Have a Little Faith: Religion, Democracy, and the American Public School
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Have a Little Faith: Religion, Democracy, and the American Public School
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Overview
From Bible readings and school prayer to teaching evolution and cultivating religious tolerance, Justice and Macleod consider the key issues and colorful characters that have shaped the way American schools have attempted to negotiate religious pluralism in a politically legitimate fashion. While schools and educational policies have not always advanced tolerance and understanding, Justice and Macleod point to the many efforts Americans have made to find a place for religion in public schools that both acknowledges the importance of faith to so many citizens and respects democratic ideals that insist upon a reasonable separation of church and state. Finally, they apply the lessons of history and political philosophy to an analysis of three critical areas of religious controversy in public education today: student-led religious observances in extracurricular activities, the tensions between freedom of expression and the need for inclusive environments, and the shift from democratic control of schools to loosely regulated charter and voucher programs.
Altogether Justice and Macleod show how the interpretation of educational history through the lens of contemporary democratic theory offers both a richer understanding of past disputes and new ways of addressing contemporary challenges.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226400594 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 11/09/2016 |
| Series: | History and Philosophy of Education Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Sales rank: | 742,078 |
| File size: | 492 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Have a Little Faith
Religion, Democracy, and the American Public School
By Benjamin Justice, Colin Macleod
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2016 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-40059-4
CHAPTER 1
Religion and Education: A Democratic Perspective
On May 26, 1797, President John Adams presented the Treaty of Tripoli to the US Senate. Six days later, the senate ratified the treaty unanimously. Article 11 of the treaty stated: "[T]he Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." Yet in 1864 the phrase "in God we trust" started to appear on American currency, and in 1954 Congress modified the Pledge of Allegiance to include the phrase "under God." Article VI of the Constitution insists that "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States." Yet American presidents routinely say "so help me God" when taking the official oath of office. Polls suggest that most Americans favor prayer in school, yet the Supreme Court has ruled that school prayer is unconstitutional.
Examples like these prompt the question of whether God or a particular religion should have a place in American democratic institutions. Such matters are controversial, contentious, and potentially divisive. Yet they are important. Against this background, it is perhaps not surprising to learn that religion, democracy, and education are the sites of many heated debates in contemporary political philosophy. Although there is near-universal acceptance of the value and importance of democracy, there are many competing interpretations of core democratic values and the institutional arrangements that they require. Everyone agrees that religion is a powerful and important force in politics, but there is widespread disagreement about the appropriate place of religion within legitimate democratic processes and institutions. Similarly, nearly everyone agrees that a modern democratic state is responsible for providing basic primary and secondary education that is accessible to all children. Yet there is a wide range of views of how schools, whether public or private, should respond to the diverse and often conflicting religious beliefs and practices of citizens both young and old. In this chapter, we will provide a general overview of some of the main assumptions and issues that animate the ideal of democratic education we adopt in this book, as well as the way in which religious diversity poses a challenge for democratic communities.
A comprehensive treatment of all approaches and controversies in this complex and varied field is impossible. Other theorists might pursue different themes or place greater weight on different facets of democratic theory or even offer a radically different conception of education in a religiously diverse democracy. As a point of departure, we identify political considerations and principles of political morality that are widely accepted as important. We then explain how these principles form the basis of an attractive conception of democracy. However, the purpose here is not solely to describe what most democratic theorists agree on. Instead, our preliminary discussion provides the basis for defending a substantive conception of public education in the context of a modern and religiously diverse democratic society.
Democracy, Diversity, and Legitimacy
Much democratic theory begins with a simple observation about diversity. Citizens of modern political communities hold a wide variety of religious, moral, political, and philosophical views. They have allegiances to many different cultural, ethnic, national, and linguistic communities. The interests of citizens, though often complementary, sometimes conflict. Citizens have divergent opinions about what political institutions are desirable, how policies should be adopted, and how political disagreements are appropriately resolved. John Rawls calls this the "fact of reasonable pluralism": "This is the fact of profound and irreconcilable differences in citizens' reasonable comprehensive religious and philosophical conceptions of the world, in their views of the moral and aesthetic values to be sought in human life." It is crucial to emphasize the notion of reasonableness at work here. A reasonable person acknowledges that disagreement about profound matters of faith and values is inevitable, and the standing of citizens in political society is not determined by the doctrines — religious or secular — to which they subscribe. Reasonable people recognize the infeasibility and inappropriateness of trying to impose their belief systems on others, and they see the value of cooperating with others in political community for mutual benefit. So they seek ways of living together that appeal to democratic values that can be accepted by all those similarly committed to establishing and maintaining fair terms of social cooperation. To put this in a specifically American political context, consider the social and ideological diversity reflected in the following list of well-known American political figures: Ronald Reagan, Malcolm X, Bernie Sanders, Ron Paul, Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton, Martin Luther King Jr., Barney Frank, and Cesar Chavez. We seek a vision of democratic politics that would allow these people to negotiate their differences in a respectful and cooperative fashion.
Against the background of this kind of pluralism, political communities must find a feasible, reasonably stable, and just way of reaching decisions about the laws and public policies that shape the economic, social, and political character of a society. Since views on how to organize society diverge in significant ways, we as citizens need to find a way to settle our political differences that all can accept as fair and reasonable. Fortunately, most people today favor peaceful, democratic means of resolving political disputes. Our understanding of the nature and requirements of democracy has evolved significantly over time. At the most abstract level, however, democracy seeks to address diversity through institutions and procedures that are responsive to the will of the people in a way that delivers political decisions that are legitimate.
Legitimacy is a very important but unusual standard. Historically, political philosophers have offered different accounts of legitimacy. But one way or another, most accounts treat legitimacy as supplying governments and political officials with the authority to govern that is grounded not in the mere capacity to wield coercive power over people, but rather in the idea that lawmaking and political decision making is regulated by appropriate values. In effect, legitimacy requires that government activity is suitably justifiable to the people it affects. Our approach draws upon a deliberative conception of democracy in which legitimacy depends on processes of reason giving and reason taking by citizens. Legitimacy depends on the public articulation of reason-based justifications of laws and policies. Laws and policies duly enacted by a political authority are politically legitimate if even those who disagree with them have sufficient reason to accept them and can be expected to conform to them. Legitimate laws need not be perfectly just, and they need not meet with the approval of all or even most citizens. But legitimate laws must sufficiently satisfy defensible political standards such that all citizens can accept the laws and basic institutional arrangements of their society. Decisions on important matters or political institutions that merely reflect or are predicated on the exercise of raw political power or coercion will not seem acceptable to those who disagree with them. Instead, decisions must be made via processes that allow reasons for decisions to be articulated and considered by those who are affected by them. Politically legitimate laws and political institutions claiming authority must, in other words, pass some standards of justification.
The justification integral to democratic legitimacy has procedural and substantive dimensions. The democratic processes (e.g., electoral and legislative systems) through which political decisions are generated must be (reasonably) fair and suitably responsive to the expressed preferences of citizens. The fairness of democratic procedures is in turn predicated on the equal standing of citizens. Citizens have an equal right to participate in democratic activity. Each citizen should have an equal vote and equal rights to political expression, assembly, and protest. Moreover, legal recognition and protection of these rights lie at the heart of a decent constitutional democracy. Historically, of course, it is only relatively recently that political communities styling themselves as democratic have practically acknowledged the fundamentality of equal citizenship and equal political rights to democracy. Throughout most of its history, America denied basic equal political standing to many of its inhabitants, even citizens, and hence failed to satisfy a basic democratic requirement. This fact casts a dark shadow over the legitimacy of much of America's political history. Consider the denial of the vote to women. Suffragettes like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton could not consider their disenfranchisement as legitimate, simply because the majority of men who enjoyed the right to vote opposed universal suffrage.
Fair democratic procedures that offer citizens equal input into political decision making provide a way of generating legitimate decisions. In many cases, the fact that a decision is arrived at through a fair system of voting provides those who have lost the vote enough reason to accept the decision as legitimate, even if they believe it is flawed in important respects. For an important range of issues, the fact that a majority of citizens cast a ballot in favor of a policy in a procedurally fair voting scheme will be crucial to conferring legitimacy on the policy. In such cases, the losers can acknowledge both that they lost a fair vote and that the fact of losing the vote gives them an important reason to view the outcome of the vote as acceptable. They reasonably view it as an outcome that they should abide by at least until such time as the policy is changed through a subsequent vote.
But procedural fairness is not always a sufficient guarantee of legitimacy in a democracy. Legitimate political outcomes must also satisfy some substantive criteria of justification. Exactly what such criteria are is difficult to specify precisely. But there are some clear cases. For example, a policy disenfranchising an unpopular ethnic minority would not be politically legitimate even if it had been adopted through a fair referendum in which everyone, including the minority, was able to participate on equal terms. Here the ideal of democracy itself places some limits on the policies that democratic majorities can legitimately enact. Similarly, legitimate political decisions must respect the fundamental rights of persons that are grounded in considerations of basic justice. Just what these rights are is a matter of some theoretical and practical controversy, but gross violations of human rights such as those involved in human chattel slavery clearly violate political legitimacy. This will be true even if a majority approves of measures that violate fundamental rights. A slave cannot reasonably view her status as a slave as justifiable merely on the grounds that a majority of citizens favor slavery. The fact that a majority of white Americans, including celebrated founding fathers such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, endorsed slavery gave Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave and tireless abolitionist, no reason to think that America's "peculiar institution" had any legitimacy. Slavery, even if it is politically endorsed by a majority of citizens, is not legitimate. Similarly, a procedurally fair vote to deny basic political rights such as freedom of speech or equality before the law to an ethnic, religious, or racial minority is not sufficient to confer political legitimacy on the denial of the rights. In some ways, America's civil rights movement is predicated on recognition of this facet of legitimacy. The Montgomery, Alabama, city ordinance that authorized racial segregation of city buses had no true democratic authority over Rosa Parks. And in 1955, when she refused to yield her seat on the bus to a white person, she acted with, not against, the spirit of democratic legitimacy.
So politically legitimate democratic outcomes are not simply ones that reflect the will of the majority of citizens as determined through some complex electoral system. The processes through which the will of the people is ascertained must be procedurally fair, and they must be structured so as to ensure that political decisions do not violate the basic rights of citizens. The elaborate form of representative democracy in the United States reflects these twin concerns with process and substance. The American constitutional structure provides an array of electoral systems (local, state, and federal) through which legislators are selected. And when they act responsibly, legislators attend to the interests of all their constituents, not just powerful lobbies, and they seek to promote the common good. The exercise of legislative power is constrained by a scheme of basic citizen rights articulated in the Constitution and interpreted and applied by courts. It is, of course, debatable how well the current American system of checks and balances works in the service of core democratic values. Historically, American political institutions have failed many citizens in many ways. But for our purposes, it is instructive to consider some challenges for democratic theory that arise in light of the place of religion in American democracy.
America is highly religious and overwhelmingly Christian. Yet it has significant non-Christian religious minorities as well as many atheists, agnostics, and people with no particular religious affiliation. Moreover, within the Christian community there is a great deal of doctrinal diversity, and no single Christian faith is shared by a majority of Americans. The depth, breadth, and diversity of American religiosity helps explain the value Americans typically assign to the protection of freedom of religion. Religious citizens have an interest in a political society that is hospitable to pursuit of their different faith-based commitments. Freedom of religion speaks to this interest in at least three ways. First, it protects religions from state interference. Providing that they respect the rights of other citizens, religious citizens are free to worship and engage in religious activities without fear of repression or restriction by the state. Second, freedom of religion allows religious citizens to express their religious convictions publicly and to try to persuade others to adopt their faith. Of course, not all religious groups proselytize to people outside their faith communities, but nearly every religious group seeks to pass religious commitments and traditions on to their children. Freedom of religion is often invoked by parents to defend their right to teach their children specific religious doctrines and to raise their children in specific religious traditions and cultures. Third, freedom of religion allows individuals and groups to insulate themselves from the religious or nonreligious beliefs and practices of other people. Some religious citizens may find the practices or beliefs of other citizens objectionable or offensive. Freedom of religion allows such citizens to limit their exposure to the beliefs and practices of others both by avoiding association with others and by restricting access by outsiders to their own religious community.
Freedom of religion also serves a more general value of facilitating deliberation by citizens about the potential value or pitfalls of different religious and nonreligious doctrines and practices. The free exercise of religion provides information and examples of different faiths and philosophical perspectives. Citizens can critically examine their own commitments by considering the beliefs and practices of others. Deliberation may lead to refinement or deepening of a person's religious commitments or to radical changes in one's religious outlook.
Acknowledging freedom of religion as a basic right clearly has implications for the nature of democratic legitimacy. Legitimate democratic decisions must respect freedom of religion, and this means that there are limits to the laws and policies that may be adopted by democratic legislatures. The establishment clause of the First Amendment forbids governments from adopting or promoting an official state religion even if there is widespread popular support for such a measure. Similarly, legislation that impedes the free exercise of religion is democratically illegitimate even if such legislation is extremely popular. For most readers, all this is probably quite familiar terrain. The real puzzles for political philosophy arise when we try to interpret the nature and boundaries of freedom of religion in relation to other democratic values.
Public Reason and Religion
One particularly difficult issue concerns the manner and degree to which religious considerations have a role in democratic debate, discussion, and argument. We have seen how democratic legitimacy depends on more than mere procedural fairness. Citizens, politicians, and officeholders in a democracy try not only to win raw political support for the policies they favor; they must also make good-faith efforts to provide reasonable public justifications for their policies. Genuine democracy is not merely about counting votes; it involves practices of reason giving and reason taking. As Rawls puts it: "To justify our political judgments to others is to convince them by public reason, that is, by ways of reasoning and inference appropriate to beliefs, grounds and political values it is reasonable for others also to acknowledge." Here we encounter a crucial but complex idea: There are constraints on the considerations that are appropriately presented in democratic discourse. Suitable political reasons aimed at justifying policies and laws must be ones that diverse citizens can all acknowledge as germane to respectful political argument. A theory of public reason aims at identifying and explaining what sorts of considerations are admissible as reasons in legitimate democratic discourse and why some considerations are not admissible.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Have a Little Faith by Benjamin Justice, Colin Macleod. Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction
1 Religion and Education: A Democratic Perspective
2 The Founding Fathers, Religion, and Education
3 Religion and the Origins of Public Education
4 Religion and Public Education in the Era of Progress
5 Religion and Public Education since 1960
6 Finding Faith in Democracy: Three Cases
Notes
Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
“Understanding and responding to the religious (or non-religious) other is a critical component of public education in a democracy, especially today. By neglecting religious topics, many schools miss an important opportunity to develop public reason, which requires exposure to different beliefs and ideas. With sensitive awareness to the difficulties this can present for teachers, this book offers a balanced and necessary look at the different sides of the issue, formulating a clear and convincing democratic rationale for addressing religion in our schools.”
“Since its early beginnings in the nineteenth century, public education in America has been roiled by controversy over religion. The controversy is never finally resolved because it arises from conflict between values at the very foundation of our democracy, such as the individual rights of parents and children and the interest that all citizens share in how well coming generations are educated. Have a Little Faith is a provocative and utterly engrossing exploration of the abiding conundrum of religion in American education. Justice and Macleod have written a landmark study on a topic as important as any other to the future of American democracy, and they have done so with a grace and clarity that makes their argument accessible to a broad public.”