My God Can Beat Up Your God

This story in USA Today notes that Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University, has written a book called Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know — and Doesn't, with Prothero arguing that “everyone needs to grasp Bible basics, as well as the core beliefs, stories, symbols and heroes of other faiths” (maintaining that, as a nation, we don’t).

I absolutely agree.

The problem, though, is that you can’t talk about religion without being categorized as either a born-again fundamentalist who wants to cram the story of Jesus down someone’s throat, or a godless hedonist (read “liberal” to many places in this country) who is automatically going to go to hell for flipping off a motorist on the highway, agreeing with the decision to remove a plaque of The Ten Commandments from the West Chester, PA county courthouse, or purchasing every single episode of “The Sopranos” on DVD (and is that show ever going to come back for what are supposed to be the last eight episodes?).

Update 3/9: OK, April 8th...got it (and by the way, the people in the New Jersey town who supported turning the show away because it doesn't show Italian Americans in the best light are idiots.)

And that mentality has been enforced throughout our political dialogue on a wide range of issues, from the Repug school voucher scheme, the net effect of which would be to hurt public school funding (choosing between one group of deserving kids in public schools versus another group in parochial schools, which I think is reprehensible), to the role of religion in the political life of this nation in general, helped along in no small part by No Child Left Behind.

And do you really need to know who I blame for that? If you can’t guess, then this story (with the following excerpt) will spell it out…

In both 1995 and 1999 the Ed Department under President Bill Clinton joined with a broad array of public groups and drew up a set of guidelines designed to curb excesses on both sides of the church-school equation. They sought to address both schools so frightened of lawsuits that they squashed legitimate religious expression, and schools that tended to promote religion.

The Clinton guidelines were far from hostile to the place of religion - including student-initiated prayer - in schools. On the contrary, they opened with a quote from Mr. Clinton that affirmed, "I believe that one of the best ways we can help ... schools ... is by supporting students' rights to voluntarily practice their religious beliefs, including prayer in school."

The Bush administration guidelines cover much of the same ground - but with a few significant differences.

One is the way they treat the question of "religious expression" at assemblies. While the Clinton guidelines stressed that "the right of religious expression in school does not include the right to have a 'captive audience' listen," the Bush guidelines draw a different conclusion.

They acknowledge that prayer or religious speech initiated by school officials would be illegal but then assert that "the speech of students who choose to express themselves through religious means such as prayer is not attributable to the state, and therefore may not be restricted because of its religious content."

But that advice is not consistent with some recent court rulings, say legal experts, and could be dangerous for school systems if they assume that by relying on the guidelines they'll be in accord with the law.

"The [Bush] guidelines gloss over some real splits in court readings, and that can really mislead administrators," says Tom Hutton, attorney for the National School Board Association in Alexandria, Va. "Court decisions really vary on these things - notably prayer at graduations."

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, he points out, recently reaffirmed that a school must prevent a captive audience from being exposed to prayer.

"The Bush administration has given a selective slant and then said, 'Now if you don't follow this you won't get funding,' " says Perry Zirkel, professor of law and education at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa. "Legally, politically, and morally, they've pushed school administrators out onto a dangerous limb."

All of these shenanigans create hostility to religion and one’s sense of spirituality in general. And when you consider the following excerpt from the USA Today article (which nails all this, as far as I'm concerned), you could wonder how this country, or at least any student of any NCLB-funded educational institution, has any notion of religion at all…

“Religion, like the arts, has become an afterthought in an education climate driven by "the fixation on literacy and numeracy — math and reading," says Bob Schaeffer of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, a group critical of the standards-based education movement. "If the ways schools, teachers, principals and superintendents are judged all depend on math and reading scores, that's what you're going to teach," he says.

Do I need to point out the irony of Bushco’s supposed adherence to “moral values” (sold to way too many “sheep” who voted for this in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections) while underfunding religion in its own education initiative?

This isn’t about teaching of a particular religion, by the way. It’s about learning mythological concepts of other religions as well as your own.

See, that way, we can do better as a country of understanding other cultures and civilizations so we don’t – oh, I don’t know – shall we say, accidentally go into a country to start a war looking for weapons that didn’t exist, maybe?

And finally, on the subject of religion, I noted this story of Jimmy Carter defending his most recent book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I’ve kept out of this because, as nearly as I can tell, Carter is guilty of errors by omission and commission in the book, and I’m very sorry to point that out because Carter is truly a great humanitarian, a president who has accomplished what is easily the most remarkable period of post-presidential accomplishment of any other.

That is why I was so thoroughly repulsed by this excerpt from the story…

"We were trying to tell Carter his lies are not helpful," a local rabbi, Shmuel Herzfeld, said afterward. "It is very clear the lies are malicious, and it raises issues what his motives are," Herzfeld said.

"I believe Jimmy Carter is an anti-Semite and his intention is to hurt Jewish people," Herzfeld, the rabbi at Ohev Sholom, said in an interview.

As I tried to point out above, Bushco’s own brand of religious intolerance and polarization has done more to stifle true religious understanding in this country now than at any prior time that I can recall.

And Rabbi Herzfeld’s remarks demonstrate religious intolerance also. That is why he should apologize for these shameful words immediately, and for the entire world to see.