"But why teach religions?"

Or: Do you want your kids learning about Scientology on the web?

Noooooooooooo

I really liked Glenn’s comment on the last post, “World Religions Everywhere”:

And when I say “really liked”, I mean “was really frustrated by, because I thought I had just written a whole post on this, and yet realized that I didn’t have anything like a clean response to”.

So I sat down with some friends who (like my wife and I) have an Aspie teenager who seems perfectly indifferent to religion, but who (unlike my wife and I) are religious. We set ourselves the challenge of coming up with reasons to learn world religions that we thought our teens could agree with.

And then I had my son rank them! So here are the four reasons we came up with, as ranked by my son from “least convincing” to “most”. After you read them, you’re invited to rank them yourself, or suggest your own.

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Reason 4: You want to understand yourself

We’ll start at the bottom: fish don’t know they’re in water; most secular people don’t know they’re religious.

It’s easy to see that you’re in a religion if you, say, wake up early each week to go see a person dressed in robes lead you in worship. This looks religious to anyone. But if you step back, much of what even secular modern people look “religious” by most folk throughout history:

• individuals have rights!

• all people are equal!

• love is the supreme value!

And so on. These aren’t objective truths of the universe; they’re specific values that blossomed in Christianity and became the foundation for the modern world. (Don’t take my word for it — Tom Holland, Yuval Noah Harari, and Nietzsche all defend it better than I can.)

I really like this one, but my son ranked it last.

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Reason 3: You want to understand the world

This is what I focused on in the last post, so I’ll only note that it has two sides: societal and personal.

As my friend Ross (the Mormon apologist whose blog specializes in sharp essays and sharper book reviews) pointed out, trying to understand India without Hinduism, Russia without Orthodoxy, or Japan without Shintoism is like trying to understand Norte Dame without football. And you can’t understand a lot of American daily life without understanding civic religion... which means you first have to understand regular religion.¹

If that’s too abstract, on a personal level it’s useful to know that many of the people who matter in your life — bosses, lovers, friends — will have religious convictions. If you want to get their help on what matters to you, you’ll want to show that you can respect what matters to them.

(My son thought this was pretty good.)

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Reason 2: You want insight

Here’s an argument that might appeal to particularly secular students: religions weren’t created, they evolved. Because of this, religions end up collecting the most useful ideas/stories/practices.

I imagine this as a giant winnowing process:

1. only the most useful new stuff gets retold

2. only the most useful old stuff gets written down

3. only the most useful written stuff becomes canon

4. only the most useful canon gets re-read and interpreted

5. only the most useful interpretations get retold

6. (repeat)

I.I.: How does this theory explain the entire book of Habakkuk?

Easily: almost no one reads Habakkuk, and of those, fewer talk about it. It’s canon, but low canon. It’s been winnowed.

To give an example of something that’s made it: “Love your enemies”. Jesus said a lot of things,² but only some of it was repeated in his community. Of that, only some was written down: among them, “Love your enemies”, and of that, only some was included in a book that made it into the Bible.³

Specifically, it made it into the Sermon on the Mount, which has attracted more commentary than, goodness, nearly anything. As a result, whole lives have been lived out in response to this saying: St. Francis, Bartolomé de las Casas, William Penn, Leo Tolstoy, Sojourner Truth, Gandhi, MLK, Desmond Tutu…

Imaginary Interlocutor: But radical pacifism is a terrible strategy. “Love your enemies” is stupid advice!

It may very well be. But, conversely, there might be something to it. (What would it look like if you loved your online nemesis? Does love disallow hate? If you don’t love your enemies, can you even say you’re a loving person? If you tried to love them, would your life be less stressful?) What it most definitely is is extreme and alien to our normal ways of thinking. It opens new doors of what your life could be, even if you don’t need to walk through them.

If you climb to the top of the mountain seeking wisdom, who’d you rather find on top: a crotchety, hairy old mystic, or Taylor Swift?

I.I.: 1-on-1 access with the Queen of Pop, and I skip the $900 VIP ticket? EASILY Swift.

Okay, that’s a bad example, but my point is that we get Swift’s wisdom all day long. It’s not necessarily bad, but it’s conventional. What’s comparatively scarce is radically diverse viewpoints: and religions are chockablock with them.

I was surprised that my son ranked this reason so high. But I’m not surprised by his top one:

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Reason 1: You want to not be fooled

Whatever else we say of them, religions are convincing. “Bewitching” might be a truer term — they snag brains and implant themselves deep.⁴ Regardless of whether we’re secular or religious, we want to take this seriously.

This is important whether you’re playing offense or whether you’re on defense.

Offensive⁵ application

If you’re trying to spread your beliefs to others, then you want to understand what they already believe at least as well as they do. (I’m not sure how many of us are in that situation: it describes some evangelistic theists I know, but also some evangelistic atheists.)

In a comment on the last post, Timothy took a pessimistic view:

Just for emphasis:

They think that… the main reason to learn about other religious perspectives is to be able to show why they’re wrong.

Honestly: I’ll take that. I think we can work with that. But I wonder if there’s an even more powerful direction:

Defensive application

Even if you have no interest in spreading your beliefs, you have a vested interest in not falling for someone else’s. This is, I think, especially true for parents. To put it pithily:

Do you want your kids learning about Scientology on the web?

Obviously, Scientology is almost uniquely awful — every belief system⁶ can lead to evil, but most of them are counterbalanced with goodness and wisdom. (And most of them aren’t a straight-up con.) But it’s useful to note that, when kids first encounter religions that contain a lot of good, what they hear often isn’t what their open-minded parents would consider to be those religions’ best parts. Vicki writes:

Part of my motivation in teaching her about religion is that she got freaked out by her cousin teaching her about demons. I had naively assumed that her relatives teaching her about Jesus would involve something about love.

Instead her intro was that you have to say ‘Jesus’ five times to make the demons go away so they don’t kill you. It no longer surprises me that this is what a five year old would tell someone about Christianity. Of course that’s the part her cousin said.

Let’s zoom out. As they get older, our kids are going to find themselves lost in a huge world of ideas, each vying for their attention and adherence. (This is the inescapable part of the modern human condition Erik Hoel characterized in his horrifying essay, “The Egregore Passes You By”.) Educating our kids means preparing them to understand these memeplexes without

1. falling for them or

2. simply rejecting them.

This is hard work. It’s part of the ultimate goal of an Egan education. (It’s what he calls “Ironic understanding”.) And understanding world religions — which are called “world religions” specifically because they’ve succeeded at passing themselves along to tens of millions of people — is the best way I know of to start getting good at that.

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What do you think? I’m going to start experimenting with doing more polls — if you’ve read this, please vote below. (If you’re really gung-ho, I’d be interested to see your full ranking in the comments.)

1. Ross also pointed out that this argument holds for sports! Many of us nerds find sports viscerally boring, and as nerd culture has spread, it’s common to hear people mock anyone who likes sports (“sportsball” is a common term of derision). Ross pointed out that this is stupid: most people throughout history have valued sports and sports-like-activities a lot. You don’t need to become a fan, but if you want to understand the human condition, you need to understand sports.

2. John 20:30–31 and John 21:25. Or didn’t you believe me when I said I had been training to be a theologian?

3. Before that, it seems to have been written down in the now-lost Q gospel, a list of Jesus’s sayings which was used by the authors of both Matthew & Luke.

4. To be clear, they’re not the only things that are this way: atheism also can be, as can ideologies of every stripe. This is part of why Egan said diverse ideologies should be explained to kids, starting around eighth grade. See my book review for more on that; a pattern is forthcoming.

5. I mean “OFF-en-siv”, but maybe you also think it’s “oh-FEN-siv”.

6. Yes, even mine! Not casting stones here.