Civility, Religious Pluralism, and Education

This chapter begins with the assumption that it is tremendously important for public school students to learn about religion, that public schools are an important crucible in which a public discourse about religion can be modeled in a civil and responsible way. Oddly enough, this starting point can be a controversial one. Many argue that religion is such a loaded topic, that any attempts for mainstream educators to navigate that inevitable minefield—of conflicting interpretations, controversial moral issues, and students’ own emotional commitments—would surely blow up in their faces. Such an attitude is hardly limited simply to those who want religion to remain a “private” matter or who confuse academic study with parochial training. On the contrary, even the former chair of the AAR Committee on the Public Understanding of Religion (CPUR) vociferously opposed the Academy’s support for teaching about religion in public schools, on the grounds that “in most cases, it can’t be done properly, and we end up lending our prestige to religious indoctrination.”¹ The point is, of course, well taken, though it’s hard to resist the delicious irony of the chair of a committee charged with developing strategies for educating the public about religion throwing up her hands at the futility of the prospect.

Nevertheless, given the assumption that informs this chapter, I also adopt as something of an article of faith the contention that the “American Academy of Religion Guidelines for Teaching About Religion in K–12 Public Schools in the United States” should qualify for early admission into any imagined fraternity of milestones, landmarks, or watershed achievements. Produced in 2010 by a three-year task force that was chaired by Harvard’s Diane Moore, and reflecting input from a broad working group of scholars, the “Guidelines” is very much the first document of its kind not only to argue persuasively the need for public educators to incorporate the study of religion into their curricula, but also to put forth a systematic and self-conscious explanation of what such curricula might look like and how professional scholars of religion might contribute toward that end. With a target audience of “public school teachers, administrators, members of school boards, and other citizens,” the “Guidelines” address a number of critical issues, including the distinction between academic and devotional or confessional approaches, the respective places for scholarly and clerical authority, and the importance of recognizing religious traditions as internally diverse rather than monolithic.2 Moreover, the document models a cultural studies methodology that could integrate the strengths of established historical, literary, and tradition-specific methods, while avoiding essentialist, apologetic, or polemical representations of religious traditions and religious history. Now, a few years after publication, the original task force has been disbanded, and the AAR is taking up the challenge of how best to disseminate the document and implement the plan articulated therein. Without diminishing the work of either Diane Moore or the task force, I would suggest that in some ways, the most difficult work still lies ahead.

Certainly, this volume incorporates a great deal of strategic material that would be relevant for carrying out this project, but my purpose here is to examine how the underlying assumption about the need for “religion in school” also informs other curricular initiatives being undertaken, or already in place, that run at distinctly cross-purposes with the goals spelled out in the “Guidelines.” In other words, I will specifically address how the Academy’s initial challenge is not only to educate communities about the need for religious studies curricula, but to compete with constituencies that have very different visions about the mission of public schools. This should not really strike anyone as much of a surprise, as various segments of the population had already been competing with us long before anyone even considered the “Guidelines,” largely due to the widely held suspicion that the academic study of religion is inherently biased and antireligious, a sentiment that has sparked furious state legislative battles over the authorization and configuration of public school Bible courses. In my adopted home state of Georgia, for example, in part to repudiate scholarship associated with the Bible Literacy Project (whose textbook was decried as a “leftwing, one-world religion-government text” designed “to undermine the claims that the Bible makes”), recent legislation mandates that high school courses in Old and New Testament employ the Bible itself as the primary textbook, and that students be permitted to choose their own preferred translations.³ This is no doubt related to the fact that even while the law stipulates a nonsectarian approach to the subject, numerous advocates expressed confidence that simply having children read the Bible in any context would provide an antidote to a plethora of social excesses, encourage them to internalize moral lessons, and so forth.⁴ However clear the “Guidelines” may be about the distinction between academic and confessional approaches to religion, many people invested in how public education is configured have not gotten the memo and would not be particularly hospitable to it.

Obviously, these character initiatives have become ubiquitous in American public schools, but they have done so while flying largely under the radar, especially in the religious studies academy. And as the “respect for the creator” incident would indicate, there is indeed a pressing need to interrogate these programs, in terms of how they are developed, what values they put forth, and how those values are transmitted to students. Perhaps the most important observation about these character curricula is that they are not sui generis, but reflect the specific values and idiosyncrasies of the regions and constituencies that produced them. To illustrate this point, Peter Smagorinsky and Joel Taxel, a pair of University of Georgia language and literacy education scholars, employ discourse analysis to examine various character education proposals in two demographically, politically, and religiously distinct parts of the country: the Deep South and the Upper Midwest. Smagorinsky and Taxel observe that the proposed curricula from southern states are “based on an authoritarian conception of character in which young people are indoctrinated into the value system of presumably virtuous adults through didactic instruction,” while those from upper Midwestern states emphasize “attention to the whole environment in which character is developed and enacted and in which reflection on morality, rather than didactic instruction in a particular notion of character, is the primary instructional approach.”10 The southern curricula specifically target such concerns as “youth depravity” and the breakdown of authority and civility, and encode both a nostalgia for an idealized past and the implicit social customs of the Southern Baptist church. As a result, the programs ultimately emphasize or reinforce concern for manners, obedience, and hierarchical social relationships, which fit comfortably with the “top-down administrative structure” and “business-oriented approach to schooling” commonly found in southern schools.¹¹ On the other hand, the Midwestern curricula address matters like student agency, mutual care, partnering, and inclusivity, often articulating a recognizably Jeffersonian understanding of citizenship. As a result, these programs value diversity, communitarianism, and social equality, ideals that reflect the “socialist and democratic foundations of the German and Scandinavian cultures that formed the values of white immigrants to this region.”¹² And it is, of course, to the former that “respect for the creator” belongs.

Regardless of whether one resonates more with either of these models, the implications of Smagorinsky and Taxel’s research are profound, and from the perspective of one trying to advance the public understanding of religion, a bit demoralizing. While one of the central themes of the “Guidelines for Teaching About Religion” is “the distinction between a devotional approach to religion and a non-devotional religious studies approach appropriate for public schools,” an unexpected impediment to bringing school systems on board is the reality that state-sponsored character education programs may have already embedded cultural, ideological, and religious preferences into their curricula.¹³ What’s more, the tentacles of these programs often extend to places that are not directly or obviously connected to the social studies and English courses where religious history and literature would ordinarily be found, which makes it that much more difficult to exercise scholarly oversight. This point bears repeating: for all of the academy’s attempts to warn off devotional approaches to religion in the humanities classroom, character curricula may be working contrary to that end in other classrooms, or outside the classroom altogether. At the school where I first encountered the “respect for the creator” adage, the “word of the week” was introduced in the morning podcast, and it was understood that all teachers, from music to physical education, were encouraged to engage students on the topic. In at least one other Georgia school, students and parents were required to sign an “acknowledgement form,” stipulating that they received the county’s “School System Code of Conduct,” which included the forty-one character traits. While the document stopped short of explicitly mandating that families affirm those values, it did state that “parents/guardians and community representatives are engaged in partnerships to support the principles of character and conduct that help our students make responsible decisions.”¹⁴ Certainly, there are cases when this reflects a transparent attempt to smuggle religious testimony into the public school curriculum, and it is almost comical to see the various contortions and gyrations the powers-that-be have affected in order to deny the obvious. In a bizarre preemptive strike against anticipated criticism, Georgia’s “Implementation Guide,” offers the following exposition, devoting more time to “respect for the creator” than to any other articulated principle:

Our most basic freedoms and rights are not granted to us from the government but they are intrinsically ours; i.e., the Constitution does not grant Americans the right of freedom of speech, it simply recognizes that each of us is born with that right. This is to say that the founders of the republic recognized a higher authority, a power greater than themselves that endowed every human being with certain unalienable rights that no government or legal document could ever revoke or take away. In the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson names this life form that permeates the universe and from which our unalienable rights stem the “creator,” “nature’s God”, and the “supreme judge of the world.” If we are to respect life, the natural rights of all people and the authority which the founders based their legal opinions on concerning our separation from Great Britain then there must be a respect for that creator from which all our rights flow. This cannot be interpreted as a promotion of religion or even as a promotion of the belief in a personal God, but only as an acknowledgment that the intrinsic worth of every individual derives from no government, person or group of persons, but is something that each of us is born with and which no thing and no one can ever deprive us of.15

This is echoed by the questionable opinion from the Georgia Attorney General’s Office: “It does not endorse any particular theory of creation, nor does it disparage those who do not hold a belief in creation.”¹⁶ Taking these statements at their word, we are expected to believe that the only reason why public educators should teach “respect for the creator” is to acknowledge “intrinsic worth” of the individual, and that doing so will not in any way violate those who do not hold certain theistic beliefs.

But I would suggest that it is more often the case that teachers and administrators in their respective communities do not easily recognize the cultural and regional situatedness of their particular values, or of the inherent problems in articulating values they imagine to be universal, and this may prove to be a tougher nut to crack. For an example, one need look no further than how several states, using language lifted from National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE) documents, have mandated that “schools should provide instruction to students in core character qualities that transcend cultural, religious, and socioeconomic differences” (emphasis added), as if it were, in fact, an easy thing to identify, interpret, and enable such transcendent “core qualities.”¹⁷ Unfortunately, such misguided attempts at universality or neutrality often produce results that look suspiciously hegemonic. I am reminded of an incident Diane Moore recently brought to my attention about a school board decision in the affluent Massachusetts town of Harvard (no relation to the university). In their quest to ensure that no particular groups would be privileged at the expense of others, the board decided to discontinue the established practice of scheduling school holidays to coincide with Jewish holidays, and adopted instead a new policy specifying that only state and federal holidays would qualify as school holidays. While this sounds on the surface like it might level the liturgical playing field (so to speak), in actual practice it does anything but that, as Christmas enjoys unique recognition as a federal holiday and spring vacations tend to coincide with Easter Week or Good Friday. A “universal” policy that is supposedly color-blind to religious differences ends up privileging the majority of the community, while superficially maintaining the ideology that it in fact does no such thing.

The Majority Rules

Ideally, religious studies scholars could redress these types of issues, by offering guidance to administrators and teachers in reflecting critically on the character curricula they have inherited (or the other school policies they have adopted, for that matter). The principles articulated in the “Guidelines for Teaching About Religion” could indirectly educate them about the embedded religious preferences that inform aspects of the public school experience apart from specifically social studies course work. Still, this may not be easy, because I would not be surprised to find that underneath the sometimes innocent, well-intentioned encoding of local values into the curriculum, there may lie an unarticulated, deeply ingrained majoritarianism, a social-political ethos with a long history in the U.S. both inside and outside of public education. By majoritarianism, I am referring to a specific brand of democratic populism, which takes the view that public policy and publically financed institutions should reflect the will of a basic majority of whoever may be the constituents, and that civil servants should be charged to carry out that will. At first blush, this does suggest an open, representative approach to government, and it was historically associated with a number of liberal causes that broadened popular participation, such as the direct election of senators, female suffrage, and even the progressive federal income tax. But one can also see how pure majoritarianism would be on a collision course with such things as minority rights, individual liberties, and religious pluralism. To give this some historical context, majoritarianism first became a noticeable player in public school education in the early twentieth century, in response not to any specific social or political issue but to the simple fact that more states began adopting compulsory education statutes. During this period, the number of students attending public schools in the U.S. was increasing exponentially—the total climbed tenfold in the thirty year period beginning in 1890, reaching nearly two million in 1920—and this catalyzed the first broad, sustained public debates on the question of exactly what should be taught in municipal schools and who should make that decision.18 As expected, the majoritarian impulse came down on the side of local control, with a kind of common-sense justification of the position: “teachers in public schools must teach what the taxpayers desire taught.”¹⁹ Not surprisingly, the best known early public school controversy where the majoritarians had a horse in the race also concerned a matter of religion. The notorious 1925 Scopes “monkey trial,” despite theatrical representations depicting a dramatic confrontation between science and religion, technically confronted the issue of whether community standards or academic authority would drive public school curricula, with the majoritarians siding with community standards and the then-fledgling American Civil Liberties Union taking up the cause of academic and intellectual freedom.

I bring this up not because I anticipate majoritarian defenses of character programs in court, but because I would suggest that the introduction of character education in public schools, like the unofficial propagation of a civil religion, will by necessity lend itself to a majoritarian definition of what constitutes character or values. It is one thing to support in theory the idea of a character curriculum that is not limited to the values of particular regions or constituencies; it is quite another to construct in the concrete an ethnically, religiously, and culturally neutral program. In fact, for all the official talk of “core values” that transcend cultural differences, and slogans that suggest complete inclusivity, the language of the federal grant programs implicitly encourages majoritarian interpretations. On the one hand, U.S. Department of Education documents encourage schools to “provide opportunities for school leaders, teachers, parents and community partners to model exemplary character traits and social behaviors.” But on the other hand, the only road map they specify for identifying either those “exemplary character traits” or the criteria for identifying which public figures “model” them is “involvement of the whole community in designing and implementing character education for its schools.”²⁰ Of course, the devil’s in the details when it comes to the “whole community” having a voice, and one can see how readily this translates into majoritarianism. The North Carolina Student Citizen Act of 2001, for example, “requires every local board of education to develop and implement character education instruction with input from the local community,” and the state’s massive character education handbook suggests “a meeting of parents, teachers, and community representatives and use consensus (emphasis added) to get agreement on which character traits to reinforce and what definitions to use.”²¹ It is hard to imagine what kinds of curricula this method would produce other than those that replicate the dominant local ethos. To orient this back to the initial topic of this chapter, I suspect administrators and teachers will be far more reluctant to relinquish the privilege of imprinting their own religiously informed values onto the schools than to become educated on the differences between academic and devotional approaches to religion. And unfortunately, I cannot see but how the former must certainly shape the latter.

Contemplating an Alternative

In all fairness, I think it best to mention, if only briefly, that some of the curricular initiatives running at cross-purposes with the goals of the “Guidelines for Teaching” come from within our own ranks, thus carrying the implicit authority and imprimatur of the religious studies academy. This is, of course, hardly the place to rehearse the tensions between theological and social-scientific methodologies, but it is worth pointing out how the internal conflicts over how our discipline is to be configured are producing some very different attitudes about what are and what are not appropriate educational techniques. What I most have in mind here is the emergence of “Contemplative Studies” (or “Contemplative Education”) initiatives, which have recently been established at University of San Diego, Emory University, Brown University, and various other institutions, which, perhaps not so coincidentally, sometimes have connections to character education initiatives as well.22 Though proponents of contemplative studies are reluctant to restrict the field with a narrow definition, most would be in agreement that the general intention is to offer structured methods for cultivating students’ “interior” lives, rectifying a widespread omission in more conventional education.²³ Based on an understanding that contemplative practices are not necessarily bound to specific religious orientations and may be useful, even essential, for students to integrate their learning across established disciplinary boundaries and to connect what they have learned to their “real world” experiences, these programs train students in “cultivating wholesome, useful qualities of heart and mind” through such things as meditation, yoga, and taiji.²⁴ Put slightly differently, contemplative education trains students in the “many ways human beings have found, across cultures and across time, to concentrate, broaden and deepen conscious awareness as the gateway to cultivating their full potential and to leading more meaningful, ethically responsible, and personally fulfilling lives.”²⁵ Leaders of the movement—and I don’t think they would object to this being called a “movement”—are quick to point out that these practices are not taught in conjunction with any religious dogmas, and that students participating in them are under no obligation to maintain any particular religious beliefs.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that religious studies educators have generally (though not unanimously) looked askance at these initiatives, and I would contend that there are two related reasons why they should continue to do so. First, notwithstanding claims to the contrary by proponents, it really requires some creative hermeneutics to maintain that the particular contemplative practices do not embed specific religion presuppositions or orientations. At the most basic level, there is no denying that insight meditation (vipassana) was initially developed in and has been taught in Theravada Buddhist circles, or that taiji has historically been a Chinese religious practice, just as monotheistic prayer has been a staple of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim practice. Claims that insight meditation, when presented independent of its normal religious associations, can be a healthy practice should be regarded with no less suspicion than claims that monotheistic prayers in the classroom can have positive psychological effects or that “respect for the creator” does not reflect an Abrahamic commitment. But apart from these a priori concerns, course descriptions and contemplative studies literature often present less religiously “neutral” starting points than the rhetoric promises. For example, the Brown University Contemplative Studies Initiative brochure defines contemplation as “the focusing of the attention in a sustained fashion leading to deepened states of concentration, tranquility, and insight,” which it identifies as occurring “on a spectrum ranging from the rather common, uncultivated, spontaneous experiences of absorption in an activity to the most profound, deliberately cultivated experiences of nonduality.”26 But of course, doctrines of “absorption” and “nonduality” are not universal, and, however sympathetic I am to those doctrines and related practices, it is genuinely a matter of public debate how “wholesome” and “useful” they may be. Along these same lines, former Naropa University president Thomas Coburn, in his discussion of contemplative education, opines that “the goal of education is a moral one, starting with oneself: recognizing the pain that we each carry within us, and then realizing that every other being is in a similar position. The goal, then, is to work together to reduce the ubiquitous pain that runs through the human condition.”²⁷ Here again, one does not need to be either a cynic or card-carrying secularist to recognize the Buddhist doctrinal presuppositions.

The second objection is related to the first, in that both concern the abstraction of specific practices from their religious sources, but this one involves a point of academic contention that has been bubbling for at least two generations. In particular, it is interesting to note that many proponents of contemplative education—Roth, Coburn, Donald Rothberg, Louis Komjathy, Robert Forman (and probably many contributors to the recent Meditation and the Classroom: Contemplative Pedagogy for Religious Studies)—have been keenly interested in developments in the academic study of mysticism, but have to a person rejected the cultural studies approach pioneered by Steven Katz, Robert Gimello, the late Hans Penner, and others.²⁸ Critics of Katz et al. argue that sui generis mystical experience possesses a special quality that somehow transcends the context of the practitioner, rendering it resistant to contextual study, and they will often go to great lengths to identify supposedly context-free experiences, which they offer as a kind of “smoking gun” to free mysticism from contextual analysis.²⁹ It certainly makes sense that one who maintains this intellectual position would be of the mind that yoga and insight meditation are not inherently Hindu or Buddhist. That is to say, once one has abstracted various phenomena culled from different traditions, identified them as “contemplative practices,” and maintained that they are not bound to the historical context that produced them, one then has a strategic justification for claiming that the practices in question are somehow generic, nonlocalized, and thus nonreligious. To bring this discussion full circle, the AAR “Guidelines for Teaching About Religion” advocate an academic, non-religious approach to the subject, which can be most responsibly accomplished through a cultural studies model. On the other hand, contemplative studies can really only be justified as nonreligious by circumventing a cultural studies model. Admittedly, such programs are not targeting public schools, but their pedagogical spirit is very much analogous to that of character curricula.

Desiderata

Although the body of this chapter takes a critical stance toward certain curricular initiatives—character education in public schools, and contemplative education in private institutions of higher learning—I do want to emphasize that this comes from an earnest desire to elevate the quality of the public discourse about religion, to help bring that discourse to the public schools in a civil and intellectually responsible way, and to educate students and their communities about the challenges of negotiating an increasingly diverse religious world. Part of this agenda needs to be constructive—i.e., creating and implementing programs like the AAR “Guidelines” and the California Three Rs Project (Rights, Responsibility, Respect). But part of this agenda must also be diagnostic—i.e., taking a proprietary interest in the work of schools with regard to far more than the specific programs and curricula which we are more immediately involved. That is to say, initiatives like the “Guidelines” and Three Rs embody an ethos that pervades much of this volume, an ethos that seeks to transform the public discourse on religion, and it is important to express principled objections to curricular initiatives—however well-intentioned—that run at cross purposes with that ethos. Even if it is unlikely that such initiatives will magically wither under criticism, simply problematizing them in this way may bring some important concerns into the conversation and may influence the shape of future initiatives further down the road.

Notes

1. Correspondence Dena Davis, October 9, 2010.

2. The complete document can be found at http://www.aarweb.org/publications/Online_Publications/
Curriculum_Guidelines/AARK-12CurriculumGuidelines.pdf.

3. The Georgia law enabling public school Bible courses was originally proposed by Democrats in the legislature, but the Republican majority scuttled attempts to authorize the BLP text The Bible and Its Influence. Nevertheless, the BLP website (http://www.bibleliteracy.org/Site/index.htm) claims that their curriculum “is now taught in more than 12% of public high schools in the state.” See “Georgia Legislature Tells Education Dept. to Plan Bible Classes,” from Church & State (electronic source) May 2006.

4. In a personal interview (October 29, 2012), Moira Bucciarelli, the Public Initiatives Coordinator for the Society for Biblical Literature and a freelance writer on local religious issues for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, indicated that while doing research for various articles, she frequently encountered this attitude. Unfortunately, she never published these findings.

5. The “Implementation Guide” can be found at many online sites. See, for example, http://www.edpsycinteractive.org/topics/affect/valuesga.html.

6. The other articulated values are accomplishment, citizenship, commitment, compassion, courage, courtesy, creativity, democracy, diligence, equality, frugality, generosity, kindness, knowledge, loyalty, patience, perseverance, productivity, punctuality, respect for environment, respect for health, school pride, self-respect, sportsmanship, trustworthiness, truthfulness (which is presumably different from the aforementioned honesty), tolerance, and virtue.

7. See http://www.ethicsusa.com/via.cfm?page=VIAProgram, http://www.yesican.net/i_can_workshop/index.htm, and http://ethicsusa.org/values-in-action/core-ethical-values-in-via/.

8. http://www.ncpublicschools.org/docs/charactereducation/handbook/content2.pdf.

9. http://www.character.org/about/vision-and-mission/.

10. Peter Smagorinsky and Joel Taxel, “The Discourse of Character Education: Ideology and Politics in the Proposal and Award of Federal Grants,” Journal of Research in Character Education 2.2 (2004) 113.

11. Ibid., 125.

12. Ibid., 132.

13. “Guidelines,” 5.

14. See http://www.evansmiddle.net/Middle_School_Code_Update.pdf, 8.

15. See the “Implementation Guide.”

16. “Official Opinion 2000–9” (http://law.ga.gov/opinion/2000–9), 12/28/2000.

17. Michigan, Colorado, and Illinois have all used that exact language in mandating character curricula. See http://www.leg.state.co.us/2000/inetcbill.nsf/a9b5aa3a41373aed872566a500594901/
8167ea7f34086638872568560079d345/$FILE/wptemp.txt, http://www.michigan.gov/documents/mde/Zeile_NASBE_Item_363049_7.pdf, and http://www.isbe.state.il.us/board/meetings/2008/aug08retreat/schedule.pdf.

18. Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 24.

19. Ibid., 44.

20. See http://www2.ed.gov/admins/lead/character/brochure.html.

21. http://www.ncpublicschools.org/docs/charactereducation/handbook/content2.pdf, “Overview,” and 4.

22. The Character Clearinghouse, “an online center for research, curricula, and student affairs resources relating to moral development of college students,” recently produced a “Thematic Issue on Contemplative Studies and Practices in Higher Education.”

23. Judith Simmer-Brown and Fran Grace, eds., Meditation and the Classroom (Albany: SUNY, 2011), xiii–xviii.

24. This phrase had appeared in literature for the program at Brown University. It can now be found at the online Cheetah House, “home of the contemplative think tank where research, social engagement, and contemplative practice converge.” See http://cheetahhouse.wordpress.com/about/britton-lab.

25. See Hal Roth, “Contemplate This! The Developing Field of Contemplative Studies,” www.acmhe.org/assets/webinar-5–27–09.ppt., 2.

26. Roth, 4.

27. Online interview at https://characterclearinghouse.fsu.edu/index.php/resources/leadership-profiles/894-enlightenment-coburn.

28. Katz edited four important volumes on mysticism—Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis, Mysticism and Religious Traditions, Mysticism and Language, and Mysticism and Sacred Scripture, all of which exemplify the cultural studies approach to the subject.

29. Typical examples of this include Robert K. C. Forman, “Mystical Knowledge: Knowledge by Identity,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion LXI: 4 (Winter 1993), 705–738; Harold D. Roth, “Bimodal Mystical Experience in the “Qiwulun” Chapter of the Zhuangzi,” in Scott Cook, ed., Hiding the World in the World, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 15–32; and Shigenori Nagamoto, “A Critique of Steven Katz’s ‘Contextualism’: An Asian Perspective,” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy I:2 (Summer 2002), 185–208.