'Teaching about Religions' author favors balanced religious courses in public schools
Emile Lester is author of Teaching about Religions, a brand-new book on religious education in public schools from the University of Michigan Press. He speaks here about how religions can be incorporated into a public school curriculum.
Recent attempts by Texas state school board members to accommodate conservative Christian concerns in the social studies and science curriculums have produced predictable handwringing among many liberals and secularists. These groups have responded by emphasizing the need to teach evolution only and insulate the public school curriculum from conservative Christian biases.
These groups’ concerns are not unwarranted. Still, in Teaching Religions: A Democratic Approach for Public Schools, I argue their concerns are based on a misconception about the religious divide in America, and their response is only likely to deepen this divide. Public schools would better live up to democratic ideals of respect and neutrality by providing a limited and balanced discussion of crucial conservative Christian views.
“To be fully inclusive of religion,” I write, “American public schools should promote robust tolerance for those of all faiths and none, and provide a special recognition of conservative Christian beliefs. Schools must encourage consensus about the civil rights of each and every perspective about religion and allow ample room for faiths to express their conflicts about politics and eternal salvation.”
The majority of evangelical Christians, the best social science research, hold views more moderate and consistent with democratic values than the minority of extremist activists who garner headlines. Extremists, like the Texas school board members, want their views to dominate the curriculum; the moderate majority of evangelicals want recognition of their viewpoints alongside the recognition of other views about religion.
Unfortunately, the current public school policy of largely ignoring religion in general and the total exclusion of central conservative Christian concerns such as critiques and alternatives to Darwinian evolution convince many moderate evangelicals of biases in the curriculum. This conviction often drives them into the arms of extremists.
The centerpiece to the democratic approach of teaching about religion would be a required a world religions course promoting knowledge about the prominent Christian and non-Christian religions in the United States, and respect for all views about the civil rights of those with different beliefs, atheists, and agnostics.
Teaching Religions presents pioneering survey research about a required religions course in Modesto, California indicating that the course increased tolerance and received approval from the religiously diverse and initially divided Modesto community.
But this course is more favorable to liberal interests and would promote ecumenist beliefs inconsistent with the religious beliefs of many conservative Christians. Fairness and balance dictate that public schools should balance the teaching of this course by offering a “one-semester elective course on Intelligent Design theory and its critics, and a one-semester elective course on the Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible.”
Striking this principled compromise would satisfy central interests of each side in our religious and cultural divides. It would reverse the disturbing exclusion of conservative Christian views in the current curriculum. It would expand respect for vulnerable non-Christian minorities like Muslims, and atheists and agnostics. It would make conservatives – assured that their own views are receiving adequate treatment - more willing to allow a robust discussion of Darwinism in the curriculum. And it would undercut the power of extremists like those on the Texas state school board seeking to impose their views on others and deepen artificial divides over religion.
