Of all the fronts opened up in today’s culture wars, the most volatile may be the public schools. The Religious Right, at its inception in the 1970s, mobilized grass-roots support largely over opposition to two court cases—Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington School District v. Schempp (1963)—which together outlawed public prayer and devotional Bible reading from public schools. Since that time, many conservative Christians have come to believe that the public schools are fomenting what Stephen Carter referred to as “the culture of disbelief.” Some have even argued that secular humanism has become the established religion of American public education.
Much has been written about the history of American education in general and the relationship between religion and education in particular. The decade following the appearance of Warren A. Nord’s landmark study, Religion and American Education: Rethinking a National Dilemma (1995), saw the publication of a variety of useful books along similar lines, including Between Church and State: Religion and Public Education in a Multicultural America (1999) by history professor James W. Fraser, The Fourth R: Conflicts over Religion in America’s Public Schools (2004) by English professor Joan DelFattore, and Does God Belong in Public Schools? (2005) by law professor Kent Greenawalt.
Lost on these important studies, however, was the fact that, while the American situation is unique in its particulars, it is not unparalleled. Although Europe is a hotbed of the culture of disbelief (or “Eurosecularity,” as sociologist Peter Berger calls it), the study of religion is far more advanced in secondary education on that continent than it is in the United States. So Americans can learn much from European examples about how to educate our children concerning the ways and means of religion. Elsewhere in the world, believers and nonbelievers alike are engaged in cultural skirmishes of their own about just how closely religion should dance with education. American debates about the propriety of high school courses on the Bible or on the world’s religions look very different when viewed in the light of similar dilemmas ongoing not only in Europe but also in Asia, Australia, and the Middle East.
Such dilemmas are the subject of a new book by R. Murray Thomas, Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Religion in Schools: Controversies around the World consists of 12 case studies of religion-in-the-schools controversies in twelve different countries, namely France, Japan, England, India, Spain, China, Italy, Pakistan, Thailand, Australia, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. To take just a few examples, the French case concerns Muslim girls who were told that they could not wear headscarves in public schools. The British case concerns the introduction of atheism and agnosticism as “belief systems” to be taught alongside Christianity and Judaism in England’s required courses in religious education. And the Italian case concerns whether a headmaster should have been ordered to remove a crucifix from a wall of his primary school after a Muslim student’s father objected to its presence.
What is clear from the case studies Thomas presents is that the “national dilemma” of religion and education takes very different forms in different nations, and that those forms shift quite rapidly with the political winds. In India, for example, Thomas discusses efforts to seize on the 2004 electoral defeat of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in order to do away with pro-Hindu biases inserted earlier by the BJP into required schoolbooks. In Spain, he discusses efforts by the Socialists, who came to power after the 2004 election, to reverse a decree passed by the pro-Catholic People’s Party requiring students to take either a course on Roman Catholic theology or an alternative course (heavily biased toward Catholicism, according to many) on the world’s religions.
Of all these cases, the two that most closely resemble each other are those Thomas chose for Australia and the United States. The American example looks at efforts by Georgia’s superintendent of schools to excise the term evolution from that state’s science curriculum. In Australia the chosen controversy also concerns the fuzzy boundary between science and religion—in this instance, efforts by multiculturalists to include Aboriginal theories of creation in science courses. While President George W. Bush and others have argued that fairness requires evolution and creationism to get an equal hearing in the public schools, Australia’s multiculturalists argue that fairness—not to mention postmodernism—requires that their nation’s science teachers give textbook space and classroom time to Aboriginal speculation on the world’s origin.
Unfortunately, Thomas does little to illuminate these similarities or, for that matter, to draw interesting contrasts. In short, what appears at first glance to be a comparative book engages in hardly any comparison whatsoever. What Thomas does instead is construct a series of rigid typologies and then repeatedly cram his evidence into them, come what may. And what comes, unfortunately, is not very much, even in a concluding chapter devoted ostensibly to comparisons.
In each and every chapter, Thomas follows the exact same organizational scheme. He begins with a section on the “historical roots” of his chosen conflict. In many cases, this historical prelude goes back absurdly early—in the case of India, to Hinduism c. 1500 BCE; in the case of Spain, to Constantine’s conversion in the 4th century ce. Next he moves on to “contending constituencies”—lining up Socialists, liberal Catholics, and religious “Nones” in the coalition to do away with religious education in Spain, for example, and the Peoples’ Party, Catholic clergy, and conservative Catholics on the opposing side. He then concludes each chapter with a short discussion of how its particular controversy was resolved (or not). As a result of his slavish allegiance to this wooden framework, the chapters read like a series of disjointed term papers, each dutifully following a teacher’s rigid outline.
In these chapters, scholars of religion will find much to quibble with. For example, Thomas seems unaware that many Hindus—most in the United States, actually—consider themselves to be monotheists, and he seems to assume that Japanese citizens can be either Shinto or Buddhist but not both. Moreover, he repeatedly refers to religious traditions as “belief systems,” something scholars of religion gave up decades ago (as insufficiently attentive to other facets of religion, including rituals and institutions).
Other readers may be put off by Thomas’ tendency to lapse repeatedly into obvious truths, among them the observation that controversies over religion in schools happen only in societies where people disagree about religion. But the real problem with this book is that its rigid organizational scheme leaves little room for creative analysis or comparative insights.
As a result, this book will be useful principally for the factual information it conveys about the cases it highlights. In his chapter on Pakistan, Thomas presents useful information about the U.S. government’s failed efforts to bend Islamic schools called madrassas in a more moderate direction. According to Thomas, these schools have become more politically radical even as they have greatly increased in number; accurate figures are not available, but Pakistan’s madrassas now likely run into the tens of thousands. And they have almost entirely resisted efforts to replace lessons on jihad with instruction in secular subjects such as mathematics, science, and English. So although Thomas does not frame it this way, readers can take from this chapter an important lesson in the vexed relationship between best intentions and unintended consequences: For the millions it has pumped into Pakistan, the U.S. government has received close to nothing in terms of influence in these highly influential schools.
In the end, Religion in Schools is most significant for its suggestion that an important comparative study can be made of religion in the schools worldwide. Such a study, however, still waits to be written.
Stephen Prothero is the Chair of the Department of Religion at Boston University. His next book, Religious Literacy, will be published by HarperSanFrancisco in February.
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