In The Atlantic Marshall Poe argues that American universities have to do more to teach students religion, which which he means not just teaching them about religion, but also teaching them how to engage in religious practice:
I think religion should be taught in college. I’m not talking about “religious studies,” that is, the study of the phenomenon of religion. I’m talking about having imams, priests, pastors, rabbis, and other clerics teach the practice of their faiths. In college classrooms. To college students. For credit. I think religion should be taught in college because I believe it can help save floundering undergraduates. I’m not talking about “saving” them in Christian sense. I’m talking about teaching them how to live so they do not have to suffer an endless stream of miseries.
If you had asked me when I was a professor whether universities should teach religious practice in order to help undergraduates navigate life, I would have said you were crazy. First, I would have said my students were pretty well adjusted, so they didn’t needed to be saved. Second, I would have said that even if they were in trouble, religion couldn’t help them. Third, I would have said that even if they were in trouble and religion could help them, religion wasn’t real knowledge and couldn’t, therefore, be part of a university curriculum. And fourth, I would have said that even if undergraduates needed saving, religion could save them, and religion could be part of the curriculum, the separation of church and state made teaching religion in public universities impossible.
You may have all of these reservations as well. But I don’t think you should, and I’m going to tell you why.
And he goes on to do just that. And as I read his piece, I have to admit, I was of at least two, and probably several minds. After all, I am a professor of religion. I teach religion quite literally all. the. time. What's more, I'm an ethicist, and the nature of religious ethics is such that a lot of what I am doing in class is teaching about what Poe calls "religious practice." So, on the one hand, what he's suggesting seems perfectly reasonable to me.
What's more, I have the privilege of having spent pretty much my entire academic career in private, religiously-oriented colleges. Apart from my undergraduate experiences at a state university, I attended two seminaries (Andover Newton and Princeton Theological Seminary), and then taught at three universities, one (very) nominally Presbyterian and two Catholic. So in a sense, the main objection that Poe has to tackle -- that teaching religion at a state school would violate the separation of church and state -- has almost never really been an issue for me, at least institutionally.
Further, I am a believing and practicing Christian (practicing in the sense that I still haven't gotten it right, so I have to keep working on it). So I should be on board with this, right?
And yet, the way that Poe frames it leaves me slightly queasy as an academic. The key problem, it seems to me, is that it conflates what students may legitimately need from their university experience, and what it is appropriate to inculcate in them in a classroom setting. A "religious practice" in the sense that Poe seems to mean, while perhaps not strictly a form of religious indoctrination, certainly stands in substantial tension with the discipline of critical inquiry that is at the heart of the academic enterprise. The teaching of the humanities, and particularly in disciplines such as religion, rests not on teaching students a particular set of practices, as might be done in an accounting or chemistry class, but teaching students how to deploy the more general practice of critical thinking in the context of a particular body of knowledge, in my case, Christian theology and ethics.
What Poe is describing is certainly appropriate in the context of extra- or co-curricular activities, such as those performed by campus ministries or student organizations. But the classroom ought to be a space to challenge and widen the perspective offered by religious traditions and practices. To describe them in order to scrutinize them, and what Poe seems to be proposing, while not necessarily inimical to that, certainly makes that task more problematic if, as he argues, our task is less to help students discern their own path through life than to provide them with one already made.
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