memories every Friday in Bible class with a quiz, and by high school I had committed major passages of scripture to memory. And there was little grade inflation – no one earned a ribbon or trophy for participation. We were taught that Christians must be an example to the rest of the world by our conduct. Perhaps that’s also why manners played an important role at school. We were expected to demonstrate good manners at all times, particularly when it came to respecting our elders. Religious schools, including mine, often have different measures of success for their students. Doing well in school is less about getting into the right college than it is about becoming the right kind of person – one who doesn’t measure his or her worth by his number of Twitter followers or how much money she has in the bank. We were crusaders for Christ, which meant we were focused on something bigger than ourselves – the perfect antidote to adolescent navel-gazing. Of course, there were drawbacks to my religious education. We were taught creation science, which raised more questions than it answered (questions my teachers weren’t always eager to address). And there were far too many times I was told that a woman’s role was to get married and support her family and community by having lots of Christian babies. (As opposed to, say, going to college – which is what I wanted to do). But at the time, I didn’t experience those messages as limiting. And looking back, Christian school was not the place of privation and joylessness often portrayed in pop culture. A Simpsons episode comes to
Today, church attendance is on the decline in the U.S. and many religious institutions are looked upon with suspicion. So it’s worth reconsidering some of the many benefits of a religious education – even for people who grow up and leave the faith. The word “values” has been overused to the point of parody by politicians, but values are central to a religious education. Most of my classmates understood the importance of trying to live them, however imperfectly. At my school, the “golden rule” in Matthew 7:12 was holy writ, and thanks to our reading of scripture, good and evil were palpable things, as were Satan and angels. Bad actions had consequences – we read stories about them all the time in the Bible – and kindness, honesty, A religious education (be it Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or another faith) gives its students a form of literacy that secular children rarely encounter until adulthood, if ever: knowledge of a traditional text. My own daily encounter with the King James Version Bible from the age of four on gave me an appreciation for language, an understanding of the vagaries of human nature, and an accumulated trove of stories. It still aids me in understanding the allusions and nods to scripture that populate our greatest works of art and literature. It was, in its way, a rigorous education... We were required to learn a smattering of Hebrew and Greek, for example. It also prized memorization, a skill nearing obsolescence in the age of Google. Our teachers tested our and generosity were prized. Moreover, forgiveness was not only preached but practiced.
50 May 2018
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