(Back to Basics #13)

         In a much-reprinted story, The Associated Press reported that Georgia and other states are cutting back on courses in the Bible in the public schools. I can understand the need for cutbacks in hard times and appreciate that the Bible classes weren't attracting many students; and I understand how problematic such courses can be — but the cutbacks are bad news.

            Like Civics, history, scientific method, math, and the sciences, basic knowledge about the world's major religions is, well, basic; so we need more and better teaching of religious studies in US schools, not fewer and/or cheaper courses.

            I can recall at least three surveys of Americans showing that as a people we're high on professions of piety but often low on information about the world's religions, including knowledge of Christianity, even (or especially) among many professing Christians. My experience teaching generally conservative college students reinforces the message of the statistics.

            I give a link to the Pew "U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey" (Sept. 2010), so I'll move on to share with the group from my experience teaching.

            In the beginning …, during my first semester teaching in 1967, I taught in Rhetoric 101 Eric Hoffer's The True Believer (1951), a book I also taught at the end of my teaching career, when fanaticism had again become an issue.

            One of my Rhet 101 students came across as if she'd been sent over by central casting for the role of 18-year old Fundamentalist or Pentecostal. At the end of a conference I asked her very tentatively, "Uh, did The True Believer … bother you at all?" It hadn't. "Why should it?", she asked. I said, "Uh, well, Hoffer discusses St. Paul — Paul the Apostle — with, well, Hitler and Stalin and, well, fanatics." She wasn't bothered, and it hit me.

            "Do you know who St. Paul was?"? She didn't, and I muttered something like, "He sort of founded Christianity as a world religion and is of some historical importance" — and we moved on.

            Somewhat later I had a colleague who claimed to have a student who'd never heard of Hitler, but I'll just throw that in; Hitler and Stalin I'm pretty sure she knew (Stalin died in 1953, and was still alive during her lifetime).

            Now when teaching Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure, I knew I'd have to handle how those plays use the old legend of "The Parliament [i.e., Trial] in Heaven" and the debate there among the four daughters of God: Justice, Mercy, Truth, and Peace.

  {Justice and Truth argue for condemning Man after the Fall — Adam and Eve and all their descendants: i.e., all of us; Mercy and Peace argue for forgiveness. Then, "Mercy and truth have met each other: justice and peace have kissed," as Psalm 85.10 has it: the Four Daughters reconcile with the solution of the Incarnation of the Son as the Christ and the sacrifice of the Man/God Jesus Christ to God, satisfying God's justice, and allowing Mercy through Christ's Sacrifice. (It's complicated.)}

            The technicalities of Christian theories of forgiveness I knew I'd have to explain, even to students who'd been to parochial school and had studied Christian theology. What I didn't think I'd have to tell them about was Jesus's central teachings and the stress traditional Christianity has put on forgiveness, including humans' forgiving other humans: "Measure for Measure" —  as we measure out our forgiveness and mercy, so it will be measured to us (Matthew 7.1-2).

            Significantly, for the most part my students wanted vengeance in the plays. Conspicuously kindly young women thought the gals in Measure for Measure and the later Winter's Tale wimps for (eventually) forgiving the men who'd wronged them.

            Fine with me if they saw these forgiving women as wimps, but I wanted these (feminist) students to allow that those wimpy women embodied the Christian ideal, which is part of the point of the play.

            As was their resistance; as a practical matter, actually-existent Christianity and real-world Christians haven't been all that good at turning the other cheek, loving enemies, and eschewing vengeance.

            If you're going to understand works of art coming out of Christian cultures, you need some knowledge of Christianity. And this is true whether the works reinforce Christian doctrine or call it into question.

            Shakespeare undermines comfortable beliefs in divine justice in King Lear — and any hope of finding our values in some benevolent Nature.

            Far more recently, Harry Harrison attacks Christian doctrine specifically and theism more generally in "The Streets of Ashkelon" (1962). And from Herman Melville through Mark Twain down to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Ursula K. Le Guin, various American authors have wrestled with God and monotheistic religions.

            Indeed, Thomas Jefferson and the Continental Congress attacked doctrine long held by the Powers That Be in Church and State in presenting among "self-evident" truths the idea that humans — or at least humans that count — are all "created equal," and endowed with rights that we organize governments to protect. The older idea, older than Christianity, but adopted early on, was that God created us unequal, each with a place in the great chain of being, a place we'd damn well better stay in.

            You'll never understand just how revolutionary the American Revolution was unless you understand that it included a conflict over very different origin myths for human society and the nature of that society.

            As a teacher of early literature, I wanted US high school graduates to know something about the world's religions in general and about the Bible in particular.

            So I desired high-school religious education to make my job easier (or possible!) as a college teacher; but I also supported such programs as an American by birth and one who had sworn loyalty to the Constitution and the American republic.

             I supported and continue to support such education as a man of the Liberal/Libertarian democratic Left (by way of some strongly-held conservative views).

            Especially when arguing for radical changes, one must couch one's argument in terms one's listeners understand and one must base one's arguments in assumptions your listeners might accept. "Know how to answer an Epicurean" — the rabbis enjoined, including, knowing how to talk to a philosophical materialist — and Paul the Apostle knew his business in speaking in Jewish terms to Jews and philosophical terms to "Greeks."

            Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., understood this well: note the similarities and differences of the inspirational "I Have a Dream" speech at a rally and his equally powerful but lower-key "Letter from Birmingham Jail" to his professional colleagues in the ministry. More generally, note the centrality of the Black Church in America, and the rhetoric of the Black Church for the entire Civil Rights Movement.

            Left-wing activists won't get far arguing for redistributing wealth on the grounds of Karl Marx's labor-theory of value or even John Locke's theory of the right of property. They might try instead the opening of the 24th Psalm:

       The Earth is the Lord's

        and the fullness thereof,

         the sea and all

        that in them is;

         for He hath founded it upon the sea

        and established it upon the flood.

These lines assume that if you make something, it's yours: the labor theory of property as a right. The world itself is God's, and the goods of the world are to be distributed according to the rules of the Landlord.

             Which makes logical and inevitable the Biblical doctrines that the poor and immigrants have a right to at least the gleanings of the land; even a working ox has a right to some products of his labor.

            And so forth, though with careful picking and choosing from the Biblical cafeteria.

            And if what passes for conservatives today object to the "cafeteria" approach, tell them that there are 613 mitzvot (teachings) in Torah, by traditional count, not just Ten Commandments. Starting with Paul, the Church has always chosen what should bind those now "not under the law[s]" of Moses (1 Corinthians 9.20).

            The point here isn't that Left and Right can agree on the Bible; they'll argue over it as much as we argue about so much else. The point, is that the American Left shouldn't concede the Bible and religion any more than we should concede the flag and patriotism.

            The Left possibly more than the Right needs to be able to talk to Christians in their own terms; and — to return to my opening — American Christians need a better idea of what the hell those terms are.

            Parents, neighborhoods, parishes, churches, synagogs, mosques — many institutions — need to be doing much of the teaching. Some teaching, though — academic, formal, non-polemical religion studies — should take place in US schools.

            That will require trained teachers.

            Ideally, religious-studies teachers should know the languages of the religions they teach: Biblical Hebrew and Greek to start with, for Judaism and Christianity, but Aramaic also, and Latin — and, for Islam, Arabic. Minimally, teachers need to know that the sacred texts of the older monotheisms are written in Hebrew and Greek, not, say, the excellent English, but still English, of the 1611 Authorized ("King James") Version of the Bible.

            Even minimally qualified teachers will be expensive.

            When we get the money, though, such money for education (including Civics, history, and science education!) will be money well spent.