Education, Religion, and the Common Good: Advancing a Distinctly American Conversation About Religion's Role in Our Shared Life / Taking Religion to School...

Theology Today, Jan 2002 by Henry, Patrick

Education, Religion, and the Common Good: Advancing a Distinctly American Conversation

About Religion's Role in Our Shared Life By Martin E. Marty with Jonathan Moore

San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, 2000. 164 pp. $23.00. Taking Religion to School: Christian Theology and Secular Education

By Stephen H. Webb

Grand Rapids, Brazos, 2000. 253 pp. $19.99. Education, religion, and the common good are a volatile, even lethal, mix-just ask Socrates. The question of how these three relate is very old, but the United States has provided a fresh context. The answer in this country used to be easier. Sidney Mead's book title-The Nation with the Soul of a Church-made more sense in 1975 than it does now, when mosques and temples have joined synagogues as alternative vivifiers of the body politic. Will Herberg's Protestant, Catholic, Jew (1955) is a galaxy long ago and far away.

These two books are distinctly different contributions to an ongoing debate/conversation. Both are grounded in evidence.

Marty and Moore draw on the huge Public Religion Project in general, and specifically on a series of three roundtables in which people across the opinion spectrum participated. The result of these conversations was some clarity about ways to formulate questions that could nudge talk beyond thrashing your opponent with either the establishment or the free exercise clause of the First Amendment. "This book is written with the hope that all over America, more people will be inspired not only to argue over answers to such issues but also to converse about the right questions."

Webb reflects on a long career as a college professor, during which he has thought more than most about what actually happens in the classroom. "Teachers rarely see each other teach, and they rarely even talk about their teaching to each other." He explains what he means by "teaching religion religiously."

Marty and Moore take a wide-angle view, covering everything from kindergarten through graduate school. Webb turns the focus to telephoto, zeroing in on the conscience of the individual scholar/teacher. Each book, however, provides an antidote to the compartmentalized, Balkanized state of public discussion and academic research. Education, Religion, and the Common Good boldly goes where no one has gone before-dealing "with all levels and in general religious terms with the common good." And Webb, disavowing the notion that the educator's job is to fill empty vessels, contends that "the goal of religion teachers should be to listen to their students and call forth their best religious voices."

Both books are a pleasure to read. Marty is, as always, clear, direct, and prodigiously well-informed. His book includes a series of questions both comprehensive and particular that demonstrate the intricate connection of politics and such academic esoterica as historical criticism of sacred texts. In a charming image that shows alertness to actual kids, Marty and Moore note that children pick up critical tools apart from what happens in school. "On their own, they may have begun to assemble their own do-it-yourself kits for spiritual detective work." Among the most searching issues they pose is this: "Can Americans still be drawn together by some common narrative?" One can ask if we ever were-for a long time, Blacks and Catholics were not really included. Lincoln's refashioning of American identity, as Garry Wills has shown he accomplished in the Gettysburg Address, may be the closest we've ever come.

Webb's prose has more calories: He turns phrases and generates metaphors in a way that could cloy in less skillful hands. He covers a lot of territory, some of it brilliantly (he's a world-class pathologist of college faculty life). He makes helpful distinctions-for instance, let's shift the question from how to teach religion objectively to how to teach it responsibly; teaching religion is more like teaching a foreign language than it is like philosophy or history. He understands that "what the Christian teacher can do is make room for a kind of truth that is neither the teacher's nor the student's"-which sounds rather Zen to me! He revisits an issue that Marty and Moore think is settled: that "professor and priest have separate callings in a society that needs the distinctive specialized skills of both." Webb admits there's a distinction, but he wants to blur it.

I recommend both books. But I do have a quarrel with them, and about something that in principle I applaud, namely, their holistic approach. Education is seamless, as is life, as the two books insist. But the constraints on K-12 public education are different, not just in degree, but fundamentally in kind from those on higher education. Yes, a half century saw an increase from a handful to over 900 public university programs in religious studies, but public universities have, for taxpayers, a different gravity from K-12 schools. Tip O'Neill's "All politics is local" applies.

But if religion is harder to deal with in elementary and secondary schools than in colleges and universities, it does not follow that public schools are an ethical wasteland. I'm speaking not objectively (my wife is a junior-high-school principal) but responsibly. When Webb writes, "There is little doubt today that American schools promote spiritual superficiality, moral shallowness, and cultural relativism," I wonder where his "little doubt" about such "promotion" comes from. School-bashing, ever since the notoriously slanted Reagan-era A Nation at Risk (1983), has been a parlor game. Webb, who acutely notes how Nietzsche has become part of the "common sense" of his students, needs to think about how the "little doubt" he refers to has similarly insinuated itself into his mental landscape. Some of the most serious and sustained attention to values and character in this country happens every day in our public schools.