No Sunday school picnic - value of Sunday school teaching - Column

Christian Century, June 15, 1994 by Martin E. Marty

DEVOUT PROFESSORS on the Offensive," read the headline in the Chronicle of Higher Education (May 4). Religious-studies professors are resisting those who marginalize religion, the article reported. On the cover in full color is devout historian George Marsden, author of the scholarly and militant The Soul of the American University (Oxford University Press). He is posed before the ten-story mosaic of Jesus on the University of Notre Dame library. Pictured inside the issue is devout ethicist Stanley Hauerwas, who we are told "sprinkles his speech with profanities"; his bright mosaic tie matches the stained-glass window at Duke University in the background. No marginalizing there.

Writer Carolyn J. Mooney contrasts the two with Vanderbilt University's chaplain Beverly A. Asbury, who suggested that Vanderbilt remove a cross from its chapel to make it "truly non-denominational," whatever that is. Responding to Hauerwas's remarks on Asbury's recommendation, Asbury wrote that Hauerwas surely realized the benefits of a secular university since he was teaching at Duke rather than at a conservative church-related college.

Closer to Marsden and Hauerwas than to Asbury as I am, at the margins of the marginalized, I was drawn to the sad paragraphs in the Chronicle story about Donald G. Schley, who is suing the College of Charleston for not hiring him for a full-time position in religious studies. "Some professors felt Mr. Schley's resume was unprofessional because it listed numerous references to irrelevant personal activities, including, some said, teaching in a Sunday school," Mooney wrote.

Many people list "irrelevant personal activities" on their resumes, such as writing scholarly articles that no one ever reads, delivering scholarly papers to which no one listens, and serving on faculty committees that never do anything important. Sometimes the resume lists oboe-playing, fly fishing, coaching Little League or other activities that might catch the eye of the hiring committee.

"Teaching in a Sunday school" irrelevant in the vita of a college or university professor? Hardly. Those who have taught children, teens or adults in a late 20th-century Sunday school have engaged in the most college-relevant kind of activity imaginable:

* they will have worked unnoticed and unrewarded, unless they last 50 years and receive a cross that glows in the dark (this is good practice for the kind of recognition they will get on a faculty);

* they will, if they have taught teens, have faced circumstances of decision and terror that will have prepared them for the most suspicious and battle-hardened college sophomores;

* they will, if they ever had to chaperone a Sunday school picnic, have seen enough raucous behavior to prepare them for fraternity Animal House parties;

* they will have found that no one does homework, no matter how small the assignment, just like in most colleges;

* they will have found that nonattendance at Sunday school, which always comes in second or 23rd to activities like shopping or ballet lessons or soccer or Nintendo, will be matched by the low priority that college students give class attendance.

In short, Sunday school veterans bring credentials more relevant than their Ph.D.s. If they are discriminated against, it's enough to lead one to sprinkle one's speech with profanities, and then to shower these on the marginalizers.