Why Comparative Religion Should Be Taught in Schools? Because of Our Enemies!

A few weeks ago, there was an article in the Los Angeles Times by Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University and the author of "Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know -- and Doesn't."

In that article, Professor Prothero recounts the religious illiteracy he had encountered over the past several years. A recent poll of the U.S. population, as a whole, indicated that 50% of high school seniors believe Sodom and Gomorrah were married, 17% believe Ramadan is the Jewish Day of Atonement, and a majority of people believe St. Paul led the Jews out of Egypt! Many evangelical Christians are adamant that the Ten Commandments be posted in public places; perhaps because it will permit them to learn more than the four most Americans are able to name!

Biblical illiteracy is not just a religious problem.

It is a civic problem with political consequences. How can citizens participate in biblically focused debates on abortion, capital punishment or the environment without knowing something about the Bible? Because they lack biblical literacy, Americans are easily swayed by demagogues on the left or the right who claim - often incorrectly - that the Bible says this about war or that about abortion or something else about homosexuality.

Notwithstanding the hysterical utterances by many, there is no Constitutional impediment to the teaching of religion in public schools. The problem arises when the teaching is combined with proselytizing or when a specific prayer is to be uttered by the students. What is discussed here will not offend God; in fact He just might be pleased about the interest!

In a 1963 ruling by the Supreme Court (Abington School District v Schempp),theCourt said no state law or school board may require that passages from the Bible be read or that the Lord's Prayer be recited in the public schools at the beginning of each school day - even if individual students may be excused from attending or participating in such exercises upon written request of their parents. The basic reason is that there is no absolute agreement among all citizens, even those identify themselves as Jews or Christians, as to which Bible is to be used. As a brief example, Christians pray to and through Jesus; to a Jew, this is abhorrent. The majority opinion then addressed secular study of religion: : "Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment."

Justice Douglas, in a concurring opinion, stressed that this ruling would not prohibit objective teaching about the Bible or religion, "The holding of the Court today plainly does not foreclose teaching about the Holy Scriptures or about the differences between religious sects in classes in literature or history. Indeed, whether or not the Bible is involved, it would be impossible to teach meaningfully many subjects in the social sciences or the humanities without some mention of religion."

I would submit that teaching the Bible in schools--as an object of study, not God's received word--is constitutional. The Bible so pervades Western culture that it's hard to call anyone educated who hasn't at least given thought to its key passages. Rhe current civic climate makes it a "now more than ever" proposition.

At the very start of the Supreme Court's string of school-secularization cases, the most eloquent language preserving the neutral study of religion was probably Justice Robert Jackson's concurring opinion in the 1948 case McCollum v. Board of Education: "One can hardly respect the system of education that would leave the student wholly ignorant of the currents of religious thought that move the world society for ... which he is being prepared."

Citing these and subsequent cases, Marc Stern, general counsel for the American Jewish Congress, has said, "It is beyond question that it is possible to teach a course about the Bible that is constitutional." For over a decade, he says, any legal challenges to school Bible courses have focused not on the general principle but on whether the course in question was sufficiently neutral in its approach.

Who cares and what difference does it make?

In 1995, a federal appeals court upheld the overturn of a death sentence in a Colorado kidnap-rape-murder case because jurors had inappropriately brought in extraneous material--Bibles--for an unsanctioned discussion of the Exodus verse "an eye for eye, tooth for tooth ... whoever ... kills a man shall be put to death."

The Christian group Focus on the Family complained, "It is a sad day when the Bible is banned from the jury room." Who's most at fault here? The jurors, who perhaps hadn't noticed that in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus rejects the eye-for-an-eye rule, word for word, in favor of turning the other cheek? The Focus spokesman, who may well have known of Jesus' repudiation of the old law but chose to ignore it? Or any liberal who didn't know enough to bring it up?

According to Religious Literacy, polls show that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the Bible holds the answers to "all or most of life's basic questions, but pollster George Gallup has reported that we are "a nation of biblical illiterates." Only half of U.S. adults know the title of even one Gospel. Most can't name the Bible's first book. The trend extends even to Evangelicals, only 44% of whose teens could identify a particular quote as coming from the Sermon on the Mount.

The West is in a struggle with Islamic extremists who, it is said by the president, have hijacked the principles of Islam, for their own ends. Be that as it may, how can the West understand the motives, principles and capabilities of al Qaeda or other extremist terror groups unless the fundamental bases of their beliefs, grounded in their faith, is fully understood. When I was in college, taking a comparative religion course, one student asked the lecturer, "Do you believe in the Biblical account of the virgin birth of Jesus, or his resurrection. The answer is significant: It does not matter. What matters is that a number of people do believe those incidents and act upon that belief.

School districts in Georgia and elsewhere have begun to introduce objective secular study of comparative religions. It is about time and the movement should be accelerated. We cannot afford another generation unable to comprehend the values and beliefs of non-Western and non-Judeo-Christian people.