#309a: Is Invincible Ignorance Catching On?

EXCERPT:
I cringe every time I pass the monument. It stands outside a town hall just north of Boston. It honors a native son killed in action in Iraq in 2006, but the inscription begins "The Global War on Terror."

It’s a lie, of course: Iraq, unlike Afghanistan, posed no terror threat to us: no Al Qaeda, no Taliban, no WMDs. This inscription disserves that young serviceman by defrauding his sacrifice. To me, this inscription is symbolic of a frightening tendency to bend reality to our feelings while stubbornly ignoring the facts.

There is, of course a lot of comment these days about the ignorance of Americans. The recent Pew research study found that, in an age when so much of politics is faith-based, most Americans suffer broad ignorance about religion -- their own as well as the faith of others.

After 35 years in ministry I'm not surprised: I still meet people who think "Christ" is Jesus' last name, who think he spoke Latin at the Last Supper and wrote the Ten Commandments. For many years I thought this simply sad, but I now agree with James Carroll that -- especially since 9/11 -- such ignorance is dangerous.

Lacking the facts about faith, people often fill the gap with stereotypes and prejudice. Ignorance breeds bigotry, and bigotry easily feel fuels hatred and violence.

Such ignorance is partly understandable, even natural. After all, people should learn about religions the same place they learn everything else--in school. But American schools have jumped from one radical extreme to the other without ever finding of a moderate, happy medium.

Before 1962 US public schools actually practiced religion--specifically, Protestantism. Daily, my first grade teacher read the King James Bible (then prohibited for Catholics), then led the "Protestant version" of the Lord's Prayer. No one questioned having us Catholics and Jews join a de facto Protestant prayer service.

After the Supreme Court outlawed such prayer in 1962, schools swung to the opposite extreme: they stopped practicing religion and began ignoring it. They never considered that the most appropriate way for public schools to treat something as important as religion was neither to practice it or to ignore it, but to study it like any of the subject.

The result is obvious: Americans grow up learning language, math, history, and science, but most Americans never learn anything about religion. Some receive indoctrination in their own church. Some get to study religion at religious schools, or comparative religions at college. But few Americans can write a full page about a religion not their own.

Unfortunately the First Amendment, intended to guarantee everyone freedom to practice their own religion, is often misused as an excuse to reject religion -- not one religion, but religion in general -- from the public forum. As long as this misuse persists, so too will our ignorance of religion.

But our schools’ failure does not explain why Americans are ignorant, not only about religious history, but also about the facts of current religious issues--especially since religious issues get so much media attention.