In For the Civic Good: The Liberal Case for Teaching Religion in the Public Schools, Walter Feinberg and Richard A. Layton argue in support of including religion courses in public school curricula. While there could be many reasons for this support — increasing community support for public education, improving Biblical or cultural literacy, building character, increasing tolerance — the authors suggest that these aims may be subject to abuses, abuses that can be checked by focusing on liberal goals of preparing students to participate in a democratic civic public. This happens when education is aimed at increasing the quality of civic participation and helping students develop autonomy; the ability to understand the traditions that give rise to their conception of the good, a willingness to own that conception, and to reflect on and revise it. Religion classes best achieve these goals when they are part of a humanities curriculum where the disciplinary structure focuses on interpretive and analytic skills and constructive engagement. Their argument has implications for rethinking the role of religion in public education, and for pedagogy.

The core of the book consists of case studies of high school religion classes in the South and Midwest: three Bible classes (Bible History, The Bible and its Influence, Bible as Literature) and a World Religions class. These classes are the result of different justifications for education about religion, and Feinberg and Layton provide background on the political and pedagogical maneuvering that led to their development. Without delving into the legitimacy of these justifications (readers can draw their own conclusions), they observe that pursuit of these goals can lead to abuse, and the results do not necessarily promote the civic good.

For one, religion classes can undermine the development of critical thinking. Bible History courses, for example, treat the Bible as textbook— facts to be memorized — which restricts consideration of alternative interpretations, a key to critical thought. Classes such as The Bible and its Influence do explore alternative interpretations, but by emphasizing historical continuity they also hinder development of critical distance. Moreover, the desire to avoid trespassing on the forbidden territory of faith can lead to strategies of non-interruption such as blocking (preemptively cutting off a line of inquiry by, e.g., raising and dismissing a rhetorical question) and steering (asking leading questions) that also undermine critical engagement. Of all the Bible classes, the disciplinary structure of Bible as Literature makes it best for developing critical thinking. But the tendency for students to over-identify with Biblical texts still hinders the development of critical distance. In general, Bible classes tend to focus on cultural retrieval, which can reinforce close identification with the text. Even where multiple perspectives are included, perspectives more consistent with students' views will be accepted uncritically. The authors are therefore cautious about whether Bible classes can support the civic good. World Religion courses, on the other hand, are best at developing critical thinking skills because they promote reflection and detachment, providing opportunities for students to look at their own tradition from the perspective of outsiders. Here too, the authors offer some cautions, particularly the tendency to seek commonality between traditions, which collapses the necessary critical distance and can lead to distortions.

The best way to mitigate such dangers is to focus on the goal of the civic good: to enhance students' autonomy and judgment so that they can be part of a democratic civic public. This can best be accomplished by making religion classes part of a humanities curriculum, because the humanities do not focus merely on acquiring knowledge — although accurate information is important — but on understanding, appreciating, evaluating, and developing the critical skills to evaluate and apply that knowledge. This is difficult, which is why schools avoid it, but in a multi-religious pluralistic democracy, avoidance can have serious consequences.

My position on the role of education in a civic public, arising out of an academic engagement with Hannah Arendt, is similar to the authors': the purpose of education is to foster the development of citizens who can take responsibility for the world, and who are capable of the critical thinking necessary to make judgments about it. This similarity is part of why I found their argument so engaging and relevant, despite differences between my situation and those described in their book (I teach at a university in California with an extremely diverse population). It prompted me to consider the ways that a commitment to civic life and discourse is more than an academic position, but is key to sound pedagogy. Teaching in a diverse context, it is inevitable that students hold beliefs that are offensive to one another, and it is tempting to “protect” students from each other through blocking, steering, and other tactics described by the authors. But these tactics restrict the exchange of ideas and frustrate the development of critical thought. The alternative, suggested by the authors, is to stress discontinuities within and between traditions. This is not news to me, and I already stress the complex and fluid nature of religious traditions in my class, but I hadn't fully considered its pedagogical implications. For example, I had a student this semester who repeatedly asserted that “The Quran is opposed to everything America stands for!” There are many ways I might have handled this situation, and most of them would end the conversation and avoid discomfort for students (and not just Muslim students). But reminding students that Islam, like all religions, is not monolithic, shifted the discussion to an examination of various strategies used to negotiate American culture and society, without leading to an argumentative defense of (or attack on) Islam.

The diversity of my situation suggests a caution toward the authors' emphasis on autonomy. They suggest that education promotes the civic good first by facilitating the act of appropriation, followed by a distancing move that allows the tradition to be critically evaluated. Their concern that students too closely identify with a religious text or tradition leads them to emphasize the creation of a critical distance by, e.g., emphasizing the discontinuities within religious traditions. But my students do not identify too closely with a religious tradition. The closest they come to a shared tradition is individualism, and what might be called the religion of diversity: they believe people should be able to think and do what they want, and that diversity is good in and of itself. But accepting diversity in and of itself is not critical judgment, and individualism can be problematic for the development of solidarity, which is also essential to a civic public. Complicating all this, students live in a society in which “the Good” is equated with material possessions, and many of them feel powerless to reject that premise.

This is not a criticism of the author's position, merely a different emphasis; and an opportunity to take up the challenge: how should I teach so that my students can contribute to the civic public? First, they need tools to judge the contributions and limits of diversity and to criticize (among other things) a culture of consumption. Because religious traditions are foreign territory for most of my students, they provide a location from which they gain the critical distance necessary to do that, and provide ample tools for thought. For my students, religious traditions are not merely something to think critically about, they are something to think critically with. Second, they need to find a sense of solidarity in the absence of a common tradition — and I think Robert Bellah was right to worry that individualism threatens this sense of solidarity. This is where Arendt becomes helpful because she argued, in essence, that traditions are not a foundation for an exchange of opinion, it is our exchange of opinion that creates and sustains the tradition. It is our discourse about our traditions that creates and sustains the common world, making us feel at home in a shared world. In other word, critical engagement doesn't need a tradition, it is one. Critical engagement creates solidarity.

While I agree with the authors' argument that the goal of religious education is the civic good, my concern is that we have gotten ahead of ourselves, because we have a long way to go before “the civic good” can be used as a justification for anything. Before we can judge the world, we have to love the world, and there are a number of people who feel no sense of commitment to their fellow citizens; people who are deeply religious as well as those who are suspicious of those with religious commitments. We need to teach the tradition of democratic discourse, and to make the case to people who are committed to vastly different traditions. Those of us who are academics but also consciously identify as part of a religious tradition are perfectly situated to bridge this divide, and to make the case that there are good reasons to support public life. If we are committed to the civic good, we have our work cut out for us.