Denying the Holocaust: Albany Teacher Suspended for Teaching Nazism

The Nazis are stealing your children!

Nazis are bad. I learned that lesson in high school like everyone else, though, let's be honest, we all knew that Nazis were bad before we ever made it to high school. Nevertheless, that is the lesson I was taught. Nothing more; nothing less. At Albany High School in New York, one teacher tried to take this lesson a little further in three sophomore English classes:

As part of the 10th grade English persuasive writing assignment, the Albany High students were asked to pretend their teacher is a Nazi government official who must be convinced they believe Jews are the source of Germany's problems: "You must argue that Jews are evil, and use solid rationale from government propaganda to convince me of your loyalty to the Third Reich!"

The teacher is on leave, facing possible termination, because school officials and government leaders were appalled. Said Superintendent Vanden Wyngaard, "You asked a child to support the notion that the Holocaust was justified, that's my struggle. It's an illogical leap for a student to make." Said New York City Councilmen David Greenfield, "The teacher responsible for coming up with and assigning students with this task must be held accountable for attempting to indoctrinate children with anti-Semitic beliefs." Said Director of the Jewish Federation Shelly Shapiro "It's not how you teach about how prejudice has led to genocide."

Well it certainly was not how I was taught that prejudice led to genocide. I learned, "Prejudice leads to genocide. It happened with the Nazis. So don't be prejudiced like the Nazis." And that was it. Something tells me that Shapiro is short-selling the pedagogical value of what is happening here. These students, in addition to learning a valuable lesson in English (because no creative writer has only had to write the perspective of laudable characters with whom everyone agrees), would take away from this assignment a powerful and deep understanding of not merely the tired truism that "prejudice has led to genocide" but an experience of precisely how it led to genocide. It teaches the student, in the most basic way, what it was to be a civilian in Nazi Germany, under a government that flooded the intellectual marketplace with antisemitic propaganda and expected you to learn a new cultural script to mirror it. The applications extend far beyond merely a better grasp of the history of 1930s Germany to a life lesson in the way propaganda continues to be employed and continues to shape the thinking of citizens around the world. Some clever honors student might even have concluded that the consumption of media in contemporary America might be shaping his or her thought in similar ways.

Renowned scholar of religion and American culture Stephen Prothero draws much the same conclusion:

I think it’s Greenfield who is lacking in common sense here. And it's the superintendent who is being illogical.

I suppose it is possible that the teacher is a closet Nazi attempting to reconstruct the Third Reich in Albany. But isn’t it more likely that he or she is trying to teach students about the dangers of propaganda and the horrors of the Holocaust?

Consider the student who felt “horrible” about doing this assignment. Is that really a bad thing? How are high school students today supposed to feel about Nazism and the Holocaust?

Apparently, what they are supposed to feel (and think) is nothing, because the lesson high school teachers are going to take away from this fiasco is to avoid this topic at all costs, lest they risk losing their jobs.

Prothero points to a further dimension of "this fiasco," the special place of the Holocaust in the American imagination. Historian John Fea has pointed out that if the principles espoused here to teaching the Holocaust were universally applied, teachers could no longer teach the thinking of Puritans who killed witches, settlers who killed Native Americans, southerners who kept slaves, nativist who oppressed Catholic immigrants, etc. What a moralistic history we are left with! And an incomplete history at that, a half history. Of course, no one would ever suggest hamstringing historians on those topics because they are not blessed by the kind of special pleading that surrounds the Holocaust. There is no villain like Hitler, no enormity like the Holocaust, and no racism like antisemitism. That, in the end, is the kind of lesson we were taught by the two-dimensional treatment of Nazism in school. No depth, no perspective, because the history of Nazism is alone a truly simple matter in history. It is a lesson against thinking for most students, and it is a tragedy that this teacher should suffer for bringing thought--in the form of an entertaining thought experiment the like of which I never enjoyed in high school or college--back into the subject of Nazism.

I hope the teacher is reinstated, because termination over something so ridiculous is unthinkable. I also hope the teacher is fired, because to take any punishment, even a slap on the wrist, and then return willingly to that environment of educational repression strikes me as a tacit admission that the teacher actually did something wrong. Of course, the teacher is probably sitting at home now worrying about paying bills, working long enough to retire some day, and coping with social ostracism. So what I really hope is that whatever the teacher wants happens. It's a shame that it had to go this far.

Holy Uncircumcised Penises, Batman!

Germany has become the first country (to my knowledge) to outlaw religious circumcision. While many countries have made cosmetic circumcision of children illegal, a court in Germany now says that religion is no longer a valid excuse:

Circumcising young boys on religious grounds amounts to grievous bodily harm, a German court ruled Tuesday in a landmark decision that the Jewish community said trampled on parents' religious rights.

The regional court in Cologne, western Germany, ruled that the "fundamental right of the child to bodily integrity outweighed the fundamental rights of the parents", a judgement that is expected to set a legal precedent.

"The religious freedom of the parents and their right to educate their child would not be unacceptably compromised, if they were obliged to wait until the child could himself decide to be circumcised," the court added.

The fact that roughly one in every three males born into the world is circumcised in a practice which has been carried out continuously since the dawn of recorded history didn't seem to bother the German judiciary. After all, we are entering a brave new world, one that can put behind it the ways of life in the backwoods parts of the world where circumcision is still prevalent: Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Israel, Canada, the United States, and Australia. Thankfully, we have Germany to lead the way, standing on the cutting edge of oppressing Jews for nearly a century now. (I'm sorry. It was just too easy.)

This, it would appear, is what societies get when law and ethics become reducible to questions of conflicting theoretical rights. Being neither a Muslim nor a Jew and living in a country which permits circumcision with broad latitude, I don't really have a dog in this fight, except for my ideological consternation when I see courts ruling in favor of self-determination for infants. Because a baby has a right to a foreskin, a right which supersedes a mandate from G-d or Allah. That works if you're a secular court in Germany because you can touch a foreskin and you can't touch God, but that logic won't fly with the billions of unenlightened people in the world who think that the commands of their respective deities hold real weight.

The idea of self-determination for infants is, pragmatically, nonsensical. We recognize that infants require guidance and support in every area of life but at the same time pretend that parents ought to be raising them in a political, ideological, and religious void. Says the court: "The body of the child is irreparably and permanently changed by a circumcision. This change contravenes the interests of the child to decide later on his religious beliefs." Ignore for a moment the fact that the absence of a foreskin does not actually prevent little Fritz von Spielberg from growing up to be good secular humanist like every other European millennial and imagine what this self-deluded ideology of neutral child-rearing and apotheosis of choice looks like in practice. In the words of Stephen Prothero, "This is foolhardy, not unlike saying that you will not read anything to your daughter because you don’t want to enslave her to any one language."

It is the right, or more precisely the duty, of every parent to raise each child in the way the parent believes is best for its health and safety temporal and eternal. Democrats can raise little Democrats. Republicans can raise little Republicans. Sooner fans can raise little Sooner fans, and the children of Longhorn fans will continue to thumb their noses at them every fall at the state fair. More importantly, Christians can raise little Christians and would be rather perturbed to find a court somewhere ruling that baptism prior to eighteen "contravenes the interests of the child to decide later on his religious beliefs."

And Jews and Muslims ought to be able to raise their children up in the way they should go. That includes performing the defining and foundational right, at least in Judaism, on their children. Unfortunately, the Germans don't seem to agree, and who better than the German courts to decide for Jews and Muslims what unacceptably compromises their religious beliefs.

In Other News

Last fall, I relayed an argument that I had been having about whether or not raising one's children to be religious constituted "indoctrination," and, if it did, whether or not it was possible to raise them in a state of neutral irreligion in an effort to promote choice. I concluded, and was delighted to later find my argument mimicked by Stephen Prothero, that there is no neutral state of irreligion, that the very act of raising children is a process of "indoctrination," and that proponents of "choice" for children were constructing their argument on an anthropological fallacy. Unfortunately, people still seem to be deluded by the fantasy that children can be raised as blank slates with regard to religion:

Ontological anxiety is the anxiety created after realizing the overwhelming number of choices one can make as a free individual. Most people choose the path of least resistance and allow the choice to be made for them by their parents or other social pressures. Thus, shrinking of consciousness occurs, as a simple way to relieve the ontological anxiety is to eliminate the vast number of choices. I believe the majority of people who label themselves as Christians do so during their childhood because it is comfortable and easy for them to conform to their family's atmosphere, not because they have any sort of intrinsically strong faith or spirituality. In contrast, children with parents who do not offer a clear path of least resistance must deal with ontological anxiety as an individual. They are forced to pick through many choices and understand their choices more as a result. Thus, shrinking of consciousness does not occur to such a high degree and their more conscious choice is usually atheism (those who never overcome the issue of ontological anxiety are agnostic, as they do not make a choice).

NYU student Joseph Rauch certainly dresses the argument up in fancier language (something he probably zealously picked up in a recent seminar), but the window dressing can be ignored. (We should also probably ignore his amusing misappropriation of agnosticism which is in fact more likely to be a positive theological position--the belief that knowledge is impossible or inaccessible--than atheism, which at its most basic merely describes the absence of a particular belief.) The argument is ultimately the same and the conclusions just as flawed. Children who are raised as "blank slates" have no greater or fewer choices available to them than the children of religious adherents, and parents who "do not offer a clear path" are in fact offering no less clear a path than a Christian parent who takes their child to church. Irreligion, whether in the form of religious pluralism, religious apathy, or positive irreligion (what Rauch likely means in his grossly overnarrow use of "atheism"), is not a neutral position in childrearing. The act of raising a child, which is by definition active, has no passive positions. I don't know what they are teaching you at NYU, Mr. Rauch, but around here we call that low-effort thinking.

In Arkansas, however, low-effort thinking is being linked with conservative politics. (Speaking of issues we've tackled here before.) Researchers at the University of Arkansas got some Razorbacks drunk and were delighted to find that the probability of holding conservative positions increased with each shot of corn mash:

Bar patrons were asked about social issues before blowing into a Breathalyzer. As it turned out, the political viewpoints of patrons with high blood alcohol levels were more likely to be conservative than were those of patrons whose blood alcohol levels were low.

But that's not all:

But it wasn't just the alcohol talking, according to the statement. When the researchers conducted similar interviews in the lab, they found that people who were asked to evaluate political ideas quickly or while distracted were more likely to express conservative viewpoints.

"Keeping people from thinking too much...or just asking them to deliberate or consider information in a cursory manner can impact people's political attitudes, and in a way that consistently promotes political conservatism," Dr. Eidelman said in the email.

Maintaining all the high standards of journalistic excellence discussed in the previously linked article, this report closes with the clearly innocent string of interrogatives: "What do you think? Are conservatives less intelligent than liberals--or more intelligent? And is conservatism a matter of lazy thinking?" It never occurs to anyone to ask whether or not sobriety or concentration might actually be correlated to political correctness rather than drunkenness and distraction to social conservatism. More insidiously, it automatically labels the motivating factor in conservatism with a derogatory epithet: "lazy thinking." Would it not be just as accurate to interpret the results thus: tests show that social conservatism is the default response of uninhibited individuals. If anything, the heuristic value of the study as reported in the article is to question whether or not social progressivism is actually furthered primarily by cultural pressures and fear of social marginalization more than anything. After all, the study doesn't indicate what way people lean who are more intelligent or more thoughtful, only which way they lean when they are less inhibited and less guarded in their responses. Rejoice conservatives; your views are instinctive (at least in Arkansas).

And while we argue about how to not raise children to not be religious and what it means when drunks in the Ozarks sound off about gay marriage, twelve Christians in Iran were anxiously awaiting a verdict in their apostasy trial. It's almost as if the Middle East has an actual war on religion.

The Myth of the Founding Fathers: Asking the Right Question

As already noted, the appeal to the Founding Fathers has reached almost religious proportions in contemporary political rhetoric. Often they are appealed to in order to bolster political philosophies, economic schemes, or specific features of controversial legislation. Just as often, they are marshaled vaguely as political partisans of various stripes radically identify their own idiosyncrasies with the dead revolutionaries in an effort to legitimize not only their politics but themselves as Americans. These attempts are usually met with appropriately graded degrees of incredulity. One feature of the debate about the Founders, however, seems to drawn continual attention on every level of society: what was the faith of the Founders? The question is supposed to provide the answer to the all-important question of whether or not America is a Christian nation. Unfortunately, too few people seem to realize what historians and academics are painfully aware of: the faith of the Founders is irrelevant.

"The eventual construction of a national identity, or a national culture, involved many factors, but one that contributed almost nothing was the religion practiced by the founding fathers themselves." So says Mark Noll, revealing what ought to have occurred to countless thoughtful people at every level of discourse. The Founders, however broadly you want to construe that category, were not ministers, they were not religious leaders, they were not spokesmen for the nation’s faith. They were political theorists, in their best moments, and more often simply politicians much of the same sort we have today. They never presumed to speak for the nation or even to be representative of it. They meant only to construct a government and then to commend that government to the people for their approval and interpretation.

It is in this latter role that the real folly of tying the religion of the nation to the religion of the Founders becomes evident. When we examine only the Constitution and the thought of its various authors, we ignore that they did not invest it with its significance or even its authority. Only when referred to the people does the Constitution become representative of and normative for American government. Therefore whether or not the Constitution, and thus the government it defines, is a purely secular one rests not with the authors but with those who interpreted and applied it. In describing his purpose in writing God of Liberty, Thomas Kidd points out, "So much of the popular discussion of faith and the American Founding revolves around the personal faith of the major Founders. This is an interesting topic, but I don't actually think it tells us much about the role that religion played in the larger process of creating the American republic. So I sought to broaden the focus to the level of the public religious principles that helped unite the Patriots. These included religious liberty, the importance of virtue, the dangers of vice, the principle of equality by creation, and the role of Providence in human affairs." These popular religious notions are infinitely more important because their influence on the development of a national identity and control over politics at every level were more direct.

Yet, as Kidd points out, these common religious notions actually unified Christian and secularist alike: "When you look at these principles, it is easier to understand why people of such sharply differing personal beliefs as Thomas Jefferson and the Baptist evangelist John Leland could cooperate so enthusiastically during the Revolution." If the interest in the faith of Jefferson and Madison is intended to establish whether or not America was founded on Christian principles, the explicit faith of either is largely inconsequential. It takes a person of profound historical ignorance to assume that when Jefferson and others appeal to Nature and Nature's God in an effort to discover the universal principles which ought to govern human relations, their vision of that universal God is Christian. It may be diluted and contorted, but it is not the same vision of a secular "Creator" that they would construct had they been Hindu or Muslim or even Jewish. Jefferson was quite clear that he believed Jesus to be a uniquely qualified revealer of the true nature of the world and ethics. The principles that guided his political thought were the principles of Christianity filtered through the prism of eighteenth century natural theology, even and especially the principle of religious pluralism. Consider the argument of Catherine A. Brekus and W. Clark Gilpin: "Christianity in America is not neatly contained under the steeples of its churches or the governing bodies of its denominations but has, in addition, extended out into other sectors of society. If Americans do not always recognize the Christian influence on their culture, it is because its omnipresence has made it virtually invisible."

Ultimately, it ought to be clear that the religious thought of the Founding Fathers, while interesting in itself, is not particularly relevant to the question of whether or not America is a Christian nation. There are other more pertinent questions we might ask. What did the people who ratified and applied the Constitution believe about the Christian character of the nation? What distinctively Christian impulses or thought modes governed the apparently construction of an apparently secular Constitution? Of course, as I argued previously, the question of first importance needs to be why do we care at all what eighteenth century Americans thought and, if it is important, what is a responsible way to apply that information? Still, Stephen Prothero comes closest to providing answers about the Christian character of the republic from its outset, doing so in a way that displays a delightful penchant for Christian paradox:

There is logic not only to President John Adams’s affirmation in the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796 that “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion” but also to the Supreme Court’s 1892 observation that “this is a Christian nation.” In short, the long-standing debate about whether the United States is secular or religious is fundamentally confused. Thanks to the establishment clause, the US government is secular by law; thanks to the free exercise clause, American society is religious by choice. Ever since George Washington put his hand on a Bible and swore to uphold a godless Constitution, the United States has been both staunchly secular and resolutely religious.

#300

In keeping with time honored tradition, this three hundredth post commemorates the great quotes that have appeared here over the last hundred entries. Below are my personal top ten notable quotables, though you are welcome and encouraged to disagree.

10) The last hundred posts began with one of my first comparative series, this one examining points of contact between Christianity and absurdism. As a near rabid fan of Albert Camus, it was difficult to select only one quote. Nevertheless, here is a thought of his from The Absurd and Science:

And here are the trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes -how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanisms and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. Have I the time to become indignant? You have already changed theories. So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art. What need had I of so many efforts? The soft lines of these hills and the hand of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more. I have returned to my beginning. I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world.

9) More recently, we find ourselves int he midst of a comparative examination of Christianity and Jain. While there are still many great quotes yet to come in this series, the following excellent excerpt could have easily been from any number of Byzantine Christian mystics but is in fact a saying of Mahavira, posted in Christ, Jain, and the Material World:

...there is no analogy whereby to know the transcendent; its essence is without form; there is no condition of the unconditioned. There is no sound, no color, no smell, no taste, not touch--nothing of that kind. Thus I say.

8) The past hundred posts has seen an unusual output of advice to parents, including from such notable figures as Stephen Prothero and the inimitable David Bentley Hart. Still, none left quite the impression as J. C. Ryle, who proved that some child-rearing wisdom is timeless. While there is much to commend the meat of his teaching, the most memorable quote came from The Wisdom of J. C. Ryle: An Appendix:

Never listen to those who tell you your children are good, and well brought up, and can be trusted.

7) I find the news deeply frustrating, as so many of us do. No story has so grated against my sensibilities for the last hundred posts than has the unceremonious dismissal of Joe Paterno. Still, the best quote here has come from the relatively minor Rep. Brad Drake, with this profoundly nonsensical, self-defeating comment posted in the Oct. 19th edition of In Other News:

I have no desire to humanely respect those that are inhumane.

6) I never seem to be lacking in pithy, inspirational thoughts from great pacifists. Last time around it was J. W. McGarvey. This time, let me offer one from J. D. Tant in The Wisdom of J. D. Tant:

I would as soon risk my chance of heaven to die drunk in a bawdy house as to die on the battlefield, with murder in my heart, trying to kill my fellow man.

5) Without a doubt, the past six months in the United States has been completely dominated by the American electoral process. More important than anything the candidates might be saying is this sentiment from Stephen Prothero offered in Knowledge and Franchise:

Few Americans are able to challenge claims made by politicians or pundits about Islam’s place in the war on terrorism or what the Bible says about homosexuality. This ignorance imperils our public life, putting citizens in the thrall of talking heads and effectively transferring power from the third estate (the people) to the fourth (the press).

4) Pope Benedict XVI has done more shocking things this year than kissing an imam. In addition to renewing the Catholic Church's stand against capital punishment, he had this to say about the Christian use of war in history, in Pope Shocks World by Doing the Right Thing:

"As a Christian I want to say at this point: yes, it is true, in the course of history, force has also been used in the name of the Christian faith," he said in his address to the delegations in an Assisi basilica.

"We acknowledge it with great shame. But it is utterly clear that this was an abuse of the Christian faith, one that evidently contradicts its true nature."

3) In a post which happened to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks which launched the world headlong into two prolonged multinational wars, I shared a Tentative Description of a Dinner Given to Promote the Impeachment of President Eisenhower, a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti:

And after it became obvious that the strange rain would never stop and that Old Soldiers never drown and that roses in the rain had forgotten the word for bloom and that perverted pollen blown on sunless seas was eaten by irradiated fish who spawned up cloudleaf streams and fell on our dinnerplates

And after it became obvious that the President was doing everything in his power to make the world safe for nationalism his brilliant military mind never realized that nationalism itself was the idiotic superstition which would blow up the world

...The President himself came in

Took one look around and said

We Resign

2) On an anniversary which personally touched me a little more dearly, On the Anniversary of David Lipscomb's Death, I shared these thoughts of Price Billingsley on the great man who was so influential in his own day and continues to touch the hearts and minds of Christians who read his works:

I then got my first sight of the dear old Brother Lipscomb dead. I was amazed to see how fine looking and tall he was when straightened out in the casket. I saw him when he was dying, and a more abject object of decaying senility I never before beheld - body and soul distraught in the parting! But did I pity him? I pitied myself for not being as ready to die as he!

1) The recent past has had more than its fair share of high profile deaths, from entertainment stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Harry Morgan, to intellectual celebrities like Christopher Hitchens. The more important loss for many, however, was a completely overlooked Bible professor at a small Arkansas university. Before offering my own eulogy concurrent with his memorial service, I shared this quote from Amelia Burr on the day of his passing:

Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.

Here's looking forward to another eventful hundred posts with even more memorable thoughts to share in the months to come.

On Christ and Jain

Jain has always fascinated me, no doubt in large part because of the peculiar intensity with which its practitioners pursue its principles. Islam, for example, has won my admiration for the popular level of its devotion. While in Christianity, we must constantly hear sermons about the value of daily prayer, the Muslim knows instinctively to pray no less than five times a day. Jain takes this kind of meticulous devotion to another level, with serious practitioners being so committed to total non-violence that they wear masks to keep from inhaling tiny organisms and sweep the ground in front of them wherever they go in order to brush aside unsuspecting insects. Even the Jain laity take strict vows of vegetarianism as part of a broader programme of non-violence. It is precisely this mixture of definite belief and assiduous application that has made Jain one of the smallest and yet one of the most influential world religions, relative to its size.

It is this fascination with Jain which recently led me to undertake studies in a reader of world religions and to listen to a series of lectures on Eastern religions by Stephen Prothero (who, unfortunately, elected to skip Jain altogether). Over the coming weeks, I would like to share some of the insights into Jain that these very cursory studies have brought, particularly those musings which may help challenge and deepen Christian faith and which might enlighten the curious outsider looking at Jain.

Secularization: Asking the Right Questions

Perhaps my favorite quote of all time, which curiously has not appeared here before, is from Hans van Campenhausen: "It is the wrong question to ask, and therefore, as one might expect, has no right answer." This is the approach that Stephen Prothero took to questions raised by secularization theory. Secularization theory, which very broadly stated, is the belief that society is marching progressively on toward irreligion, raised questions about the anomaly of a developed Western society like America which was curiously still so religious. This, shockingly, turned out to be the wrong question, given that--in Prothero's words--"Secularization theory has run aground, as grand theories often do, on the shoals of historical facts."

Instead, Prothero offers this thought-provoking question which may turn out to have been the right one all along:

Today what needs explaining is not the persistence of religion in modern societies but the emergence of unbelief in Europe and among American leaders in media, law, and higher education.

The Nonsense of Choice

In a recent discussion with a proponent of the "let them choose" philosophy of religious child-rearing, my conversation partner was shocked by my suggestion that such a proposition was functionally impossible to achieve. It boggled his mind that I would suggest that the very act of raising a child at all is a process of "indoctrination" (his term, and a favorite of those who oppose parents passing on religion to children). In fact, I had the audacity to claim that all parents indoctrinate their children with their own ideology, even if that ideology happens to be religious apathy, religious pluralism, or positive irreligion. Your children will take their cues from you and develop in response (either positively or negatively) to the ways in which you behave. In the words of J. C. Ryle: "Imitation is a far stronger principle with children than memory. What they see has a much stronger effect on their minds than what they are told." The "let them choose" advocate was unconvinced, I suspect in part because of a contemporary anthropological fallacy that irreligion is a biological or psychological default, a neutral rather than a positive state.

More recently still, I was delighted to discover that Stephen Prothero had apparently read our conversation and retroactively written my thoughts back into his 2007 book:

Some friends tell me that they don’t bring their sons and daughters to worship services or talk with them about their faith because they want their children to be free to choose a religion for themselves. This is foolhardy, not unlike saying that you will not read anything to your daughter because you don’t want to enslave her to any one language. The fact of the matter is that you cannot avoid teaching religion to your kids; if you offer them nothing, you are telling them that religion counts for nothing.

Sure, I would have liked a citation, but I suppose I will settle for the tacit affirmation of my highly original argument that irreligion is a positive position and, consequently, an attitude of "let them choose" is self-defeating.

Knowledge and Franchise

Attention Americans: you are disenfranchised by your own ignorance. Sure, technically everyone (well, almost everyone) in America has the right to vote, but the idea that this vote belongs to you and is cast by you as a free exercise of your will is an illusion. The very fact of Americans collective ignorance is a de facto relinquishing of the vote to people who have, whether themselves ignorant or not, purport to be the possessors of authoritative knowledge. In the words of Stephen Prothero:

Few Americans are able to challenge claims made by politicians or pundits about Islam’s place in the war on terrorism or what the Bible says about homosexuality. This ignorance imperils our public life, putting citizens in the thrall of talking heads and effectively transferring power from the third estate (the people) to the fourth (the press).

Prothero writes here specifically of religious ignorance, but medical and economic ignorance play their part as well. In accepting ignorance as a necessary evil in our busy pursuit of the American dream, we defer judgement to those who we assume are more knowledgable than we. In reality, the electoral process boils down to little more than a contest between various groups of talking heads to see who can convince the largest mass of ignorant viewers that they are best informed. In the words of E. D. Hirsch, "the right to vote is meaningless if a citizen is disenfranchised by illiteracy or semiliteracy.”

For Christians, my advice is always simply not to vote, not because you are ignorant but because you are keenly aware that there is no participation in the political process which does not involve gross violations of the Christian ethos. To those who are not Christians, or to those Christians who insist on voting, I can only hope that you will make an effort to learn your religion from theologians, your economics from economists, and your medicine from doctors (and not, might I add, from Dr. Ron Paul or Dr. Sanjay Gupta, but from less obviously partisan physicians). Or, as James Madison put it, "A people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."

The Skeleton of Christian Literacy

In his work Religious Literacy, Stephen Prothero offers what he calls a "Dictionary of Religious Literacy." It represents his attempt to ennumerate the bare minimum of what an American needs to know to qualify as religiously literate. What it amounts to in practice is a relatively short list of terms from the world religions and their definitions which are most relevant to civic life in the United States. It was interesting for me to peruse through that list, in part to learn new things that I supposedly should have known all along but also to evaluate just how well I stacked up against his minimum of religious knowledge.

My interest in religious literacy is somewhat different, however, from Prothero's. His concern is primarily with religious knowledge as a civic duty, as a way for all people to adequately navigate the social and political landscape of Christian-dominant but highly pluralistic America. For my part, I lament religious ignorance because it leads to religious excesses and abberations. To be a Christian and to not understand basic truths about the Bible or about the main contours of Christian theology is to invite disaster into your own thinking. The proliferation of ever more ridiculous sects and abominable ethical systems in American Christianity is, I believe, a direct result of the ongoing biblical and theological illiteracy of most American adherents.

With that in mind, I would like to offer what I believe are the core Christian facts which every American Christian ought to know by adulthood in order to successfully navigate the social, political, and theological landscape of America's Christian pluralism. I will divide my list into two fifty point sections: a primary literacy and a secondary literacy. They correspond roughly to what I believe a person should learn in from their earliest childhood and what should be built onto this base knowledge later, perhaps in high school. Let it be noted that some of these concepts may appear at first glance to be quite deep and complex. For example, if I list "Synoptic Gospels" as an area of knowledge of a literate Christian, I do not expect every Christian to be able to navigate the intricacies of two source theory versus four source theory versus the Farrer hypothesis or even to know what those are. It is enough to simply know what the term "Synoptic Gospels" means, i.e. which are the Synoptic Gospels and why, so as to know it if it should appear in an adult conversation about inspiration, canon, or higher criticism. With that disclaimer out of the way, here is my own skeletal outline of a literate Christian:

Primary Literacy

1) Name the books of the Bible in order.
2) Distinguish the Torah.
3) Distinguish the Gospels.
4) Distinguish the Epistles.
5) Identify Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel,
6) Noah,
7) Abraham,
8) Isaac,
9) Jacob,
10) Joseph,
11) Moses,
12) Joshua,
13) David,
14) Solomon,
15) Esther,
16) Daniel,
17) Jonah,
18) Mary and Joseph,
19) John the Baptist,
20) Jesus,
21) Peter, James, and John,
22) Judas Iscariot,
23) Pontius Pilate,
24) Stephen,
25) and Saul/Paul of Tarsus.
26) List the 7 days of creation,
27) the 10 plagues,
28) and the 10 Commandments.
29) Be familiar with the story of the Tower of Babel,
30) Sacrifice of Isaac,
31) Parting of the sea,
32) Giving of the Law and the golden calf,
33) Fall of Jericho,
34) Slaying of Goliath,
35) Fall of Jerusalem and exile,
36) Nativity,
37) Baptism of Jesus,
38) Temptation in the wilderness,
39) Feeding of the 5,000,
40) Clearing of the temple,
41) Passion, resurrection, and ascension,
42) Conversion of Saul,
43) and the conversion of Cornelius.
44) Be able to recite the Shema,
45) Psalm 23,
46) Lord's Prayer,
47) Golden Rule,
48) John 3:16,
49) Great Comission,
50) and either the Apostle's or the Nicene Creed.

Secondary Literacy

1) Name the Deuterocanonical books.
2) Distinguish the Prophets (Major and Minor).
3) Distinguish the Pauline and Johanine Epistles.
4) Distinguish Synoptic Gospels.
5) Identify Seth,
6) Ham, Shem, and Japheth,
7) Ishmael,
8) Aaron,
9) Gideon,
10) Samson,
11) Ruth,
12) Samuel,
13) Saul, King of Israel,
14) Jeroboam and Rehoboam,
15) Hezekiah,
16) Josiah,
17) Elijah and Elisha,
18) Isaiah,
19) Jeremiah,
20) Ezra and Nehemiah,
21) Job,
22) Lazarus,
23) Mary Magdalene,
24) Matthais,
25) Phillip,
26) and Barnabas, Silas, and Timothy.
27) Be able to list the Twelve Apostles.
28) Be familiar with some of the distinctive beliefs of Catholics,
29) Lutherans,
30) Presbyterians,
31) Baptists,
32) Methodists,
33) Pentecostals,
34) and Mormons.
35) Be able to identify Augustine,
36) Thomas Aquinas,
37) Martin Luther,
38) and John Calvin.
39) Distinguish between Pharisees and Sadducees.
40) Be familiar with Matthew 5-7,
41) John 1,
42) Acts 2,
43) Romans 1-6,
44) 1 Corinthians 15,
45) Ephesians 2:8-9 and James 2:14-26,
46) and the broad strokes of Revelation.
47) Be able to roughly explain a Christian understanding of Trinity,
48) Divinity of Jesus,
49) and sin and salvation.
50) Define the term "evangelical."

A Reading Recommendation for the Illiterate

Stephen Prothero's Religious Literacy undertakes in a brief span to quantify, explain, and propose corrections for the rampant religious illiteracy of Americans. In simpler terms, Prothero attempts to unravel the paradox that, while Europeans tend to be religiously knowledgeable and irreligious, Americans are pious and religiously ignorant. Religious Literacy is too short a work, at just under 150 pages of actual exposition, to argue any of its points substantially, but this is just as well because Prothero is not covering any radically new ground. Instead, the work functions as an interesting resource both as an introduction for those who, as part of their general religious ignorance, are unaware that there is a problem and as a synthesis for those who are already plagued by worry about our collective idiocy. The book is carefully organized along three lines of thought:

What is the problem?

This is by far the most gripping section of Prothero's work, not because he uncovers a problem which we are all startled to find exists but because he quantifies it in ways that highlight its embarrassing severity. It is here that Prothero shocks the reader with a rapid succession of ever more embarrassing facts: one in five evangelicals believes in reincarnation, most American adults cannot name even one of the four Gospels, most American adults cannot name the first book of the Bible, a significant percentage of high school seniors believe Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife, only one in three Americans can correctly identify Jesus as the person who delivered the Sermon on the Mount, and one in ten Americans believes that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. These facts, gathered from scientific surveys, are interspersed with more anecdotal tributes to American religious ignorance: a woman who believes God created Eve out of an apple, another who thinks Matthew was swallowed by a whale, most Americans cannot name more than five of the Ten Commandments, and more. Worst of all, there are not statistically significant discrepancies between religious groups. Evangelical Protestants do marginally better in surveys than Catholics, for example, but they are nearer to one another than they are to getting right. In some cases, evangelicals do even worse, as with the 60% of evangelicals who believe that Jesus was born in Jerusalem compared to only 51% of Jews. The real force of all these statistics is to re-sensitize the reader to the claim that the religious ignorance in America is no trifling matter. It is easy to say that we should know more about the faith claimed by some 80% of Americans; it is something else to come face-to-face with the cold, hard statistical reality of our own shortcomings.

Why is there a problem?

Unless you suffer under the delusion, as is the case with much of the institutional religious right, that the ongoing march of aggressive secularity is the cause of religious illiteracy, Prothero's answer to the question of "why" will not be shocking. The rise of widespread religious ignorance, especially Christian ignorance, is tied by Prothero to the American process of religious democratization, à la Nathan Hatch. It was the anti-institutional, anti-clerical, anti-intellectual impulse of distinctively American revivalism--particularly in the Second Great Awakening, but also, according to Prothero, in the post-war revival of the fifties--that began the deemphasizing of religious knowledge. The unlikely and unwitting alliance of liberal Protestantism and evangelicalism resulted in a subordination of religious knowledge to religious feeling and of orthodoxy to orthopraxy. The onus of responsibility and thus of guilt falls not the deliberate atheist but on the amnesiac Christian who has forgotten his or her duty for pedagogy.

Notably, in a justifiable effort to stop Christians from shirking their guilt in the rise of a the religiously ignorant, I believe Prothero goes to far in exonerating secularity as such. I agree, certainly, that the religious right's attempt to blame active and self-aware secular pressure is misguided, perhaps even destructive as it encourages Christians to continue to ignore their need to be the front line in resurrecting religious knowledge. It is worth remembering, however, that democratization--with its anti-institutionalism and anti-clericalism--is itself a secular impulse of Western culture. It is a more pernicious form of secularity in so far as it has been quietly accepted as if a religious truth and erodes religious knowledge, among other things, from within. In Prothero's defense, however, his work is perhaps not the place to make such a subtle argument.

How do we fix the problem?

Here, Prothero's proposal is as bold as it is unlikely. He insists that, as a civic duty, every high school student should take a mandatory course in the Bible and world religions. He reasons, quoting Warren Nord: "How can anyone believe that a collegebound student should take twelve years of mathematics and no religion rather than eleven years of mathematics and one year of religion Why require the study of trigonometry or calculus, which the great majority of students will never use or need, and ignore religion, a matter of profound and universal significance?" While some might suggest that having a course dedicated to the Bible is somehow giving preferential treatment to one religion, Prothero insists that having such a specialized course is a logical, educational, and civic necessity. Without commenting on the validity of any religion or religion at all, he correctly notes that the Bible--not the Vedas or the Tao Te Ching or even the Quran--has been the most influential work in the history of Western culture. It is the Bible and the Christian religion which dominate the American political and social landscape like nothing else. Those ignorant of Christianity in America are intellectually anemic in ways they would not be if similarly ignorant of Sikhism. In Prothero's own words:

Some have argued against Bible courses in the public schools on the grounds that they somehow “establish” Judeo-Christianity. For these courses to be fair, this argument goes, teachers need to give equal time to all the world’s scriptures, treating the Bible as one sacred text among many. This is absurd and impractical. Of course, students can learn much from reading the Quran and the Tao Te Ching. But the Bible, which the Supreme Court has described as “the world’s all-time best seller,” is of sufficient importance in Western civilization to merit its own course. Treating it no differently from, say, the Zend Avesta of the Zoroastrians or Scientology’s Dianetics makes no educational sense. (And what teacher has the hours—or the training—to give “equal time” to all the world’s scriptures?)

The most intriguing part of his proposal is his examination of its legality. Showing a surprisingly broad knowledge of legal decisions regarding religious curricula, Prothero helps the reader to navigate constitutional issues surrounding his proposal (which, I should note, is by no mean peculiar to him but is being taken up in various forms on all sides of the political spectrum). His conclusion, which one struggles to disagree with, "Supreme Court justices are all but begging public schools to teach about religion."

In short, Religious Literacy is an intriguing little work which marches us through the morass of our own benightedness and, perhaps overly optimistically, proposes a way out for Americans. While I struggle to imagine a world in which Prothero's national proposals become a reality, his work has forced me to think about what might be done on a more local level, particularly by parents and churches. Many of the hallmarks of literacy according to Prothero I did not learn until I began formal education in religion. Looking back, I realize that they are facts that all Christians should know, not the least of which those of us who come from religious traditions which purport to give special place to the Scriptures.

The Wisdom of Stephen Prothero

With regard to the silly idea of so many pluralists that mere understanding will lead to peace, Stephen Prothero reminds us all that "People sometimes kill their enemies not because they do not understand them but precisely because they do."