Pagan Godspell

Ah – it is a freakin’ glorious gorgeous day here in the not-so-wild midwest, and one cannot step outside without feeling as though perhaps gravity has not let up just a tad.  The birds are singing as though their whole bodies are their hearts, and every breath of air is pregnant with promise.  The vernal equinox, celebrated as Ostara by some among the Pagani, approaches, and the precious Mama warms to the moment.  Of course, not all of us Pagans are thrilled at the upcoming holiday, but then, some of us are planning just to have a small ”peaceful weekend at home,” rather than the usual big family blowout (I *heart* The Onion).

For today, however, once again my attention has been drawn to the Washington Posts’ ongoing “On Faith” panel blog.  Today’s question is: “Should teaching about religion be mandatory in public schools? In colleges and universities?”  I’m particularly amused by Starhawk’s response: “Can I Design the Lesson Plan on Wicca?”, in which she states, “If we don’t have a state religion, then we’d have to teach all religions. And I just want to say to everyone pushing this idea that I am completely ready to step up and help design the Mandatory Wiccan Religion Session for primary, intermediate and secondary grades.”

I am assuming WaPo’s question is in response to the recent debate in Georgia over whether or not to offer bible classes in public schools (the classes would be electives, not mandatory), as well as the recent data suggesting that Americans are woefully uneducated about world religions in general.  As others have noted, it is particularly interesting to note how many folks think Sodom and Gomorrah were a married couple.  This is amusing, but raises the question – why would we need to know this?  Who does it benefit if everyone in America knows about all the ”main” stories in the Bible?

Now, I have mixed feelings about all this “religion in schools” business.  Distinct from the kerfuffle over prayer in schools, the teaching of comparative religions or philosophy of religion have their own kettle of wormy worms.  They are, in my mind, different issues, though with some of the same problems. 

Unlike Starhawk, I’m not automatically opposed to teaching about religion in schools.  It is true that teaching about religion and teaching religion, as in belief, theology, ethics, etc. are two different things.  Do I trust the government and our educational system to enforce the difference?  Bwahahaahahahhaahaha – No.  But it’s still important to note that there is a difference.  I do agree with Starhawk that once you begin to offer mandatory courses in Christian theology, ethics and praxis (and I’m assuming you’d have different courses for different Protestant approaches as well as Catholic and Eastern Orthodox teachings, yes?), you betcha there’d better be a course in Celtic Reconstructionist polytheology, ethics and praxis right there with it, along with Buddhism (a course for each kind of Buddhism of course – Zen Buddhism, Mahayana Buddhism, etc.), Islam (Sunni, Shi’a, Sufism and others), Hinduism (which is itself just a convenient term for a whole bunch of different religions), Judaism (Reform, Reconstructionist, Orthodox, Conservative and Renewal, each), Wicca (haha!  Try narrowing it down to maybe 6 different traditions – good luck), Other Paganisms (I can think of 10 major ones just off the top of my head), Bahai, Shinto, Zoroastrianism, a million and one indigenous traditions, forever and ever and ever.  Religion is literally endlessly diverse and extraordinarily complex.  The way our media goes on about it, you’d think it was pretty cut and dried, but boy howdy, it ain’t.  But this is still different than teaching philosophy of religion, or a basic course in comparative religions (in which one can give all the above religious traditions the same brief overview and discuss topics and themes of relevance to world issues regarding religion).

Now, as an agnostic/newbie Pagan teen raised in a liberal household without any formal religion and who was obsessively interested in everything religious, I would have jumped at the chance to take a comparative religions course in high school.  As it was, my high school did offer an elective in Biblical Literature, which I took.  I also took Greek Mythology (which isn’t considered holy scripture to most and sure is holy scripture to some – there’s a whole other Pagan issue in there).  The approach to both classes was similar – that each were a set of cultural stories, a combination of history, myth, and teaching story.  Both were very useful courses and I’m glad I took them, and I absolutely and fundamentally believe that, given that Biblical Literature was offered, courses should have been offered in all the other holy scriptures of different traditions as well – each.  Therein lies the rub once again – why are schools offering courses in the Bible and not the Qur’an and the Upanishads?  Well, Georgia?  Uh huh.  I think we’re all pretty familiar with the answer to that.

Another key here is of course that these courses were electives.  I am not in any way in favor of making any course on the Bible or any other religious scripture a mandatory course – if ya pushed me on it, you’d most likely learn that I tend to think that no subject should be mandatory…I’m one of them crazy children-directed unschooling types…it’s that pesky anarchist in me.  However, given the current norm of mandatory curriculums, I might be willing to say that a basic course in comparative religions might be acceptable, providing that the curriculum was fair (and, again, do I trust institutions to pull this off?  Bwahahahahaha – No).  Whether we like it or not, religion is an undeniably powerful force in our lives, and American culture is saturated with it.  As a whole, under the meme of “American culture”, our governmental policies are steeped in religious beliefs, our holidays, our worldview, our understandings of family, etc. all stem from religious belief structures.  We may not like what those are (and I don’t really), but in order to equip ourselves to be aware of how this works in our culture and how we might begin to build different ways of seeing and being in the world, we must understand them.  In order to establish friendly, authentic, strong relationships with folks of other faiths, it is necessary to know something about the diversity of faith traditions in the world, about how religions function, how they deeply influence individuals and communities, to begin to grasp how endlessly messy and crazy and fantastic and impossible the world of religious scholarship and study can get (for instance – what is religion?  There’s an all-nighter – a trillion seminary students and AAR conferences later and nobody’s got the answer to that one).  As a religious scholar (well, kinda), I can’t help but be biased here – I think a basic understanding of the way religion works in the world, some history of world religions, and a basic understanding of world religions in relationship with each other makes for a broader awareness of how our world works.  And if you’re going to change a world, you need to know how it works.  Informed dissent.  That’s what I’m talking about.  Unfortunately, I find the likelihood of a curriculum that is truly just and allows for the authentic, gritty, honest examination of these issues by students and teachers in a government-funded, institutionalized classroom to be pretty poor.  Can it happen?  Sure – I believe in infinite possibility.  It’s the probability that I have an issue with.

In a world where I trusted institutions to enact fair and balanced (har!) curriculums and offer courses that enabled students to choose to study a wide variety of religions and to begin to understand the way religion works on the ground and begin to cultivate an awareness of the ways in which religious belief influences culture, government, foreign policy, etc., I may not be opposed to educational systems that included religious studies in their curriculums (hey – if I thought history courses were fair and balanced and were taught predominately with an eye towards cultivating a hermeneutic of critical examination in students I’d be happy).  Even in that world, this would be incredibly difficult.*  And as I’ve said before, sounds like fun to me, but maybe not to non-anarchists.  In this world, where the privileging of Christianity is a very real fact, and there are those in power who would not hesitate to institute a theocracy if they thought they could get away with it, I cannot help but be suspicious of religious curriculums in public schools.

But for now, I’m just going to have to be content with my quiet little preparations for the vernal equinox.  Now – pay attention, there’ll be a quiz later.  Ostara, boys and girls, as you can see by the board here (*schwak!*), is a Pagan celebration honoring the arrival of spring and the growing fecundity of the Earth, symbols of the holiday include eggs, rabbits, bulb flowers….

*Please note that I am not crapping on teachers.  Public school teachers have an unbelievably hard burden to shoulder – we expect them to teach to enormous expectations from our government in terms of test scores and college preparation and at the same time expect them to teach rich, creative courses that train students how to critically engage their world, and that’s no small task.  I have the highest respect for those who teach.  My criticisms point to the flaws in the idea that institutionalized curriculums can ever truly solicit authentic inquiry, be radically inclusive, and avoid privileging one topic over another, particularly and especially when it comes to the subject of religion.