Teaching about Religions: A Democratic Approach for Public Schools

Conclusion

Conclusion Chapter 5 addresses how the proposals in this book would respond to and avoid the problems with the curricular treatment of religion in public schools in the past. But recent developments in national politics present unique opportunities and perils for the future of American religion and democracy. This conclusion contends that the curricular changes this book recommends would help America to take advantage of these opportunities and avoid the perils. To understand why this is the case, we need to begin with an analysis of which aspects of the relationship between religion and politics are changing and which are not. evidence of the coming consensus Forty is a number associated in the Bible with narratives of trial and redemption . The Genesis flood lasted for 40 days, Moses spent 40 days on Mt. Sinai, Jesus spent 40 days fasting in the desert, and the Israelites spent 40 years in the desert. Numerology is not ordinarily among the foremost concerns or inspirations of political analysts. But during and after the 2008 election cycle, several esteemed analysts (Sullivan 2007; Beinart 2009; Saletan 2009a; Rich 2009) have speculated about whether America may now be completing its own 40-year cycle of trial and redemption. Andrew Sullivan provided perhaps the most prominent and prescient of these arguments in a December 2007 Atlantic Monthly piece provocatively entitled “Goodbye to All That.” At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war . . . within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of inten235 sifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce. Barack Obama’s nonideological approach to politics and his accompanying emphases on bipartisanship and civility, Sullivan contended, contrasted sharply with the divisive politics of the previous two presidents. Karl Rove’s political strategy for the 2000 and 2004 elections, Sullivan argued , relied heavily on the exploitation of religious and cultural conflicts, such as homosexual marriage, to mobilize conservative Christians to vote for Republican candidates. President Clinton was not above manipulating America’s religious and cultural divides to his political advantage, but Sullivan argues that it was Clinton’s history and behavior that proved most divisive . His failure to participate in the Vietnam War, however justified it might have been, rendered him unable to be a neutral arbiter in culture war disputes, “and his personal foibles only re-ignited his generation’s anxiety over sex and love and marriage” (Sullivan 2007). Obama himself—all of seven years old in 1968—recognized the political value of stressing his postboomer biography. In The Audacity of Hope (2006), Obama argued for moving beyond “the psychodrama of the Baby Boom—a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago—played out on the national stage” (36). He also attempted to stake out centrist positions on controversial cultural issues. Government, Obama argued, should take measures to reduce the number of abortions. While arguing that gay couples deserve equal hospital visitation rights and joint health insurance, he also explained in Audacity that “society can choose to carve out a special place” for traditional marriage (222). Obama’s campaign turned this conciliatory attitude toward cultural and religious differences into action through its outreach to white evangelical voters. Recent Democratic presidential candidates had not completely ignored these voters, but the Obama campaign’s appeals were both more visible and more frequent. His appearance at the Civil Forum on the Presidency at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church and his campaign’s coordination with the Matthew 25 Network, a political action committee devoted to establishing support for Obama among moderate evangelical voters , were only the most notable examples of these appeals (Luo 2008). 236 teaching about religions Judged strictly by his overall performance among white evangelical voters, Obama’s outreach efforts appear to have failed. Employing John Green’s (2009) distinction between evangelicals, Obama did not improve at all on John Kerry’s performance among modernist, centrist, or traditionalist white evangelicals. Moreover, the contentious battle over the repeal of gay marriage in California served as a reminder that the culture war on this issue was far from over, and the intense allegiance Sarah Palin inspired in some Republican quarters suggested the continued...