Here is the first and the follow-up article by Stanley Fish that is very thoughtful. It might interest some of you.
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March 31, 2007
Religion Without Truth
By STANLEY FISH
In 1992, at a conference of Republican governors, Kirk Fordice of Mississippi referred to America as a ''Christian nation.'' One of his colleagues rose to say that what Governor Fordice no doubt meant is that America is a Judeo-Christian nation. If I meant that, Fordice replied, I would have said it.
I thought of Fordice when I was reading Time magazine's April 2 cover story, ''The Case for Teaching the Bible,'' by David Van Biema, which also rehearses the case for not teaching the Bible. The arguments are predictable.
On the one side, knowledge of the Bible ''is essential to being a full-fledged, well-rounded citizen''; also, if you get into a debate with a creationist, it would be good if you knew what you're talking about.
On the other side: bring the Bible into the schools and you are half a step away from proselytizing; and besides, courses in the Bible typically play down the book's horrific parts (dashing children against stones and the like), and say little about the killings done in its name.
As the Time article reports, the usual response to those who fear that allowing the camel's nose under the tent will sooner or later turn the tent into a revival meeting is to promise that the Bible will be taught as a secular text. Students will become familiar with the Bible's stories and learn how to spot references to them in works of literature stretching from Dante to Toni Morrison.
There may be a bit of instruction in doctrine here and there, but only as much as is necessary to understand an allusion, and never to a degree that would make anyone in the class uncomfortable.
Stephen Prothero of Boston University, who is cited several times by Van Biema, describes the project and the claim attached to it succinctly: ''The academic study of religion provides a kind of middle space. It takes the biblical truth claims seriously and yet brackets them for purposes of classroom discussion.'' But that's like studying the justice system and bracketing the question of justice. (How do you take something seriously by putting it on the shelf?)
The truth claims of a religion -- at least of religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam -- are not incidental to its identity; they are its identity.
The metaphor that theologians use to make the point is the shell and the kernel: ceremonies, parables, traditions, holidays, pilgrimages -- these are merely the outward signs of something that is believed to be informing them and giving them significance. That something is the religion's truth claims. Take them away and all you have is an empty shell, an ancient video game starring a robed superhero who parts the waters of the Red Sea, followed by another who brings people back from the dead. I can see the promo now: more exciting than ''Pirates of the Caribbean'' or ''The Matrix.'' That will teach, but you won't be teaching religion.
The difference between the truth claims of religion and the truth claims of other academic topics lies in the penalty for getting it wrong. A student or a teacher who comes up with the wrong answer to a crucial question in sociology or chemistry might get a bad grade or, at the worst, fail to be promoted. Those are real risks, but they are nothing to the risk of being mistaken about the identity of the one true God and the appropriate ways to worship him (or her). Get that wrong, and you don't lose your grade or your job, you lose your salvation and get condemned to an eternity in hell.
Of course, the ''one true God'' stuff is what the secular project runs away from, or ''brackets.'' It counsels respect for all religions and calls upon us to celebrate their diversity. But religion's truth claims don't want your respect. They want your belief and, finally, your soul. They are jealous claims. Thou shalt have no other God before me.
This is what Fordice meant. He understood that if he prefaced Christian with ''Judeo,'' he would be blunting the force of the belief he adhered to and joining the ranks of the multiculturalist appreciators of everything. Once it's Judeo-Christian, it will soon be Judeo-Islamic-Christian, then Judeo-Islamic-Native American-Christian and then. Teaching the Bible in that spirit may succeed in avoiding the dangers of proselytizing and indoctrination. But if you're going to cut the heart out of something, why teach it at all?
Maureen Dowd is on vacation.
Stanley Fish, the Davidson-Kahn professor of law at Florida International University, is a guest columnist this month.
April 15, 2007, 8:24 pm
Religion Without Truth, Part Two
In a March 31st Op-Ed column I critiqued Professor Stephen Prothero’s claim (quoted in Time magazine’s April 2nd issue) that the “academic study of religion … takes the biblical truth claims seriously and yet brackets them for purposes of classroom discussion.” I questioned how anyone could take something seriously by leaving it at the door or putting it on the shelf. And I said that in the absence of its truth claims – claims like salvation is through belief in Jesus Christ who rose from the dead and redeemed us by taking upon himself all our sins – a religion was nothing more than a set of stories and ritual practices bereft of any transcendent meaning of which they would be the expression. You can teach those stories and practices – just as you might teach the stories and practices of baseball (which is, I know, the religion of some people) – but you wouldn’t, I insisted, be teaching religion, only its empty shell.
Of the hundred or so comments I received, only a few indicated agreement with my point. The others raised a number of objections, and among those objections three were prominent: 1) I fail to understand that one can teach the truth claims of religion as historical and cultural facts without either believing or disbelieving in them: “To understand the works of Christians such as Chaucer, Dante, Milton or Shakespeare, one must understand something of Christianity. One must not, however, become a Christian.” 2) Teaching the exclusive truth claims of a religion as matters of fact goes against the principles of liberal democracy and liberal education: “Teaching religious thought as dogma is not education, but theocracy.” 3) What I said in this column is contradicted by what I said in earlier columns: “The argument you present seems to run counter to your prior claim that any potentially controversial topic can and should be studied within ‘academicized’ grounds.”
First of all, I stipulate to the usefulness of teaching the bible as an aid to the study of literature and history. I’m just saying that when you do that you are teaching religion as a pedagogical resource, not as a distinctive discourse the truth or falsehood of which is a matter of salvation for its adherents. One can of course teach that too; one can, that is, get students to understand that at least some believers hold to their faith in a way that is absolute and exclusionary; in their view nonbelievers have not merely made a mistake – as one might be mistaken about the causes of global warming – they have condemned themselves to eternal perdition. (“I am the way.”) What one cannot do – at least under the liberal democratic dispensation – is teach that assertion of an exclusive and absolute truth as anything but someone’s opinion; and in many classes that opinion will be rehearsed with at best a sympathetic condescension (“let’s hope they grow out of it”) and at worst a condemning ridicule (“even in this day and age, there are benighted people”).
In short, what one cannot do is teach a religion as true, because as Patrick Tharp notes, to do so would be to teach a singular truth – “All religions can’t be taught as truth, only one” – and a chief tenet of liberal education (it is a religion too) is that a range of religious views should be taught in the sense of being noted and indexed in the manner of sociology or anthropology.
On this point, there is really no difference between me and my critics. We agree that you can’t – or shouldn’t – teach religion, in the strong sense, in the public schools; and we agree too that you can and should teach about religion in the public schools. Where we disagree is in the judgment of what, if anything, is lost when the assertion of dogma (a word that acquired its pejorative association late: it originally referred to the systematic content of a theology) gives way to a discussion or survey of dogma. When Barbara Schutz declares that “There is a difference between professing a faith and describing and discussing it,” she and I are on the same page; the question is whether the difference is one that makes discussing a faith an affront to it rather than a tribute to it.
That question and one Christian author’s answer to it are on display in a key section of John Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress” (1678), once the second-most-read work in Christendom after the Bible. Bunyan’s hero meets up with a fellow pilgrim named Talkative and is at first quite taken with him because he seems so knowledgeable about the faith they supposedly share. But in a short while Christian comes to see that while his new friend has all the answers to any question of doctrine – he boasts “I will talk of things heavenly or things earthly; things moral or things evangelical; things sacred or things profane, things past or things to come” – none of his answers has made its way from his lips to his heart. That is, they come from a rote erudition and not from an inward conviction.
That is finally the judgment Christian passes on Talkative: “Paul calleth some men, yea, and those great talkers too, ‘sounding brass and tinkling cymbals,’ that is… ‘things without life, giving sound.’” And later his friend Faithful comments: “To know is a thing that pleaseth talkers; but to do is that which pleaseth God.” Faithful’s point is that true religious knowledge is not something one delivers in precepts but something one performs at every moment, because its lesson and one’s being are indistinguishable. (“In him we live and move and have our being.”) There is, he explains “knowledge and knowledge. Knowledge that resteth in the bare speculation of things; and knowledge that is accompanied with the grace of faith and love which puts a man upon doing even the will of God from the heart.”
To have, or to be had by, this second, superior, knowledge is to have undergone a reorientation of being such that the content of both the world and your consciousness has been transformed. You now see the world as everywhere displaying the single truth of which you have become an extension. As Augustine puts in (in “The Christian Doctrine”), “To the pure and healthy internal eye, He is everywhere.” When Zach Johnson won the Masters golf tournament a week ago, he replied to a reporter’s standard questions about how he had done it by saying “Jesus Christ was with me every step of the way” (on the model of Paul’s “Not me, but my master in me”). The reporter looked unhappy and ended the interview abruptly.
The characterizing feature of the knowledge that does not save and transform – speculative knowledge, empirical knowledge, knowledge about – is the distance between the knower and the thing to be known, a distance that must be bridged by some methodological or technological apparatus. But with respect to the knowledge Bunyan and his characters celebrate, there is no distance – the knower and the object of knowledge are one – and the appearance of distance is a sign that you have joined the superficial Talkative in his ability to discourse on everything, but really know nothing. The lesson is given in Proverbs 3: “Be not wise in thine own eyes.” “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; lean not into thine own understanding.”
Leaning into your own understanding – cultivating it, extending it, refining it, adding to it – is what liberal education is all about. The project is to move forward to knowledge you do not yet have rather than to enact a knowledge that is written in the fleshly tables of your heart (II Corinthians, 3:3). The empiricism to which liberal education is devoted – let’s assemble the evidence and figure out where it leads us – is well encapsulated in the familiar saying “Seeing is believing.” The model of religious knowledge inverts that proverb and declares instead “Believing is seeing.” And that is why, as I have already acknowledged, teaching religion in the strong sense – the sense that would internalize its truths rather than study them – does not belong in the public schools, informed as they are by a theory of knowing that puts at its center a mind that stands apart from the objects of its analytical attention.
And that brings me to the charge that I have contradicted my assertion in previous columns that the business of liberal education is to “academicize” controversial topics — that is, to refrain from either embracing or rejecting the substantive positions of any party and instead subject all positions to an academic interrogation of their structures, histories, affiliations, etc. Can’t religions texts and the truth claims that come along with them be academicized too? Yes they can, but the effect on them of academicizing would not be the same as it would be on a vexed political issue like the issue of whether the United Sates should move toward a confrontation with Iran. An inventory and examination of the various perspectives on that issue would preserve, and indeed cast a spotlight on, all that is at stake in choosing one course rather than another, even though the choosing would not be part of the classroom exercise. But an academic inventorying of the competing candidates for religious truth will inevitably slight what is at stake in believing any one of them because it will treat the alternatives as objects to be thought about rather than as visions to be lived. To academicize a political topic is to deepen our knowledge of it. To academicize the truth claim of a religion is to kill it, “for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” (II Corinthians, 3:6).
Finally, I note that some of those who responded negatively to the column identified themselves as members of religious studies departments. That put me in mind of something my friend and noted theologian Stanley Hauerwas likes to say: ‘The only requirement for being a member of a religious study department is that you not believe in God.”
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