Q: Proselytizing in the Classroom: My son’s elementary teacher sent a note to all the parents last week. The email included a link to her website. Included on the site was a note stating that she couldn’t wait to share Christ’s love with the children. We are a religious minority in this community and, living in the Deep South, I deal with this kind of thing every single year, whether it’s school-sponsored Bible study, the choir concert that includes Christmas songs almost exclusively, or my middle-school-aged daughter feeling like she has to become a Christian because the other kids at lunch tell her she’s going to hell if she doesn’t. Do you have any suggestions for handling these issues without causing my children to be ostracized or suffer retribution from the teachers?
I never cease to be amazed at the lengths some will go to make the point that America’s a Christian nation…and therefore our laws, rules, and morality should be based on biblical values. The arrogance and ignorance inherent in this blindered view of America and its history are astonishing in their narrow-mindedness and intolerance.
All one needs to do is take a good look around. In the melting pot that we celebrate as America, not everyone is a Conservative White Christian. America was founded by people fleeing what they perceived as religious persecution in their native England. Now their descendants see nothing wrong with instituting their own flavor of religious persecution. They blow right by inconvenient Americana like the separation of Church and State. They conveniently forget that the Founding Fathers understood the admixture of religion and politics (and, even worse, education) is a recipe for tyranny. If you don’t believe that Church = State is a truly bad idea of epic proportions…well, I hear Iran and Somalia are beautiful this time of year.
America is not a Christian nation. It IS a secular nation in which 80% self-identify as Christian. This is neither a subtle nor unimportant distinction. When failure to grasp this basic truth about America means that Christian indoctrination creeps into our public school classrooms, we have a problem. One need look no further than Texas to understand what can happens when hyper-religious zealots force their religious beliefs into our schools and require them to be taught as equivalent to empirical science. Faith may have a long and proud tradition in American history, but our public schools are not taxpayer-funded Christian madrassas. The teachers we pay to educate our children should not have the right nor the leeway to treat their classrooms as extended Sunday School. Not all of us are fundamentalist Christians, and those of us who aren’t tend not to appreciate seeing our tax dollars used to create the next generation of blindly obedient Christian soldiers. If you’re OK with that, there are plenty of private religious schools available (as is the option of home schooling) ready, willing, and more than able to accommodate that desire.
If your Christian faith is what helps to add meaning and purpose to your life, then good on you. Christianity- in theory, if not always in practice- is about peace, love, and understanding…and who’s going to argue we can’t use more of that? If your faith compels you to share the “Good News” with those not enlightened enough to have accepted your flavor of Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior, there’s a time and place for that. A public school classroom is neither, and educators who use teaching time to proselytize shouldn’t be entrusted with a publicly-funded classroom full of impressionable children.
This is why it’s called “education,” not “indoctrination”…and our public schools should be used to educate future generations of doctor, lawyers, and engineers. They’re not taxpayer-supported seminaries designed to instill the Gospel of Jesus Christ into our children, though I look around me today and realize that this argument will largely fall on deaf ears.
We’re better than this…aren’t we??
