Religious ignorance
Carlin, David R. Jr.
OF SEVERAL MINDS David R. Carlin, Jr. RELIGIOUS IGNORANCE A CLEAR & PUBLIC DANGER ¦^L I^H o one who wants to un^^^A^^H derstand American so^^^^^^^| ciety and its history can ^^H^^^J do...
...But it is at least as bad as performing Death of a Salesman without reference to Willy Loman's occupation...
...For another, there is the notorious reluctance of public schools to teach about religion...
...Not to worry, I'll be told...
...There are many causes for this state of affairs, too many to mention in the brief space available...
...Indeed, in today's cultural climate the former are perhaps even more impertinent than the latter...
...Ninety-nine percent of our high school students are bored to tears with American history and English literature to begin with...
...so it's not as if their noninstruction in religion has frustrated a burning zeal on their part for literary and historical enlightenment...
...But for starters, there is the privatization of religion, which is an almost inevitable, though perhaps not quite logical, extension of the American wall of separation between church and state...
...Close inquires into the religious lives of our neighbors are as impertinent as close inquiries into their sex lives...
...I'm not referring, it need hardly be said, to their unwillingness to engage in religious indoctrination, which is clearly constitutionally forbidden, but to their unwillingness to examine religion as a social and historical phenomenon, which is not at all forbidden...
...In the nineteenth century the intellectual avant-garde who sat at the feet of such masters as Comte, Feuerbach, and Nietsche confidently expected the imminent disappearance of supernatural religion, which had become plainly incompatible, they believed, with the scientific and technological spirit of the modern age...
...Their religious privacy is an inalienable right, and my religious ignorance is a correlative inalienable duty...
...my motive is a strictly secular one...
...this would not be the first time, after all, that knowledge led to relativism, and relativism to skepticism and indifference...
...8: Commonweal...
...for public confessions about one's sexual curriculum vitae are nowadays regarded as far less embarrassing, it seems, than public confessions about one's religious history...
...Cast off by the well-educated, they are picked up by the semi-educated, who wear them as badges of what they imagine to be enlightenment and up-to-dateness, little suspecting that they are rendering themselves a half-century or so out of fashion...
...I don't make the above observation in the spirit of pious lamentation...
...But it's just possible, isn't it, that one of the reasons they find history and literature so deadly dull is that they are victims of a conspiracy of silence that ignores, or at any rate grossly understates, the religious dimension of those subjects...
...RELIGIOUS IGNORANCE A CLEAR & PUBLIC DANGER ¦^L I^H o one who wants to un^^^A^^H derstand American so^^^^^^^| ciety and its history can ^^H^^^J do so without under^H ^H standing the nature and history of religion in America...
...Well, this disappearance seems to have been indefinitely postponed, at least in America, where religion shows remarkable persistence and vitality...
...They deal with religion in a very gingerly manner for the same reason they deal with sex education in a very gingerly manner...
...What's more, this lack of knowledge causes them neither embarrassment nor anxiety...
...But whatever its value or disvalue for religion itself, there can be no question that this religious ignorance is a dangerous state of affairs for anyone who has the worldly obligation — and in a republic, this is an obligation that falls on every citizen — to reflect intelligently and critically upon the condition of his or her society...
...This may not be quite as bad as performing Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark...
...How are high school students to understand American history or English literature, for instance, if they don't possess, at a minimum, a nodding acquaintance with the varieties of Anglo-American Protestant experience...
...for American religion is destined, sooner or later, to arrive where American vaudeville has already arrived, namely, in history's graveyard of irrelevant institutions...
...Despite this, scads of people who are otherwise well-informed about the world around them — folks who wouldn't dream of allowing themselves to be any16 January 1987: 7 thing less than up-to-speed about politics, business, or even sports — remain chronically underinformed about the religious life of their society...
...both are terribly controversial subjects...
...True, perhaps...
...truly, their ignorance is a blissful one...
...But since the semi-educated greatly outnumber the well-educated, an exploded philosophy of history, e.g., secularism, may well have its largest constituency a generation or two after it has become intellectually indefensible...
...But pity the poor school board and superintendent...
...The safest policy with regard to sex, religion, and all other controversial subjects, therefore, is to say nothing that is not perfectly innocuous...
...But discredited philosophies of history don't simply vanish...
...Sometimes, in fact, they do just the opposite...
...What consenting adults and their children do behind the closed doors of church, temple, or mosque is nobody's business but their own...
...Who needs it...
...As a result, every day one runs into people who are convinced they have barely more need to examine American religion than to examine, say, American vaudeville...
...From John Winthrop and Anne Hutchinson to Pat Robertson and Raymond Hunthausen, religion has played a vital role in American life...
...Try to treat either in a serious manner, and you'll provoke a hurricane of angry parents — the kind of storm that has the potential for blowing you out of office...
...And it doesn't matter that the fate of the republic, as Tocqueville insisted so long ago, may hinge on what goes on behind those closed doors...
...If you doubt this, check the Phil Donahue show...
...Yet another cause of religious ignorance is a rather quaint secularism popular among certain influential strata of American society...
...For all I know, more widespread knowledge of American religion may serve to undermine religion...
...If religion is a strictly private matter, then the other fellow's religion must be none of my business, and mine none of his...
Vol. 114 • January 1987 • No. 1
