Thoughts on Religious Literacy/Illiteracy

I’ve recently been searching for good scholarship on how to help secondary school students explore and understand religion.  The on-line journal World History Connected has a volume dedicated to the subject.  In the first article, Overcoming Religious Illiteracy, Dianne L. Moore, of the Harvard Divinity School, discusses what religious illiteracy is, why it is a worldwide phenomena – including within the field of education – and what can be done about it.  In short, teachers need better support when it comes to understanding religion, so they can help students understand the subject rather than passing on their own illiteracy. Moore describes this illiteracy as existing in five primary forms: the points below are taken directly from her article:

1) Religious traditions are often represented inaccurately by individuals who define themselves as "religious" as well as those who self-define as "non-religious." For those who define themselves as "religious," this inaccuracy often manifests itself in relationship to their own traditions as well as the faith traditions of others.

2) Religious traditions are often represented as internally uniform and static as opposed to diverse and evolving.

3) Religion is deeply and nearly exclusively equated with sectarianism in ways that render the study of religion a difficult concept to grasp and apply.

4) Practitioners of a given religious tradition are assumed to be the best sources of information about the tradition and are often looked to formally or informally as "experts." This fails to recognize the distinction between an academic study of religion and the devotional expression of a particular religious worldview.

5) In some contexts, religion is interpreted as a "private" affair distinct from the secular "public" sphere of political, economic and cultural life.

Of these five points, number two jumps out at me more than the others: if “religious traditions are often represented as internally uniform and static”, they are also being presented in an ahistorical light – which is exactly what I have so often felt while looking at curricula or discussing religion with teachers.  Just a few weeks back, I was trying to find curricula that did justice to the depth and beauty of ancient Egyptian religion.  I felt like everything I found portrayed Egyptians as all believing the same thing – with the exception Akhenaton, Egyptian religion apparently stayed the same for thousands of years and all Egyptians apparently believed the same thing.  Egyptians believed that when you died, the gods weighed your heart before your soul could cross over to the afterworld, and that these gods for some reason were composite man-animals, and that this one god Osiris was killed by Seth but then his wife found him etc.   

Statements like “Egyptians believed…” “Persians believed…” or “Christians/Catholics/ Protestants believe” are already setting the speaker up to say something ahistorical.  I hope to develop that habit of saying, "many ancient Persians believed..." or "some Jewish people thought this, but others disagreed". Students should know the Osiris myth, as well as other foundational stories.  But they should also learn, for example, that the Osiris myth changed over time as Egyptian society changed, and how and why it did so: did religion change after a major invasion?  After certain cultural exchanges?  What is our evidence?  Did the changes (surely!) involve debates and multiple perspectives?  Did the changes involve some people having power and others not?  By exploring such questions, students can learn to analyze religion in a way that is highly relevant today, even if the religion faded long ago.

To quote Moore: 

Which perspectives are politically and socially prominent and why? Which are marginalized or silenced and why? Regarding religion, why are some theological interpretations more prominent than others in relationship to particular issues in particular social/historical contexts? (E.g., what are the factors that led to the Taliban's rise to power in Afghanistan and why did their interpretation of the role of women in Islam, for example, gain social legitimacy over other competing claims within the tradition itself?)

Moore hones in on the fact that religious literacy is one of the best ways to combat religious prejudice.  While it is not the subject of her paper, teaching religious literacy is, for me, also about helping students explore the profound thoughts and feelings of humanity.  As a history teacher I would hope to help students, via reflecting on history, also reflect on their own spiritual thoughts, feelings, and questions.