Can religious studies teach students purpose?

In a 1927 Atlantic article, the Episcopal priest Bernard Iddings Bell leveled quite the original insult at college students: They were becoming “mental and ethical jellyfish.” These students were drifters and conformists, Bell complained; they lacked standards and had no real understanding of truth, beauty, or goodness. The problem, he believed, was that colleges were obsessed with teaching facts, and did not help students mold those facts into some sort of “interpretation of life.” Universities, Bell wrote, should be assisting students in “the answering of the question, ‘What is it all about?’” Yet, he continued, schools found it “easier to ignore this problem than to face it, because the facing of it inevitably involves religion.”

A century later, inevitable feels like the right word. A long line of American politicians, scholars, and community leaders has characterized education as a way to hand down values and ethical priorities. Is religion essential to this sort of education? Some religious conservatives say yes—and then go on to manipulate the issue to achieve their own aims. This past summer, several states introduced legislation that would require public schools to display the Ten Commandments, and Louisiana became the first state to pass such a law (a move that the Supreme Court had ruled unconstitutional in 1980). In some cases, state officials have defended these measures as a way to teach students history; in other cases, they haven’t even bothered hiding the role of their personal beliefs.

When it comes to private education, the quandary is not a legal one; instead, the primary question is one of pedagogy. What can, or should, private, secular institutions do to offer students a path toward exploring what it’s “all about”? And should the study of religion have anything to do with that search?

The answer might depend on what a person actually means by teaching religion. In a 1925 essay, the theologian and minister Charles M. Sheldon walked readers through some possible definitions: Does teaching religion mean teaching “doctrine,” or “faith,” or “conduct”? In other words, teaching religion might mean instructing students to follow certain ritual observances. Or it might mean encouraging them to believe in a certain god. Or it might just mean teaching them lessons about how to live a good and moral life—lessons that can be found in religion but not exclusively there.

Bell and Sheldon were writing at a time when American higher education was just starting to disentangle itself from Protestant Christian tenets. Most private, secular institutions separate themselves more clearly from religious indoctrination today—an important division in a multi-faith and multicultural society. In our modern era, a more specific question remains: Can the optional study of religion help students grasp the meaning of life?

Bell, for his part, argued that when it came to colleges, the “ignoring of religion is fatal to the real purpose of education” (italics his). But he didn’t appear to mean religion in the purely doctrinal sense. “Facts and behavior are dead stuff until man begins to interpret them; and that interpretation is bound to become a religious activity,” he wrote. Teachers, he believed, shouldn’t give “students a set of cut and dried religious interpretations to be swallowed by them without personal experiment … What ought to be done for the groping student is to present to him the religious interpretations of the ages and ask him to use them as possible keys to the understanding of material and life.”

Bell seems to have been proposing something between religion as doctrine, taught in order to inspire obedience, and religion as a mere lens through which students can learn facts. His approach to religious education allowed him to leave ample room for the truths of science too: Writing about efforts to forbid educators from teaching about, for example, how the Earth is older than Hebrew texts suggest, he argues that “no man with a sound philosophy of religion thinks that it detracts from the dignity of God to say that he took his time in making the universe.”

My own education has left me with the sense that religious study is by no means essential to a young person’s pursuit of meaning, although contending early on with moral concerns can help. I attended a modern Orthodox Jewish institution for elementary and high school, and although I spent much of my time there reconciling my opinions and beliefs with those being proposed to me as “true,” I’m still grateful to have spent my younger years tackling philosophical and theological inquiries. I learned to be a citizen of the world, someone equipped to make ethical decisions—not because of the specific religious framework I was offered (which, on some occasions, I challenged and even rejected), but because I’d given moral issues substantive thought. A shared religious experience also meant that I was part of a community, and that feeling inspired me to learn in a way that no curriculum could.

Religious education is far from the only method for imparting such a feeling. But it’s as true as it is clichéd to say that many Americans are missing a sense of community, of neighborly responsibility, perhaps even of purpose. Bell’s critique of the students of his day is a reminder that figuring out what it’s all about is humanity’s most important shared project. The answers might lie in nature, a good book, a great friend, or showing up for a person in need. But the facts of life on their own will never be enough.