of children
which are contrary to biblical teaching."
Hagee wrote to the Alabama legislature opposing adoption of the
text, citing points such as discussion questions that could lead
children away from a belief in God. Example: Asking students to
ponder if Adam and Eve got "a fair deal as described in Genesis"
would plant the seed that "since God is the author of the deal,
God is unfair."
Hagee prefers the Bible itself as a textbook for Bible classes,
used with a curriculum created by a group of conservative evangelicals,
the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, based
in Greensboro, N.C. The council says its curriculum is being offered
in more than 300 schools.
Mark Chancey, professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist
University in Dallas, looked last year at how Texas public school
districts taught Bible classes. His two studies, sponsored by the
Texas Freedom Network, a civil liberties group, found only 25 of
more than 1,000 districts offered such a class.
"And 22 of them, including several using the Greensboro group's
curriculum, were clearly over the line," teaching Christianity
as the norm, and the Bible as inspired by God, says Chancey. One
teacher even showed students a proselytizing Power Point titled,
"God's road map for your life," that was clearly unconstitutional,
he says.
The controversies, costs and competing demands in the schools have
prompted many to turn instead to character education.
But classes promoting pluralism and tolerance fail on the religious
literacy front because they "reduce religion to morality,"
Prothero says, or they promote a call for universal compassion as
if it were the only value that matters.
"We
are not all on the same one path to the same one God," he says.
"Religions aren't all saying
the same thing. That's presumptuous and wrong. They start with different
problems, solve the problems in different ways, and they have different
goals." --
"What
happens when the government gets involved with religion?
In the country of Malaysia, it is against the law to
convert from Islam to any other religion."
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