Religion-free texts: Getting an illiberal education

In the current culture wars, religious liberals tend to ally themselves with the educational establishment against those on the Religious Right who are attacking the public schools. In politics and theology, I line up with the left. Nonetheless, I believe with the right that public education is hostile to religion—not least to liberal religion. The problem isn't the absence of school prayers. Schools respect the religious liberty of students in prohibiting religious exercises. There is no hostility to religion in that. The problem is that systematically excluding religious voices from the curriculum makes public education fundamentally illiberal—something that, ironically, most liberals fail to see.

During the past few years I've reviewed 82 high school textbooks in a variety of subjects—history, economics, home economics, literature, health and the sciences—for their treatment of religion. I've also read the national content standards that have been developed for K-12 education over the past decade by thousands of scholars, teachers and representatives of professional organizations. To keep my discussion manageable I will comment only on high school texts and standards in three subject areas: economics, the sciences and history. But the problems we find here cut across the curriculum at all levels of education.

Economics.
The scriptures of all religious traditions address justice and the moral dimensions of social and economic life, as does much recent moral theology—from the social gospel through liberation theology. Most mainline Christian denominations and many ecumenical agencies have official statements on economics and justice. Central to scripture and this literature is the claim that to understand the economic domain of life we must apply moral and religious categories to it. Yet in the 4,400 pages of the ten economics texts I reviewed, all of the references to religion add up to only two pages, and all are to distant history. In the 47 pages of the national economics standards there are no references at all to religious ways of understanding economics.