By Susan L. Douglass  - 2004

What is the purpose of teaching about religion in public school classrooms? Is it to propagate religion, and to instruct in its practice? Should teaching be confined to representing the history of that religion which represents the largest demographic group in the country? Or should religions be selected for study based on a judgment of their worth? Is teaching about religion a matter of studying a mere artifact of human development that belongs to a rich and glorious past, but which has been superceded by natural and social sciences? Or is it a matter of politics or social engineering, whose presence in the school is designed to make all groups feel validated? Can public schools support the spiritual and intellectual rights of families and students of different faith traditions?

Turning the question on its head, would learning about US history, world history and world cultures make any sense if study of human religious experience were taken out or made invisible? Would the visual arts, literature, music and architecture of the world appear coherent if only "secular" expression was considered? Would it help American citizens live together more peaceably and constructively if we insisted upon the secular character of culture as a bulwark of the republic and enforced secularism in education? Is it right to present a view of religious experience that reflects a prevailing positive or negative view of one religion or the other? Should an anthropological, sociological or other academic view of the beliefs and practices provide the framework for discussing or explaining different religious beliefs as an aspect of culture, or should classroom study explain how people who practice the faith describe their beliefs and practices? Should faiths be evaluated based on the historical record of their adherents in following its moral and ethical codes, or on the quality of their cultural achievements? How could this be fairly accomplished in assessing the history of all major faiths, and how would such an enterprise serve the academic study of history?

The Uniqueness of the American Experience

The United States has been religiously diverse since the colonies were founded under the sovereignty of the British Empire. Reluctantly at first, and with increasing conviction and the reinforcement of laws that underlined religious tolerance, the United States achieved independence in a social context that was certainly more religiously homogeneous than today, but had won religious tolerance the hard way, against the backdrop of diversifying Protestant Christian experience and a sense that people were beginning a new experience for humanity as well. The Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom became a model for the First Amendment to the Constitution, and has stood the nation in good stead for well over two hundred years, through waves of immigration from Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, stretching from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. Religions have changed America and have themselves been shaped by the American experience. More than any other factor, the openness and mobility of the society and the proximity of people from different groups and belief systems has perhaps led people to look at their own core beliefs, and encouraged neighbors to focus more on commonalties than differences.

Today, the United States' demography nearly mirrors the world's demography. All the major religions of the world are present among the teachers and students who attend public schools here. In the past two decades, history has again been placed at the center of the social studies curriculum in public schools, as the standards for history and social science in the majority of the states attest. Because history has been given pride of place, religion as a realm of history has an equally firm place in the curriculum. A viable set of constitutional guidelines for teaching about religion has been developed by theologians and disseminated through efforts to achieve a civic consensus among educators, business and civic leaders, scholars of the law, religious communities and parent associations. The First Amendment Center, under the leadership of Charles C. Haynes, has been instrumental in developing, refining, disseminating and implementing these constitutional guidelines on the place of religion in the schools, which serve both to accommodate the religious beliefs and practices of the diverse student body in schools, and to encourage academic study of religions of the US and the world. The guidelines are available. It is up to educators, parents and scholars and faith communities to bring these guidelines to life in actual teaching materials and classroom praxis. It involves a lot of detailed work, research, review and collaboration. Collaboration among religious groups to produce the best materials for each grade level where the standards insert it into the curriculum would be the best demonstration of our civic and religious duty, and a model for interaction among groups that are at loggerheads in many parts of the world.

Teaching About Religion

Teaching about religion in public schools is a significant topic, and one that appears with considerable frequency in the K-12 program. United States history occupies students' coursework during at least four full years (grades 4, 5, 8 and 11, generally) in addition to much of the year in primary grades.

There, students learn about the religious context of exploration and migration to the New World, study the religious experience of Americans from colonists through the independence struggle, and they learn a great deal about the role of religion in the social, political and cultural history of the young nation. While a crowded curriculum may not give the subject its full due, the amount and quality of coverage on religion in US history has certainly increased in recent decades. In world geography and world history, which occupy between two and three years of the K-12 program, in addition to scattered topics elsewhere, students learn about the origins, basic beliefs, practices, and traditions of major world religious traditions and the history of societies and cultures they influenced. As in US history, academic standards for teaching about world religion are part of nearly every state curriculum requirements.1

How and what should students learn about the history of their own faith and that of their classmates, neighbors, and fellow citizens of the country and the world? What sort of instruction is fair, balanced and constitutionally appropriate? The First Amendment Center guidelines for teaching about religion provide an excellent guidepost. Expansion upon these guidelines, given in their most basic form below, may be found in several consensus documents published by the First Amendment Center, such as A Teacher's Guide to Religion in the Public Schools:

• The school's approach to religion is academic, not devotional.
• The school strives for student awareness of religions, but does not press for student acceptance of any religion.
• The school sponsors study about religion, not the practice of religion.
• The school may expose students to a diversity of religious views, but may not impose any particular view.
• The school educates about all religions; it does not promote or denigrate religion.
• The school informs students about various beliefs; it does not seek to conform students to any particular belief.

These guidelines have received wide dissemination, but as yet imperfect implementation. Not every teacher, administrator and developer of instructional materials and textbooks has understood or internalized the guidelines. As a result, mistakes are made in classrooms and in textbooks, and supplementary units have been published that do not meet these guidelines. It is well known that the collegiate educational and state certification systems allow inadequate teacher training in many areas, and certainly in teaching about religion. The fact that there are flawed instructional materials and faulty classroom instruction does not justify banning the topic of religion from history classes. It does justify, however, working harder to make sure that the guidelines are understood and followed in the public school classroom.

Just as we should not allow the intrusion of secular assumptions to anthropomorphize religion as a human impulse, neither should we advocate trivializing religious beliefs or practices through simulated celebrations, or make students and their families uncomfortable through role playing the beliefs and practices of other faith communities. Educators and members of the faith communities can and must help in the effort to teach about and preserve the heritage of our faiths. That will not happen by competing for more coverage, or trying to suppress coverage of other faiths. It can best be achieved by cooperating in implementing the civic framework of teaching about religion through scholarship, and through sensible and sensitive accommodation of students' religious needs while they are in school.

CIE's Work in U.S. Education

Since 1990, the Council on Islamic Education has worked within the framework of the guidelines for teaching about religion, whether in teacher training, textbook review, or developing educational materials. We have worked with the First Amendment Center as signatories to the consensus documents on religion in public education, and have participated in every civic forum on the topic to which we were invited. In reviewing textbooks, our scholars have consistently applied the guidelines to manuscripts, with the intent of fostering authenticity in covering the beliefs of all faiths covered in the classroom, working toward accuracy, fairness and balance. Among the most important issues that have come to our attention in teaching about religion is authenticity. We have often drawn curriculum and textbook writers' attention to the fact that a secular voice in the text-though very common in academia-is not a neutral voice. The key to achieving meaningful coverage of any religion is the accurate description of its beliefs and practices, and describing its origins as persons of the faith understand them. This authenticity can achieve a very intimate and faithful presentation of the faiths, but it has one condition: instead of stating the beliefs as a truth claim, the beliefs must merely be attributed to persons of faith. This simple distinction makes all the difference, and shows the full potential of the guidelines to achieve true religious understanding and preservation of faith in a secular, multi-religious civic environment.

One alternative that has been tried, and is still represented by some teaching materials, is the intrusion of secular assumptions in describing religious beliefs. Under this scenario, the faith experience is explained away, cheapened by being relegated to an invention. A child who reads that faith is a human invention-however useful for social control, however culturally interesting-is subject to erosion of their faith in favor of social engineering. Just as the state has no right to establish religion under the constitution, so the state has no right either to impose a secular belief system in which religion is viewed as a quaint artifact or worthwhile pastime that encourages social cohesion, but which at bottom, is seen as lacking veracity.

Under the guidelines, a student who attends public school learns authentically what the religious faiths stand for according to their adherents. Scripture is believed to have been revealed by God by adherents of the faith, therefore students learn that persons belonging to those faiths believe in its revelation. Prophets were not mere shepherds, carpenters or boat-builders, but persons of faith believed to be chosen by God to receive and spread His message among humankind. Religious scriptures should be portrayed - using words of attribution - as adherents of the faith traditions understand and believe them to have originated.

Holidays are another common area for study in the elementary classroom, and on an explanatory basis in secondary classrooms, at appropriate times of the year. Information about holidays is an accessible way to approach understanding other cultures, especially for young children. In discussing holidays, CIE materials and review efforts focus on avoiding celebration or simulation in the classroom, and on moving beyond the portrayal of foreign or exotic practices.

Religious holidays in many traditions are about remembrance of past events that are related to the core values of the faiths. Sharing both the stories and the values behind these remembrances is a way to bridge among communities of faith and those who may not share adherence to a religious tradition. There may have been a tendency in the past to focus explicit efforts on describing holidays of faiths that are relative newcomers or minority faiths among people in the US. It is just as necessary to explain the holidays of the faiths that have long been common in the US, especially because there may be students who have never heard the story of what they commemorate, who may be baffled by the commercialization of holidays whose true meaning and values they have not adequately understood.

Faith communities should share expertise on creative and historically valuable ways to address the beliefs, practices and celebrations. While we may not celebrate holidays in the schools, nor make truth claims about faiths, the constitutional and civic framework makes it the duty of faith communities to share their experience, their knowledge, and their talents to demonstrate to students of all faiths how much they value those traditions and beliefs, and to model teaching about them within the proper civic framework.

Teaching about religion is the practice of sharing authentic accounts of the origins, beliefs, and values of the various faiths, so that people can better understand each other. Students should be able to attend school without having to having their faith challenged on academic grounds. The school has a responsibility-and the duty, according to state academic standards-to provide accurate and thoughtful information.

1See Teaching About Religion in National and State Social Studies Standards (Council on Islamic Education and First Amendment Center, 2000) for data on the state-mandated requirements and approaches to teaching about religion in history, geography and US studies. The full study or an executive summary may be downloaded at www.fac.org or www.cie.org.