This is a guest column by Perry L. Glanzer, who is a professor in the School of Education and the Institute for the Study of Religion at Baylor University.

While talking with Warren Nord at a conference in the late-1990s, I asked for his opinion of George Marsden's The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. He told me the book was not outrageous enough. Although Nord passed away in June 2010, his last book, Does God Make a Difference? Taking Religion Seriously in Our Schools and Universities (Oxford Univ. Press, 2010), fortunately gives us a clear idea of how he believed the integration of the two might be made more outrageous. (His two previous books were Religion and American Education: Resolving a National Dilemma and Taking Religion Seriously Across the Curriculum—coauthored with Charles Haynes.)

In Does God Make a Difference? Nord contends that integrating religion and education should be normative in liberal education. What proves scandalous is that "with regard to religion American education is superficial, illiberal, and unconstitutional." To make his case Nord presents a three-part argument.

First, Nord points out the curious fact that, although religion serves as a live intellectual option for the majority of Americans, and relates to numerous important questions in every discipline, it receives little attention in America's educational system. To prove this point, he undertook the heroic task of analyzing pages upon pages of K-12 educational standards and textbooks.

He hardly found a smidgen of religion. In history texts, religion largely disappears after the 18th century. When religion was mentioned at all, it was usually in connection with political conflicts (e.g., the Iranian Revolution, the partition of India, 9/11, and Al Qaeda). Authors routinely missed chances for positive inclusion. For instance, they credited Martin Luther King's views on nonviolence to Thoreau and Gandhi and said nothing about his Christian theology or that fact that he was an ordained minister in the Baptist tradition. Not one textbook even mentions that Christians believe Jesus Christ is the Son of God. Economics and science texts proved worse. Nord found only three references to religion in 6,700 pages of economics texts, and a total of one page of references in 7,356 pages of science texts. Overall, less than 1 percent of textbook content dealt with religion. (If you are skeptical of Nord's findings, feel free to replicate his research on a smaller scale, starting with the texts used in your local public schools.)

While Nord finds the lack of subject matter tragic, something even more important remains missing. Both education standards and the texts failed to encourage students to consider alternative paradigms for interpreting the subjects they address. For example, "economics texts and courses teach students to conceive all of economics in entirely secular, nonmoral categories." What would we think of a fundamentalist Christian school that required no course work in science and only mentioned science briefly in a few brief pages, and taught science solely from the Bible? We would call this practice indoctrination, even if the teachers thought they were teaching the truth. Why then, Nord asks, should we think differently about secular schools that never teach a religion course and do not even consider religious knowledge, texts, perspectives, and ways of reasoning? We shouldn't. We should call it secular indoctrination.

In the second part, Nord makes the case that this secular indoctrination is constitutionally problematic, morally unfair, a civic failure, and a betrayal of the core principles of liberal education. The last point is particularly noteworthy. A liberal education, he insists, should initiate students into classic and contemporary academic conversations in which religious voices are actually live options. Students need to be taught to think religiously and not merely "to think in secular ways about religion." Students are illiberally educated, Nord maintains, "if they learn to think about sexuality"—to take one salient example—"only in secular categories." Currently, the victory of the dominant secular culture over religion and the failure to consider religious options is so complete, he argues, "that it may even make sense to talk now about the educational oppression of religious subcultures."

Nord's pedagogy for the religiously oppressed, presented in the third portion of his book, involves some simple but rather radical solutions. First, he believes secondary schools should require a course in world religions. Second, he suggests a five percent rule that would require "all courses that deal with morally, philosophically, politically, and religiously controversial material devote five percent of textbook space and class time to making students aware of these controversies, situating them within the conversation that constitutes a liberal education." Third, he proposes that schools offer an optional year-long course addressing "morality and meaning." To make room for the two courses he alienates all math teachers by suggesting we drop two required math courses. Of course, he recognizes that his proposals would face many additional practical challenges when it comes to teacher training and cost, but he believes these obstacles can be overcome.

Nord's work provides a welcome dose of sophisticated analysis to a field often littered with inflammatory generalities. He astutely diagnoses the problem with secularized public education through rigorous scholarship instead of the exaggerated scare tactics of some popular evangelical critics of public schools.

Interestingly, Nord himself was a religious liberal, which made him an exception among those most concerned about secularism and secular indoctrination. In his last book, he ruefully acknowledged that the "greatest disappointment in twenty years of trying to make the case for taking religion seriously has been the utter indifference of religious liberals to any serious study of religion in public schools (with a very few exceptions)." For all too many of his fellow liberals, fighting the occasional prayer at school board meetings was more important than looking at the big picture of publicly funded secular indoctrination. (After all, who would want to make common cause with those dreadful evangelicals and other religious conservatives?)

Perhaps because Nord addressed this problem as a religious liberal, he placed a significant amount of confidence in the state and its educational apparatus to be able to implement solutions. He trusted that government employees would be genuinely concerned with liberal education and ideological fairness. In reality, I find education leaders are typically more concerned with avoiding conflicts and meeting state academic standards.

Even if his suggested courses were implemented, state-sponsored religion courses must serve the interests of the state and, according to one of the Supreme Court's ill-conceived tests for the Establishment Clause, have a secular purpose. Under these restrictions, religious believers may rightly worry that Nord's proposed courses would actually serve to inoculate students against the power and attraction of religious ideas.

Does God Make a Difference? argues that a liberal education should involve helping students understand that some beliefs and theories, including religious beliefs and theories, are more true or reasonable than others, a critical process that would prove stimulating. Yet, Nord does not adequately address how public education can solve what C. John Sommerville identifies as one of the major problems with secular universities in particular and secular education in general—the inability to form standards by which to make judgments about religion.

Consequently, I believe a more feasible solution would be to provide more released-time education for subjects such as world religions and sex education. Such an approach would allow community groups, including religious organizations, to provide education in these controversial areas during the school day. In addition, public high schools across the nation could allow dual credit for college religion and ethics courses at accredited colleges and universities (a practice already in place in some states). A student could take a world religions or ethics course from college professors with the appropriate training to teach such courses. They could also take it from a private college or university linked to the student's tradition. Of course, these changes would not solve public education's secular indoctrination problem. Still, many would find even such modest incorporation of sophisticated and diverse forms of authentic religious education within the system of K-12 public education truly outrageous.

—Perry L. Glanzer

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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