Duck, Duck, Faith

In the curricular review’s game of duck, duck, goose, Reason and Faith is the goose. While we appreciate the bold thinking underlying this suggestion, among the excisable components of a solid general education report, a religion requirement should be the first to go.

It would be foolish to think that the study of religion should not play an important part in educating “citizen[s] of a democracy within a global society,” as the report advances as its underlying aim. Religion has always been important and certainly, recent events seem to have elevated its relevance to understanding human interaction in the modern world. Both before and after 9/11, religious ideas have been among the most potent social forces, animating decisions with profound global implications. But is religion, on its own terms, important enough that we should elevate it to a category of courses within our program of general education?

We think not.

Understanding religion is an enterprise to a very large degree intertwined with a more general understanding of culture and history. The general education proposal says as much; according to it, the Reason and Faith requirement’s aim “is to help students understand the interplay between religious and secular institutions, practices, and ideas.” We do not believe that religious ideas in particular should be given a platform greater than other social and political forces, and bracketing these ideas as such gives them preeminence incommensurate with their proper place in understanding the modern world. That is not to say that religious notions are not important, but that they do not in any discernable way warrant this special treatment.

Moreover, we are not necessarily comfortable with the type of worldview engendered by what may amount to no more than an ephemeral inflation of the supremacy of religious ideas. Instead, we believe the best way to understand religious ideas as part of a general education is in the context of a balanced treatment of competing forces. Several of the proposed categories—including, “The Ethical Life,” “Cultural Traditions and Cultural Change,” “Societies of the World,” “The United States: Historical and Global Perspectives,” and even perhaps “Life Science”—would certainly force students to grapple with religious ideas, and we think they would do so more than adequately.