Texas board tries to imbue school textbooks for the U.S. with God/Christianity

[Viking]

How can prohibition not be considered religiously motivated?

and timmy, don't use Evangelical about ante-bellum abolitionists. They were in their own view Christians.

[Grallon]

What does what you're saying have to do with the topic at hand?

Everything since I comment on the *real* core value of America: money - the pursuit of money - or happiness as the euphemism goes.




G.

[jimmy olsen]

How can prohibition not be considered religiously motivated?

and timmy, don't use Evangelical about ante-bellum abolitionists. They were in their own view Christians.

The movers and shakers in the abolitionist movement were Evangelical Christians, Baptists and Methodist and many other sects. In fact much of their antipathy towards slavery can be laid at the feet of their interpretation of evangelical theology.

In the context of the 19th century American evangelical experience, this refers to the validity of the conversion experience, i.e. being born again. The evangelical argument against slavery was this; a man's soul can not be saved unless he is born again and takes Jesus as his lord and savior. A man can not do this unless he has free will and a slave by definition does not have free will. Thus African Americans in bondage were being denied access to divine grace and their eternal souls damned forever. This is why the evangelicals were radicals who demanded immediate abolition, while those like Lincoln who simply viewed slavery as theft of a man's labor and dignity were (in the absence of war) willing to compromise and pursue slow reform. 

Antislavery abolitionists, viewing slavery as mortal sin, also cast doubt on the validity of the conversion experience of any man who owned slaves, thus deeply offending the evangelicals of the South.

This post brought to you by my 500 level class on the history of Christianity in American Politics. The above subject is what I wrote my final paper on.

[dps]

How can prohibition not be considered religiously motivated?

and timmy, don't use Evangelical about ante-bellum abolitionists. They were in their own view Christians.

The movers and shakers in the abolitionist movement were Evangelical Christians, Baptists and Methodist and many other sects. In fact much of their antipathy towards slavery can be laid at the feet of their interpretation of evangelical theology.

In the context of the 19th century American evangelical experience, this refers to the validity of the conversion experience, i.e. being born again. The evangelical argument against slavery was this; a man's soul can not be saved unless he is born again and takes Jesus as his lord and savior. A man can not do this unless he has free will and a slave by definition does not have free will. Thus African Americans in bondage were being denied access to divine grace and their eternal souls damned forever. This is why the evangelicals were radicals who demanded immediate abolition, while those like Lincoln who simply viewed slavery as theft of a man's labor and dignity were (in the absence of war) willing to compromise and pursue slow reform. 

Antislavery abolitionists, viewing slavery as mortal sin, also cast doubt on the validity of the conversion experience of any man who owned slaves, thus deeply offending the evangelicals of the South.

This post brought to you by my 500 level class on the history of Christianity in American Politics. The above subject is what I wrote my final paper on.

I don't know that Viking's post should have gotten a reply other than, "Wtf are you talking about?". 

[Neil]

Abolition and the other antebellum 19th century reform movements were principally driven by Evangelicals, the former being one of the main causes of the Civil War.

That's not a religious conflict.  That's religious lunatics throwing rocks at the established order in an effort to force society to live by their sick ideals.  Sort of like Prohibition or abortion.

[jimmy olsen]

Abolition and the other antebellum 19th century reform movements were principally driven by Evangelicals, the former being one of the main causes of the Civil War.

That's not a religious conflict.  That's religious lunatics throwing rocks at the established order in an effort to force society to live by their sick ideals.  Sort of like Prohibition or abortion.

While I agree that it's not a religious conflict, it is an important factor in the most important conflict/event of our nation's history.

[Neil]

Everything since I comment on the *real* core value of America: money - the pursuit of money - or happiness as the euphemism goes.

I don't see how publishing schoolbooks for money relates to a society committing suicide.  I'd like you to expand on your thoughts on the matter.

[Berkut]

'Cause you have a burr up your ass about anything involving religion.

So this is really about YOUR issue then, and your imagination that this has something to do with MY beliefs on religion. Whya ren't I surprised?

  Anytime someone's religious faith is brought up as a factor in any proposal, they're labeled as "fanatics" or "nuts". 

Not at all. However, when religious people try to impose their religious view into textbooks, then I certainly call that fanatic.

Fair enough if we're talking about a Fred Phelps or a suicide bomber, but the vast majority of religious folks aren't like that.

The vast majority of religious folk don't try to shove their religious views into textbooks either - clearly we are not talking about the vast majority of religious folks.

  I know that I'm not, and frankly I'm fucking tired of hearing that shit.

If it doesn't apply to you, why are you so sensitive to it - to the extent that you actually imagine people arguing about entirely different things making entirely different arguments?

It is odd that you are "tired of that shit" yet have actually invented someone making such an argument - apparently you aren't all that tired of it, since you have gone to the trouble of creating someone to get tired of it over out of your own imagination.

So yeah, I have an agenda, too--to not get lumped in with a bunch of assholes just because I believe in God.

Seems like a reasonable position, but who is doing such lumping? Only your strawman you are merrily burning up.

I certainly think that we should take advantage of the expertise of the professionals, but I don't think that means that nobody else has anything of value to offer.  Which may not be exactly what you're saying, or mean, but you seem to at least imply it.

Nope, I imply nothing of the sort - anything I have said, I have stated rather clearly, I think.

Someone, namely Meri, has stated that she thinks we should spend more time talking about the religious aspects of some historical events. I have disagreed with her on the basis that she has not provided any reason to think that the religious context of the writing of the Constitution is not given adequate coverage already. In other words, *she* is claiming that the experts are wrong. Which is fine -experts certainly can be wrong - but I find her arguments unconvincing, especially given that she has stated very clearly that she actually has not idea what is taught.

You can make an argument that may overcome expert opinion - but you would actually have to make an argument - at least if you want to convince anyone.

[merithyn]

I disagree.  Religion and religious conflict have had some impacts, but thety are minor.  One could understand everything important about American history without knowing anything about religion other than its impact on settlement patterns.  Things like The Great Awakening should be taught, but not as a central portion of a course on the time period - it is a sidebar.

I considered the entire discussion a sidebar rather than a central portion of study. I do not agree with you, which is fine, but I wonder how much of the Great Awakening or religion is even mentioned now in your classroom.

[merithyn]

Nope, I imply nothing of the sort - anything I have said, I have stated rather clearly, I think.

Someone, namely Meri, has stated that she thinks we should spend more time talking about the religious aspects of some historical events. I have disagreed with her on the basis that she has not provided any reason to think that the religious context of the writing of the Constitution is not given adequate coverage already. In other words, *she* is claiming that the experts are wrong. Which is fine -experts certainly can be wrong - but I find her arguments unconvincing, especially given that she has stated very clearly that she actually has not idea what is taught.

Actually, I'm claiming that those writing the textbooks aren't experts, per the article cited. And I do have an idea of what is taught, but not enough so to say decidedly what should be minimized in favor of the back story of the founding fathers. I'd rather not say something decisively until I do, though I agree that local and state government could do with a paring down. As your comments haven't been very convincing to me that I'm mistaken in my opinion, either, I'd say we're at an impasse.

[Viking]

It's the appropriation of Evangelical Christianity of the abolition movement that I object to. They were not the only Christians involved, not to mention there were Evangelical Christians were very much against abolition as well. If you want to associate any religious group with abolition then you'd have to select the Quakers. You can only really be considered evangelical if you include all protestant churches into your Evangelical definition, which does not fit with the modern use of the word, or even the 19th century use of the word.

William Wilberforce was born again and was without a doubt an Evangelical Christian and his religion was a fundamental part in his view on Slavery. But among his opponents in the struggle for abolition (and successors in america) were also Evangelical Christians.

[Sheilbh]

Okay but I don't think it's possible to ignore the importance of religion as a socially reforming movement throughout the 19th century, even if it's also right to take cognizance of its presence among reform's opponents.

[jimmy olsen]

The Quakers were spent as a political and religious force by the mid 19th century. And while it's certainly true that there were Evangelicals, especially in the South who were against abolition (justifying slavery via the curse of Ham), it is also true that in the North radical abolition was primarily pushed by Evangelicals and their churches and reform organizations.

An evangelical is a Protestant who believes in the need for a born again conversion experience, who emphasizes the death, resurrection and salvation of Christ, and one who respects the authority of the bible. The later has trended towards literalism in the recent century.

http://isae.wheaton.edu/defining-evangelicalism/

Indeed, by the 1820s evangelical Protestantism was by far the dominant expression of Christianity in the United States. The concept of evangelism–revival-codified, streamlined, and routinized by evangelists like Charles G. Finney (1792-1875)–became "revivalism" as evangelicals set out to convert the nation. By the decades prior to the War Between the States, a largely-evangelical "Benevolent Empire" (in historian Martin Marty's words) was actively attempting to reshape American society through such reforms as temperance, the early women's movement, various benevolent and betterment societies, and–most controversial of all–the abolition movement.

[jimmy olsen]

I just saw this, and while they're talking about colleges rather than high school it's on the same topic.

I'm surprised that Harvard doesn't have a religious studies department. I've been to a small liberal arts college and a state university and neither shied away from religion. The fact that Bard is one of the most liberal colleges in the nation didn't stop them from studying it in a serious way.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/233413

Harvard's Crisis of Faith

Can a secular university embrace religion without sacrificing its soul?
By Lisa Miller | NEWSWEEK
Published Feb 11, 2010
From the magazine issue dated Feb 22, 2010

It doesn't take a degree from Harvard to see that in today's world, a person needs to know something about religion. The conflicts between the Israelis and the Palestinians; between Christians, Muslims, and animists in Africa; between religious conservatives and progressives at home over abortion and gay marriage—all these relate, if indirectly, to what rival groups believe about God and scripture. Any resolution of these conflicts will have to come from people who understand how religious belief and practice influence our world: why, in particular, believers see some things as worth fighting and dying for. On the Harvard campus—where the next generation of aspiring leaders is currently beginning the spring term—the importance of religion goes without saying. "Kids need to know the difference between a Sunni and a Shia," is something you hear a lot.
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But in practice, the Harvard faculty cannot cope with religion. It cannot agree on who should teach it, how it should be taught, and how much value to give it compared with economics, biology, literature, and all the other subjects considered vital to an undergraduate education. This question of how much religion to teach led to a bitter fight when the faculty last discussed curriculum reform, in 2006. Louis Menand, the Pulitzer Prize–winning literary critic and English professor, together with a small group of colleagues tasked with revising Harvard's core curriculum, made the case that undergraduate students should be required to take at least one course in a category called Reason and Faith. These would explore big issues in religion: intelligent design, debates within and around Islam, and a history of American faith, for example. Steven Pinker, the evolutionary psychologist, led the case against a religion requirement. He argued that the primary goal of a Harvard education is the pursuit of truth through rational inquiry, and that religion has no place in that.

In the end, Menand & Co. backed down, and the matter never made it to a vote. A more brutal fight was put off for another day. But that's a pity—for Harvard, its students, and the rest of us who need leaders better informed about faith and the motivations of the faithful. Harvard may or may not be the pinnacle of higher learning in the world, but because it is Harvard, it reflects—for better or worse—the priorities of the nation's intellectual set. To decline to grapple head-on with the role of religion in a liberal-arts education, even as debates over faith and reason rage on blogs, and as publishers churn out books defending and attacking religious belief, is at best timid and at worst self-defeating.

Harvard's distaste for engaging with religion as an academic subject is particularly ironic, given that it was founded in 1636 as a training ground for Christian ministers. According to the office of the president, Veritas was only officially adopted as its motto in 1843; until then it had been Christo et Ecclesiae ("For Christ and the Church"). While it's true that other Ivy League colleges don't require undergrads to take religion (with the exception of Columbia, where readings in the mandatory Contemporary Civilization course include selections from Exodus, the Book of Matthew, Saint Augustine, and the Quran), it's fair to say that the study of religion at Harvard is uniquely dysfunctional.
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Religion at Harvard doesn't even merit its own department. Professors who teach religion classes generally belong to other departments—anthropology, say, or Near Eastern languages. A Committee on the Study of Religion oversees the courses, but it can't hire and fire, and it can't grant tenure. Diana Eck, the top scholar of world religions who runs the program, argues that its second-class status prevents it from drawing the biggest talent to campus—and, as a result, the most gifted students. There are great teachers of religion at Harvard, she says, but because they're members of other departments, their reputations don't enhance the religious-studies program. Eck mentions Emory, Oberlin, Swarthmore, Smith, Carleton, and Macalester as places where religion departments thrive.

Harvard likes to regard itself as the best of the best. Yet even public universities—the University of Texas, Arizona State, and Indiana University, for example—generate more excitement around the subject of religion than Harvard does. A new religious-studies program at the University of Minnesota was launched last year; already it has more than 50 majors. "I have just been amazed at the breadth of the embrace that we have received here," says Jeanne Kilde, a professor of classics and Near Eastern studies who runs the program. Last year 33 Harvard undergrads chose to major in religion, compared with 704 in economics, 408 in government, 217 in history, and 45 in classics. "Hist and Lit," another boutique major without an official department, had 155 majors. In religious studies, says Eck, "we patch things together the best we can."

Undergraduates with more than a passing interest in religion are pointed to the Divinity School, half a mile away from Harvard Yard, where they can take graduate-level courses about belief from people who are, by tradition, believers. This separation of "faith" from "reason" occurred in the early part of the 19th century, when the American university evolved into a secular place. Even now, in an era when a presidential candidate cannot get elected without a convincing "faith narrative," the scholars who study belief continue to reside in the Divinity School, and when the subject of religion comes up, the scholars on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences sniff at its seriousness.



Such general disdain, combined with the bureaucratic awkwardness of navigating between the Divinity School and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, finally caused American Catholicism scholar Robert Orsi, who had been at Harvard for seven years, to flee for Northwestern University in 2007. "There is [such a thing as] a critical study of religion," he says. "It is a very important and interesting part of the human story, and people are teaching it at small colleges and state universities across America."
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In dozens of phone calls and several trips to the Harvard campus, I tried to understand the faculty's anxiety about religion. The facile explanation is that more than a third of elite university professors are nonreligious, a dramatically higher percentage than the population at large. But both believing and nonbelieving scholars clearly can teach about religion in a secular setting without crossing the line into proselytizing. And wouldn't students benefit from having their assumptions challenged in a rigorous way? (Fluency in religious history and texts, in fact, is the sharpest weapon against fundamentalism, as Sam Harris demonstrates in his polemic The End of Faith.) "My colleagues fear that taking religion seriously would undermine everything a great university stands for," the Rev. Peter Gomes, Harvard's chaplain and a professor of Christian history, told me. "I think that's ungrounded, but there it is."

Steven Pinker says his main objection to the 2006 proposal that students be required to take a course in a Reason and Faith category was that it seemed to make reason and faith equal paths to truth. "I very, very, very much do not want to go on the record as suggesting that people should not know about religion," he told me. "But reason and faith are not yin and yang. Faith is a phenomenon. Reason is what the university should be in the business of fostering."

Pinker is a public intellectual, a celebrity on the Harvard campus, the kind of teacher who can draw 400 students into a lecture hall and who elicits star-struck stares in the Yard. His specialty is the evolution of language, but all his work, from The Language Instinct to The Blank Slate (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), coheres under the broad notion that a scientific, rational world view is the highest achievement of the human mind. As his wife, the novelist Rebecca Goldstein, put it to him on a day I visited them on Cape Cod, Mass., "All forms of irrationality irk you, but [religion] is the form of irrationality that irks you most." In Pinker's view, human progress is an evolution away from superstition, witchcraft, and idol worship—that is, religion—and toward something like a Scandinavian austerity and secularism. (Pinker is one of those intellectuals who speak frequently about how sensible things are in Europe; one suppresses the urge to remind him of the Muslim riots in the Paris and London suburbs.) A university education is our greatest weapon in the battle against our natural stupidity, he said in a recent speech. "We don't kill virgins on an altar, because we know that it would not, in fact, propitiate an angry god and alleviate misfortune on earth."

That insistence on the backwardness of religion is why, on a warm October afternoon in 2006, at a small faculty luncheon at a Cambridge, Mass., bistro called Sandrine's, Pinker launched his bomb. The topic of the meeting was curriculum reform, but Pinker homed in on religion, declaring that requiring students to take a course in a Reason and Faith category would be like requiring them to take a course in Astronomy and Astrology. "Faith," he said, "is believing in something without good reasons to do so. It has no place in anything but a religious institution, and our society has no shortage of these." His remarks that day ran in The Crimson and were picked up by the national press.
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"For myself," remembers Derek Bok, who was Harvard's acting president at the time, "that was one of the less thoughtful remarks that I heard. This was a rhetorical flourish he threw in there. It caught people's attention—it did. He's very good at that."

Menand—who was co-chair of the curriculum-reform committee and had come to think that Reason and Faith was "a really great idea"—was not surprised by Pinker's remarks. He does not see himself as an advocate for the study of religion per se, but he does want students to engage fully with the messiness and contradiction of clashing ideas. He and Pinker have been intellectual rivals since 2002, when he eviscerated Pinker's book The Blank Slate in The New Yorker. ("Oh, I was pissed," says Pinker. Both now characterize their relationship as collegial.) Menand believes that Pinker's "scientistic" world view—that is, submitting everything, from painting to romantic love to empirical measurement—leads to a narrow and sometimes wrongheaded understanding of things.

Neither Menand nor anyone else is suggesting, in any case, that Harvard elevate God's Truth over the progress made through enlightened rational inquiry. But science isn't the only—or even always the best—tool for understanding human experience, and to hold science up as the One and Only Truth is a kind of fundamentalism in itself. Furthermore, as Menand points out, scientific truths shift over time, dependent as they are on history and culture: just look, he says, at the recent "discovery" of "behavioral economics." A humanist, he cracks, would never have expected people's saving and spending habits to be anything but irrational. For Harvard—or any liberal-arts college—placing value on the study of religion poses no threat to secularism, science, or rationality. As Menand puts it, "We teach stuff we don't believe in all the time."



Menand's strongest argument, though, centers on relevance. In his new book, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, he takes the modern university to task for its narrowness. Professors exist in their slim silos of expertise, training graduate students in esoterica to perpetuate their own interests. But since only a tiny fraction of Harvard students pursue academic graduate degrees, Menand says, the academy is not serving its students very well. Menand believes—passionately—that, as he wrote in the final document summarizing the new goals and categories for curriculum reform, college is a time to "unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what's going on beneath and behind appearances." Forcing kids to grapple head-on with the world view of a Christian or Muslim fundamentalist, say, would be a part of this unsettling.
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By floating the idea of a religion requirement, then, Menand and the other members of the committee were essentially saying that religion matters. It matters in the world, and it matters to our students. In their adult lives, Harvard grads will have jobs that take them to far-flung places, and they will live with people who are dramatically unlike themselves. They may live in a town where the school board is considering teaching creationism or the library is aiming to ban Harry Potter. Just because the study of religion does not fit into the narrow categories the university has created for itself does not mean that students should not equip themselves—in a rational, secular context—with a vocabulary for thinking about it.

Menand insists that Pinker's rhetorical assault did not kill the religion requirement. In the political climate of the time—this was just after Larry Summers's spectacular flameout as Harvard's president—it was crucial to get curriculum reform passed, and in the interest of efficiency the religion requirement was bartered away for a broader category. But Menand agrees that Pinker's vocal antipathy contributed to a campuswide concern that the religion debate at Harvard could become a media sideshow and detract from the goal. "We dropped it because there was a ruckus," he says. In retrospect, he says, "I wish we'd hung onto it a little bit longer. It was a conversation worth having."

This year's freshmen, the class of 2013, are the first to benefit from the new General Education requirements that passed, finally, in 2007. During their tenure at Harvard, undergraduates now have to take one course in each of eight categories, including two in science and one in math. They have to take one course in a loose category called Culture and Belief, which includes religion courses but also classes in photography, mythology, and the literature of the quest. A student, in other words, can graduate from Harvard without having to grapple directly with questions about a world in which people define themselves and their histories according to their views of God.

Harvard students are increasingly "churchgoing, Bible-studying, and believing," says Jay Harris, the dean who administers the General Education program. "We have a very strong evangelical community. We have women walking around in hijabs." The disinclination of the faculty to bring religion front and center puts teachers at risk of being radically out of step with their students. Pierpaolo Barbieri, who sat on the Crimson editorial board at the time of the 2006 religion debate, agrees: "Growing up after 9/11, you need to fathom how other people think. With rationality, it would be very difficult to understand how someone could get on a plane and do that." Barbieri, who is now getting his master's in economics at Cambridge University, supported Reason and Faith in an editorial.
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On one of my visits to the Yard, I met a sophomore named Ryan Mahoney in a basement pub. Raised in Queens, N.Y., and educated, as generations of Irish Catholics have been, by Jesuits who saw in him some promise, Mahoney was forthright about a despondent feeling he had, in class and among his friends: neither the Catholic theology that framed his thinking nor the religious community that gave him comfort were appropriate subjects for discussion. He once overheard students in the dorm making fun of his rosary. "I do not think there would be any openness to discussing God in any of the classes I took last year," he said. "But acknowledging the fact that religion exists and that it's not lunacy to believe in God would be helpful." To dismiss the importance of the study of faith—especially now—out of academic narrow-mindedness is less than unhelpful. It's unreasonable.

With Johannah Cornblatt

Lisa Miller is NEWSWEEK's religion editor. Her book  Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination With the Afterlife  is due out from Harper in March.

© 2010

[garbon]

Stanford has its own department.