Q&A: What Americans Don't Know About Religion Could Fill a Book
How did many Americans go from describing their civic religion as Christian to calling it Judeo-Christian?
The shift came after World War II in response, first, to the Holocaust and the Nazis' uses of Christianity to advance their anti-Semitic program and, second, to the postwar threat of Communism. In order to distance themselves from the anti-Semitic fascists and to fight "godless" Communism, American Christians made common cause with Jews . . . and tried to mute their differences. Gradually the distinctive features of Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism tended to fall away as we thought of ourselves as Judeo-Christians.
Will the phrase Judeo-Christian-Islamic ever be as widely embraced?
I don't think so, largely because it's too long. The term Abrahamic America is becoming pretty widespread, and it could replace Judeo-Christian. But right now, we're in the midst of a debate over whether Islam can stand alongside Judaism and Christianity as one of the three great American faiths. Part of the argument of my book is that we're having trouble with that conversation because we don't know anything about Islam. Another problem of the Abrahamic model is that it excludes Hindus and Buddhists.
What accounts for the shocking neglect of religion in most U.S. and world history textbooks?
Fear of controversy–even allergy to controversy–is one big factor. Publishers are determined to make textbooks as unobjectionable as possible so they can be sold in every school district in the country. Another factor is that one of the pockets of secularity in the middle of this very religious country is [the] publishing [industry] and the media more broadly. A lot of the authors and publishers of these textbooks are secular, and they imagine that everybody else must be also. Finally, until recently, a lot of intellectuals thought religion was going away as societies became more modern, and that just hasn't happened. A lot of historians and sociologists have been scrambling in the last few years to make sense of a world in which religion matters. I think they're finally getting the message.
In your view, what other nations, if any, do a good job teaching religion in an objective, academic way?
European countries do a much better job. They are at least trying to educate young people about religion and, to their credit, not just about the state religion, either. You don't only learn about Lutheranism in Sweden or Anglicanism in Britain.
The judge in the recent Dover, Pa., trial recommended that American public schools take up religious studies courses to address the kind of questions that intelligent design proponents and others wanted to be addressed in biology courses. Do you think this will take the heat out of debates over creationism vs. evolution?
That's a hard question. My proposal for having required courses on religion in public schools would foster better-informed debates about these questions ... but I don't think they bring an end to disagreements between creationists and evolutionists. Religious literacy should enable people to understand the debate better and might even make it possbile for the two sides to understand each other better. ... Because most Americans don't really know that much about religion, the debates currently tend to be carried forward by the extremists. If more of us were better informed, more of us could participate.
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