Religion and American Education, by Warren A Nord/Paying the Words Extra, by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan:
McGreevy, John T
A SEPARATION OR A DIVORCE? RELIGION AND AMERICAN EDUCATION Rethinking a National Dilemma Warren A. Nord University of North Carolina Press, $19.95, 453 pp. PAYING THE WORDS EXTRA Religious...
...They proclaim that nans are wholly self-interested beings economics courses), that evolution is purposeless (in biology courses), and that students must decide, by themselves, what positions to hold on such controversial matters as sexual behavior or drug use...
...Sullivan's own mock effort in Lynch v. Donnelly, for example, concludes with the less than ringing charge that "government [should] resist any religious expression that reifies a particular interpretation of what religion is...
...These proposals are not unreasonable...
...Nord per-uasively argues that educators in public istitutions exclude religious points of iew...
...Judges thus become theologians, and public discussion of religion speeds toward unresolvable shouting matches...
...Metaphorical walls were understood to separate church from state...
...More frequently, teachers, text-ok authors, and administrators assume igion's irrelevance...
...Another justice used the phrase "strict and lofty neutrality as to religion...
...Nord's contribution to this literature is a remarkably clear account of the secularization of modern intellectual life...
...Students would read texts from the major religious traditions, become aware of religious approaches to knowledge, and use theology as a backdrop for analysis of contemporary problems...
...Sullivan's diagnosis is astute, as is her careful reading of each justice's opinion...
...American schools are increasingly diverse...
...This was not always true...
...More than any particular result she advocates a sort of legal anthropology, with judges self-consciously attempting to view religion in the eye of the particular beholder, not treating it as a static phenomenon...
...George Marsden has recently argued that universities need to consider religious points of view in a genuinely multicultural curriculum...
...Justice Sandra Day O'Connor agreed with the result but offered her own reasoning, while Justice William Brennan's bitter dissent termed the creche a "distinctively sectarian" symbol, one that unacceptably breached the wall separating church from state...
...What also makes Religion and American Education distinctive is its reformist zeal...
...Nord's tone throughout the book is measured, and he evenhandedly evaluates objections to his curricular reforms...
...That some analysts could contemplate vouchers for parents whose children attend private schools, but draw the line at vouchers for parents whose children attend private, religious schools seems to prove the point...
...Her remedy is less clear...
...The cacophony of contradictory voices present in any such course would seem to reenforce, not dispel, the notion of any religious tradition as one in a series of name brands...
...The Court's majority opinion, authored by Chief Justice Warren Burger, permitted city officials in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to construct a Christmas creche in the hope of luring holiday shoppers downtown...
...Easier said, one might add, than done, especially if legal opinions are to avoid resembling term papers in history of religion courses...
...is, as conceived in the language and culture of the writers of the Constitution, impossible...
...PAYING THE WORDS EXTRA Religious Discourse in the Supreme Court of the United States Winnifred Falters Sullivan Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions, $24.95,212 pp...
...The cumulative result is an implicit endorsement of unbelief, a message to students that religious faiths merely reflect personal, seemingly irrational, choices...
...For Sullivan, these differing opinions prove that "the separation of church and state...
...In just a few chapters, Nord ranges from Descartes to the modern university, distilling a vast philosophical and historical literature...
...The issue at hand, whether taxpayers should provide children attending Catholic schools with bus transportation, did spark great controversy, but the principle outlined by the Court, that governmental bodies must remain neutral with regard to religion, quickly became legal orthodoxy...
...As young people spend more time in school, however, and as federal courts become involved in a greater range of questions, it becomes evident that segregation of religion, and religion alone, is itself a theological position...
...At times this exclusion means ig-jring the ways in which religion con-lues to shape human behavior and story...
...Neither Sullivan nor Nord thinks government should promote prayer in the schools, or build nativity scenes...
...Like Nord, however, Sullivan shrewdly identifies a fault line running through much of contemporary American society and intellectual life...
...And Nord expresses reservations about school-voucher programs...
...Frustration with contemporary notions of neutrality also marks Winnifred Fallers Sulli van's interpretation of a 1983 Supreme Court decision, Lynch v. Donnelly...
...Relatively few treatments of Kant and Hegel also include content analyses of home economics textbooks used in North Carolina schools...
...Fifty years ago, most judges and educators agreed that religion, whatever it was, needed to be barred from public institutions...
...All of these claims, Nord points out, exist in some tension with the normative judgments made each week in many churches and synagogues...
...Aid to religion was "indirect, remote, and incidental...
...Nord proposes a required course in religion for all high school students...
...Warren Nord's thoughtful analysis of religion's role in public education reflects an emerging dispute over exactly what the term "neutral" entails...
...Children in elementary school would develop "religious literacy," while colleges would place the study of religion near the center of a liberal arts education...
...Pity the instructor charged with surveying even the "major" religious traditions represented in her classroom, leaping from Augustine to the Qur'an to the Plains Indians to Joseph Smith, all between January and June, and in the hope that Thursday's class will not be canceled for a pep rally...
...Stephen Carter's treatment of law and religion, The Culture of Disbelief, asked liberals not to close the door to religiously inspired arguments in the public realm...
...What they do request is a more sophisticated conversation about these matters, a conversation that both authors do a good deal to advance...
...Nord's basic thrust will be familiar to Commonweal readers...
...Warren Burger looks at a creche and sees a generic holiday symbol...
...William Brennan finds a marker of the Incarnation...
...John T. McGreevy Neutrality has become a complicated word...
...That is, the creche must go...
...Even so, Nord's conviction that "religion" courses will counter the secularization of American education reflects a teacher's instinctive turn toward course syllabi when confronted with a social problem...
...The considerable virtue of such classes is their ability to reduce ignorance, but only churches and synagogues themselves-through liturgy, religious education, and other means-can present faith traditions as ways of life, not simply sets of propositions...
...A creche in modern America, Burger maintained, merely acknowledged a secular holiday...
...In 1947, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black confidently asserted that the government's primary duty with respect to religious belief was to avoid passing laws which "aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another...
Vol. 122 • June 1995 • No. 12
