Homo sine religione sic ut equus sine freno.1
—Medieval saying
In history, your middle-grade student will continually ask why. Why was that war fought? Why did this statesman make this decision? Why did the Crusades dominate the religious life of medieval Europe?
These questions cannot be answered unless you take the role of religion in public life seriously. People of faith have influenced history at every turn. Until the student is willing to examine honestly and soberly the claims of religion in the history of mankind, his study will be incomplete.
In the effort to offend none, the public schools have managed to offend practically everyone—either by leaving religion and ethics out of curricula altogether or by teaching them in a way that satisfies neither believers nor skeptics. In sympathy, we’ll say that the public schools are in an impossible situation. They are legally bound to avoid the appearance of promoting one religion over another. And in a mixed classroom, how can you take one religion seriously without antagonizing those who don’t share it? The inevitable result is summed up by a character in P. D. James’s mystery Original Sin:
“There were a dozen different religions among the children at Ancroft Comprehensive. We seemed always to be celebrating some kind of feast or ceremony. Usually it required making a noise and dressing up. The official line was that all religions were equally important. I must say that the result was to leave me with the conviction that they were equally unimportant.”2
When you’re instructing your own child, you have two tasks with regard to religion: to teach your own convictions with honesty and diligence, and to study the ways in which other faiths have changed the human landscape.
Only you and your religious community can do the first. As for the second, in high school the student will make a formal study of ethics. For middle school, we suggest you simply keep the following guidelines in mind as you do your history, science, and literature.
(1) Include religious works in your study of primary sources. As you progress through history, stop and read the Old and New Testaments; they are foundational to Western thought and ought to be treated as serious philosophical documents.
(2) Read about major faiths that have shaped our world: Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam. Compare them. Ask the most basic questions about them: What do these religions say about the nature of man? the nature of God? the purpose of living?
(3) As you choose biographies for history reading, try to seek out works about those who have changed people’s minds and ways of living—not only religious figures such as Confucius and Mohammed, but the theologians and prophets who followed them: Augustine, Anselm, Ibn Ezra, Francis of Assisi, Ignatius of Loyola, Martin Luther (just to name a few).
(4) Watch out for logical fallacies. When writers start talking about religion—especially in books for young children—fallacies abound. Keep your eyes open for the three most common errors: chronological snobbery, which assumes that people long ago were more stupid than people today (“the Virgin Birth was accepted by theologians of the Middle Ages, but no modern scholar can seriously believe in it”); the black-and-white fallacy, which assumes that there can be no alternatives between extreme positions (“the Catholic Church tried Galileo for heresy because he said the earth wasn’t at the center of the universe; therefore the churchmen involved were either blind to the truth, or else hypocritically protecting their own power”);3 and the poisoning-the-well fallacy, which discredits an argument by attacking its source rather than its content (“that legislator is a religious man, so his opinions are obviously biased by his religious beliefs”).
(5) Don’t ignore the deep religious faith held by many of the West’s greatest scientists. The theism of scientists and mathematicians, from Pascal to Einstein, deeply affected their professional and intellectual pursuits.
(6) Finally, discuss the moral and ethical questions of history with your middle-grade student. Don’t shy away from the errors made by religious men and women (every faith has mounted its own version of Holy War at some point), but don’t identify the mistakes of religious figures with the requirements of faith itself.
You might start by reading together and discussing stories that bring the rewards and costs of ethical behavior to the forefront. Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination and Books That Build Character: A Guide to Teaching Your Child Moral Values through Stories are two useful starting places. Choose an evening once a week to read and talk—as a family—about ethical issues that come up. This will serve as great preparation for the formal study of ethics in high school.
We’ve also listed a beginning introduction to world religions, A World of Faith. This book outlines the beliefs of twenty-eight religious groups. Keep it on hand as a reference while you work through world history.
RESOURCES
These books are easily available through local bookstores, libraries, or online booksellers.
The Church History TimeLine. Camino, Calif.: Brimwood Press.
$27.00. Order from Brimwood Press. Six-foot wall timeline to accompany your regular history timeline; shows the branching off of the Christian church into its multiple denominations as history progresses.
Guroian, Vigen. Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Kilpatrick, William. Books That Build Character: A Guide to Teaching Your Child Moral Values through Stories. New York: Touchstone, 1994.
Stack, Peggy Fletcher, and Kathleen Peterson. A World of Faith. Salt Lake City, Utah: Signature Books, 2001.