Washington Post: Ivy League Students Are Suffering From Religious Illiteracy, by Gregory Conti (Princeton):
Several years ago, one of my colleagues at Princeton University hosted a lecture on religion and free speech. The talk didn’t seem to be landing with the students. Finally, he realized why: The speaker had made repeated reference to the Ten Commandments, and several students didn’t know what they were.
This isn’t an isolated problem. It’s increasingly common on college campuses to encounter students who are unfamiliar with the most basic features of Christianity, such as the difference between the Old and New testaments or between Catholics and Protestants. They seldom recognize the allusions to the Bible that appear in Shakespeare’s work or in Lincoln’s second inaugural address (or in Obama’s first, for that matter). These students are bright, conscientious and curious. But they lack religious literacy — and their ignorance of religious ideas means they struggle to understand a wide array of Western art, literature and philosophy.
This is a development that even nonbelievers like myself should find troubling.
A little over a century ago, the influential legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt wrote that “all political concepts are theological concepts secularized.” Even if one thinks this is an exaggeration, it points to the difficulty of attaining any real understanding of the tradition of Western political theory without religious literacy. The same goes for other subjects: Neither Shakespeare nor Austen nor Mozart nor Rembrandt nor John Ford nor Oscar Wilde can be appreciated absent a grounding in Christianity.
Secularization is sometimes (wrongly, in my view) celebrated as a victory for reason over superstition. But a lack of contact with religion — and particularly with Christianity and its history — is an obstacle to mastering many subjects and to attaining the kind of broad cultural competency that higher education is expected to provide. …
At the moment, many universities are rethinking their curriculums, particularly with an eye to forming citizens with greater cultural depth and the ability to deliberate intelligently with their fellows. Speaking as a nonbeliever, I hope that they will begin with basic instruction in the Bible and Christianity. The future leaders of American society need to be fluent with its major religious traditions and idioms — so that they can understand their believing fellow citizens, and so that they can draw on the full wealth of moral insight that civilization has passed down.
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