Humanizing Religion: Teaching Religion as Practice

I truly appreciate the focus of Michael C. Weber’s article Teaching Religion in the World History Class.  Which is, in short, that when it comes to teaching religion, we've inherited a pedagogical tradition of focusing on the ideas, the laws and theological abstractions, while leaving out the people, and thus leaving out what religion actually looks like. 

So lets add the element of humanity to curricula on religion.  Weber urges teachers to present students with sketches of what devotees and practitioners actually do: how did kings and peasants practice Buddhism?  Villagers and urbanites?  Upper as well as lower class women?  How was their practice influenced by their life - was the practice, the devotion, the way of believing influenced by being a king, a farmer, a woman? How did their practices and beliefs shape their lives? 

Weber offers some resources in his article, but notes that they are not ideal.  A single source providing short biographical sketches of contextualized religiosity would be incredibly helpful.  Anybody know of something like that?   

In the blog post just before this one, I focused on the problem of religion often being taught as uniform and static – an ahistorical understanding of religion that Dianne L. Moore has called a world-wide form of religious illiteracy.  Teaching the diversity and dynamism of any one religious tradition is important because it humanizes the religion.  And vice-versa: teaching about actual human practice would be a great way to highlight the diversity and dynamism of religion.  

Weber gives a good snapshot of how reducing religions to sets of beliefs, while leaving out an understanding of what people actually do, makes religion and the people who practice it appear rather silly:

…books and teachers usually opt for a quick essential description of the belief system: with this essentialist approach Judaism simply becomes a series of beliefs about ethical monotheists, the covenant people of the one God who controls history; Buddhism about following the Eight Fold Path to Nirvana; Islam is reduced to being a radical, legalistic religio-socio-legalistic monotheism of the Arabs; and the Christian religion is summed up in the somewhat tragic narrative of the "life of Jesus of Nazareth" and the idea of love of God and fellow Christians.  

These oversimplifications are dehumanizing, in a very real sense that the human experience has been stripped away.  Without a focus on the religious experience and practice and the role of religion in society, these beliefs simply appear bizarre.  My feeling is that an essentialist presentation of religion is likely to cause students to perceive current as well as past religious practitioners as naive.  It may cause religious students to feel disconnected from school.  Presentations of religion that fail to present spiritual experience and practice also fail to provide students with spiritual nourishment, including the ability to understand and analyze themselves and others as spiritual beings.       

The focus on religious practice is in accord with recent trends in religious scholarship.  One resource that has interesting potential for us as teachers is the Princeton Readings in Religions series, which describes itself thus: “Princeton Readings in Religions moves away from an emphasis on philosophy and the religious expressions of elite groups to represent instead a wide range of current and historical religious practices”.  The website is well worth checking out...

The books are organized around themes that would be helpful for a world history teacher: for example, Religions of Japan in Practice has 45 short readings split in sections on "Ethical Practices," "Ritual Practices," and "Institutional Practices," and includes lists that categorize the readings chronologically, geographically, and according to religious tradition.  The readings are too dense for most secondary school students, but if we’re searching for rich, historically contextualized depictions of religion in practice, and are willing to write a few scenarios up ourselves at the appropriate reading level, this is a goldmine.     

As always, I would love to hear any ideas readers may have :)

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.