Proselytism Problems

In Reading, Writing & Religion II, Mark Chancey details the struggles which Texas public schools have faced in attempts to introduce courses on the Bible. From lack of established curriculum requirements to untrained and biased teachers, the problems are many and have proved difficult to address. And as expected from a southern American area, any bias has pointed in the direction of Protestant Christianity while tending to minimize or erase the beliefs of other traditions like Catholicism, Judaism, or Eastern Orthodoxy. Such bias raises obvious problems with alienating non-religious and minority religious students, and while improvements have been made, the state still have a ways to go before its Bible courses are largely unproblematic.

This tendency toward bias makes me wonder, however, if courses on other religions would be taught differently, particularly because of Protestant Christianity’s emphasis on conversion. That is, many of the biased courses which Chancey describes are taught by Christian teachers trying to push Christian agendas on students. But what about the possibility of another class taught by an instructor of another faith? Imagine, for example, a Jewish teacher offering a course on the Hebrew Bible in a Texas public school. Even if she used the phrase “we believe” in her lessons, odds are her class would be less like a Sunday school than many which Chancey tells us of simply because Judaism is not concerned with conversion in the way that Christianity is. Such a course would be less like sermons and more like history and culture lessons from an insider.

I do not mean to say here that Christians shouldn’t be teaching courses on Christianity, but in a religion which values conversion, instructors in public schools would do well to stay on secular side of the line between informing and proselytizing. An interesting experiment, though certainly not the most practical to implement, would be offering courses on multiple world religions and observing how their instruction unfolded, especially if by teachers who identified with the faith traditions they taught. Offering such courses could give us data on how world religions compare in presenting themselves in public, scholastic sphere, and it could give us a more nuanced idea of how best to present religion as academia to young people of varied backgrounds.