Generally speaking, I’m in favor of maintaining a fairly strong separation between public schools and religion. As a Jew who was raised a Methodist in rural areas of the South, I think I’m particularly sensitive to the ways in which people try to impose their own beliefs and practices on others, sometimes thoughtlessly and sometimes with the most cunning deliberation. I don’t believe, however, that conducting schools as if there were no such things as religions nor any people who practice them is either possible or wise, for a number of reasons.
Too much of our history and culture has been shaped by religion to pretend it doesn’t exist. To suggest, as has been done in this thread, that school performing arts groups avoid any work that mentions Jesus or God strikes me as absurd, eliminating as it does much of the canon of western music and most of European drama before this century. I do not believe that hearing classmates perform a Bach chorale would subject my kids to inordinate pressure to adopt the religion of its composer. Nor do I think that studying Paradise Lost, the poems of T.S. Elot or Gerard Manley Hopkins, or the sermons of Jonathan Edwards, qua literature, would have a deleterious effect on them. Indeed, I think they would be the poorer for missing them. Likewise for the visual arts.
By the same token, I would no more suggest that students, faculty, and staff should avoid any visible signs of their faith (or lack thereof) than I would suggest that the Hasidim should change their dress and doff their hats when I walk through their neighborhoods, on the grounds that I don’t share their practice and it marks them as belonging to a particular religious group. Apparel is in some cases dictated by religious law, custom, and practice; in such cases, to be required to avoid any obvious display of belief would amount to banishment from the public school system. I, for one, would hate for my children to be denied the benefit of instruction by an otherwise brilliant teacher who felt obligated to wear a kippah or a cross pendant or any other religious symbol, and who was therefore precluded from teaching in public schools.
If you’re unable to accede to this line of argument, consider the consequences if you deny it. If anything that any religion anywhere considers a religious symbol is to be banned, it would be quite easy to end public education simply by setting up a religion that worships books as gods, with school buildings as temples, and teachers as priests.
I expect to instruct my children in our faith and its practices, and I expect that as members of a religious minority they will come in to contact at every turn with people who do not share them, and who in some cases are positively inimical to them. If my efforts are of so little value that encountering someone wearing a cross pendant threatens them, then I will have failed horribly – equally so if they are unequipped to deal with the hostile or the zealously proselytizing. I would hope that they grow up to acknowledge that there is a vast range of religious feeling among the people they encounter, to respect the differences, and to respond to their own religion with conviction and pride while avoiding condescension and contention toward others.
We must, as a society more multi-grained than any the world has ever known, re-learn the meaning of tolerance. We must train ourselves to find offense in the actions of others only when they admit of no other explanation, instead of seeking out opportunities to be affronted. We must learn that the wearing of a religious symbol, performance or study of work with religious themes, or mere mention of a religious affiliation on the part of a school employee or student, does not constitute an attempt to impose a certain set of beliefs on us.
I will be the first to stand up against outright proselytizing, intimidation, and bigotry on the part of either students or teachers at a publicly funded institution of learning. But I also oppose the notion that to benefit from such institutions one must divest oneself of any publicly discernable religious practice.
“Ain’t no man can avoid being born average, but there ain’t no man got to be common.” –Satchel Paige
