LITR 4232 American Renaissance 2012 final exam—Answers to Question A2 "1 or 2 terms or subjects" final exam assignment

Andy Feith

Addressing religion in the classroom.

          I’m planning to teach high school English, and having done some thinking on how to address the issue of religion in literature, I’ve come to the tentative conclusion that I’d like to be a teacher who doesn’t stray away from religion. I’d like to find that magic middle ground where I’m respectful, yet detached toward different belief systems. It seems to me that education should have a liberalizing effect on students’ religious understanding. I can think of two classes I had, one during my sophomore year of high school, and another during my freshman year of college, that sort of threw me into crises of belief. Simply learning that other people have different understandings of religion, and that those people hold their beliefs as sincerely as I hold mine, made me feel destabilized and uncertain. They were traumatic and painful times for me. Clearly as a teacher I will have a responsibility to respect my students’ most deeply held beliefs, but I also want to stubbornly insist on learning about other people’s beliefs, as they exist today and have existed in the past.

          To learn that our own dominant religion, Christianity, has changed over time, is in itself a relativizing realization. The Christianity of Edwards’ Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, which I read in high school, sounded much different from the Christianity I heard from any pulpit in Friendswood. Learning about the different “Great Awakenings” in England and English-speaking America tends to include an appreciation of the changes in emphasis or practice that went hand in hand with these awakenings.

          But let me turn to a text. William Apess’ An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man is notable for its being a text by an American Indian, in advocacy of Indians, that relies extensively on Christian theology to make its points. It insists that all people, not just white people, are “the image of God,” that God has actually seen fit to create more “colored” people than white people on earth, that Jesus and his disciples themselves were not white. We’re getting a look not just at a text that is at once classic, popular, and representative, but at the technique of using the words of a dominant culture (or religion) to argue against it. Again, this is a marvelous thing for a student to learn: people who claim the same religion can have profound disagreements about how they should live it. Apess clearly separates what he considers to be the principles of Christianity (backed up by scripture) from the culture of condescension toward nonwhites that had come to be incorporated into American Christianity. I would love to see students make equivalent distinctions between religion and culture today.

          To Apess’ appeal for justice for Indians I might contrast some of the sermons of George Whitefield, who was more alarmed by individual than corporate or systemic sins. I might pose the question, what causes one religion to change and evolve such that two widely differing interpretations of that religion come about? Where Apess is concerned with the many injustices visited upon Indians (women made into “common prostitutes”, no education, financial exploitation, etc.), Whitefield is concerned with the more private morality of family life. He wants fathers to take care that their children are taught the Bible. Indeed, he recommends religious instruction for children and “servants” as an expedient by which they may become more obedient. Apess does make a threat (or an appeal, you might prefer to call it) to the judgment of God, but Whitefield does so much more graphically, calling up an image of “your children and servants… cursing the father that begot them, the womb that bare them.” I might point out how one man appeals mainly to his readers’ consciences, whereas the other appeals to naked self-interest and fear of damnation.

          Teaching these texts would promote what one might call religious literacy, an understanding of the different forms religion has taken and still tends to take. I admit that my private (and possibly arrogant) hope would be for my students to develop a healthy skepticism toward religion, but short of that, I can still attempt to provide a broader scope of knowledge about world religions and some kind of context for understanding one’s own beliefs.