Religion’s Impact Can’t Be Ignored

If students find history a bore, literature mysterious and the arts unmoving, maybe it’s because public schools have sucked these subjects dry of a universal force that stirs human hearts and shakes the world. Namely, religion.

People slaughter and revile one another in the name of religion, and inspired by their religious values, people also have built hospitals, freed slaves and fed the starving.

Yet, in the curricula of America’s public schools, religion tends to be as welcome as a skunk. Students can look in vain for a clear account of the intensely religious ideas that were at work when Martin Luther blew apart Europe and reframed Western thought, when Abraham and Mohammed lighted fires that still scorch the Middle East, when Martin Luther King Jr. peacefully changed the face of America.

As a consequence, students graduate ignorant of the origins of Western culture. In college, when professors attempt more honestly to grapple with the large questions of history, art, literature and life, students can’t even speak the language.

As a practical matter, the most important reason for this state of affairs is that some Americans have a habit of filing lawsuits when a whiff of faith sneaks into the classroom. Public schools hate political controversy; it interferes with the levy campaign. Even a neutral discussion of religion can provoke offense and raise the fear of lawsuits. So, too many teachers, administrators and textbook authors simply hide from the subject or trivialize it beyond recognition. Political correctness, which threatens academia with the notion that people have a “right” not to be offended, is the end result of this pathetic trend.

Can this really be the destiny of a nation founded on freedom of speech and made strong by competition in the marketplace of ideas?

Certainly, it is wrong for government, including public schools, to promote a particular religion. Even the devoutly religious, if they stop to think about it, should not expect the government’s teachers to promote one religion because there are so many sects that the odds are the favored flavor won’t be theirs.

But there’s a difference between proselytizing and objectively presenting the volatile ideas that fuel the engines and flames of history.

Today, public schools are under serious attack from the right, and schools’ allergy to religion is one of the reasons. No American should ask public schools to do the work of synagogues, churches and mosques, but for the sake of honest education and literate young people, we have to recommit ourselves to the robust atmosphere of freedom.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board