Traveling lite
Carlin, David R. Jr.
OF SEVERAL MINDS David R. Carlin, Jr. TRAVELING LITE THE EMPTY-BIN GENERATION s I think I have mentioned in this space before, I earn my living teaching sociology at a...
...He didn't even know how to say, "Have a nice day...
...and doesn't care...
...But perhaps there is a bright side to all this...
...Gallup polls on religion consistently reveal that America has a higher rate of religiosity than any other advanced industrial nation...
...But at the level of the typical college student almost none of this has taken place...
...but they are all drowning...
...Could this be the clue to the ahistorical nature of the undergraduate mind...
...Corresponding to this drop-off in knowledge of other religions has been a decline among the young of knowledge of their own religion...
...The development of the modern sense of history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries can be seen as part and parcel of the Enlightenment's antireligious program: earth was to be substituted for heaven, mankind for God, time for eternity, and history for theology...
...Perhaps young Catholics were taught that Martin Luther initiated the Reformation because he wanted to marry a nun and drink beer...
...Oh brave new world, that has such students in it...
...For one thing, when we talk about religion in America we are not talking about religion in general but about Christianity, which in one or another of its many forms is the religion of the great bulk of the population...
...We don't understand how someone can get oriented to the universe without a sense of history or religion or both...
...Reduced hostility among faiths has led to nothing better than greater indifference...
...Whatever the case may be for Hindus, for example, for Christians a sense of history is not in the least incompatible with a sense of religion...
...Thus undergraduate ignorance of history may simply be a by-product of the fundamentally religious orientation of the American mind...
...We never gave up on the idea of God, so we never had to embrace the idea of history...
...Of course my students know the basics of U.S...
...But the mental bins in which students store their religious knowledge are almost as empty as the bins in which they store their historical knowledge...
...To those of us who belong to the older world this looks like a cultural catastrophe...
...that Lincoln presided over the Civil War...
...Every so often a perverse mood comes over me, and I point out to my students that Julius Caesar, despite having spent a certain amount of time in Britain, could not speak a single word of English...
...Maybe the typical four-year student knows a little more history than my two-year students, but not much more...
...How could this be...
...with the realm of spirit, not the realm of earthly things...
...But the average American has never subscribed to this program...
...In the bad old pre-ecumenical days our views of other religions may have been distorted by vicious stereotypes, but at least we had views...
...As doctrinal differences between faiths diminish in social importance, it becomes less important to know the doctrines of one's own faith...
...It takes about five minutes of wrong guesses before someone suggests that Caesar may have antedated the English language...
...that John Kennedy had a relationship with Marilyn Mdnroe...
...Were the mind of the average collegian stocked with an overflowing supply of religious knowledge, something might be said for the theory that there is no room left for any historical knowledge...
...But Christianity is a historical religion...
...At the level of religious professionals, the ecumenism of the last generation or so has led to greater understanding and appreciation of the other fellow's religion...
...How could so intelligent a man have been so linguistically ignorant...
...and does very nicely, thank you, despite neither knowing nor caring...
...Based on what I've read and experienced, it seems that my students constitute something close to a representative sample of the nation's college students...
...On the contrary, a sense of history is indispensable for a properly Christian sense of religion...
...Perhaps a new kind of human being is emerging--one who doesn't know where he or she is in the great ocean of being or in the rushing river of time...
...that he slandered the Holy Father in a sacrilegious manner...
...history: that Washington was the first president...
...My students travel light, keeping their minds free for their daily practical tasks, while we old-fashioned folk weigh ourselves down by carrying hundred-pound metaphysical backpacks, filled with curious but useless items of information...
...For another, if undergraduates are uninformed about history, they are nearly equally uninformed about religion...
...No one knew the answer--though several students suggested "after death," perhaps on the theory that dead folks, whose income after all is notoriously stable, would stand more in need of price controls than those of us with greater potential for income growth...
...and the person fed these half-truths may have been better offthan the one who responds to the mention of Luther's name by saying, "Martin who...
...My students may be drowning in 100 fathoms of historical ignorance, while the others are drowning in only 97 fathoms...
...The other day one of my colleagues made the mistake of asking his class what the expression "A.D," stands for, as in the sentence, "The Emperor Diocletian decreed price controls in A.D...
...So we are raising a generation that knows little religion and less history...
...and that he told people they could sin freely provided they had faith...
...This wasn't fair to Luther, but at least it contained a set of half-truths...
...Well, this exculpatory theory won't wash...
...TRAVELING LITE THE EMPTY-BIN GENERATION s I think I have mentioned in this space before, I earn my living teaching sociology at a community college...
...11 January 1991:7...
...Could it be that a sense of religion has left no mental room for a sense of history...
...Religion, after all, is concerned with eternity, not time...
Vol. 118 • January 1991 • No. 1
