History of Religion in America and Its Effect on Education

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History of Religion in America and Its Effect on
Education
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AmericansPeople of the Book

• Read and memorized, cited and recited, searched
  for meaning and quoted for authority
• To be Christian was to be learned

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John Calvin

• People should be able to read scripture for
  themselves
• And interpret for themselves
• Sovereignty of God
• Depravity of man

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Protestant Reformation

• Focus of Christianity shifted from sacraments to
  scripture, from the idolatry of images to the
  veracity of words
• Sola scriptura (Bible alone)
• Clergy became interpreters and teachers
• Printing pressgift from God
• Translatorssaints
• Readingmeans of grace

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Teaching Reading

• Act of nearly unparalleled piety
• Acquiring basic literacy became a religious duty

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Tin Man Faith

• To be Christian was to know and understand the
  Bible

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New World Experiment

• Depended on a population of educated people
• Social order depended on morality and morality on
  religion
• Bible reading would foster faith, which would
  foster ethical behavior, which would sustain
  social order

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17th century

• Colonists passed a series of laws requiring
  apprentices and children to attain at least so
  much, as to be able duly to read the Scriptures,
  and other good and profitable printed Books in
  the English tongue (60).

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American Revolution

• Children needed to read not only to be good
  Protestants but also to be good citizensto free
  themselves from the tyranny of popes as well as
  kings.
• The American experiment, which vested sovereignty
  in the people, depended for its survival on an
  informed citizenry.

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American Education

• Both religious and secular
• 17th and 18th century New England was perhaps
  the most literate place on earth (61).
• Literary rates for whites were higherfor both
  men and womenin the colonies than on the
  Continent (62).

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African Americans and Indians

• Literacy came slowly
• For African Americansslave owners feared for
  their slave to learn to read the Bible for
  themselves
• W.E.B. DuBois Only 5 could read on the eve of
  the Civil War

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King James Bible

• In 9 out of 10 homes in the early republic
• The best-selling book and the most influential
  cultural artifact
• The book for reading in households and schools
  well into the 19th century
• a manual of law, literature, history, and
  warfare, as well as a primer for reading and, of
  course, for religion (62).

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Sermons/Lectures

• The average weekly churchgoer in New England . .
  . listened to something like seven thousand
  sermons in a lifetime, totaling somewhere around
  fifteen thousand hours of concentrated listening
  (63).
• Equivalent to roughly 10 times the listening load
  of a four-year college student today

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Other Books

• While novels prospered in Europe, Americans
  preferred religious books
• Catechisms, prayer books, and devotionals

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Basic LiteracyReligious Literacy

• Americans acquired
• Protestant worldview
• Biblical idioms

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Limitations

• Limited to Christianitymore specifically
  Protestantism
• Anti-Catholicism was one of its key components
• Very limited knowledge about Judaism or
  Mohammedanism (Islam)
• Only most sophisticated scholar or well-traveled
  sea captain knew of Asian religions

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Chain of Memory

• Homes
• Schools
• Churches
• Sunday Schools
• Bible and tract societies
• Colleges

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ReadingReligious Skill

• Reading was preparation for Gods grace
• Taught to girls as well
• Republican Motherhood charged 18th century
  mothers with the task of turning their sons into
  patriotic citizens
• 19th century Cult of True Womanhoodwoman
  responsible for moral character of family

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Puritans

• Reigning theology in the colonies
• Recognized two clerical offices pastor and
  teacher
• 4 part sermons text, doctrine, reasons, and
  uses
• Emphasized scripturereading it, understanding
  it, applying it

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Great Awakening

• Mid 18th century
• Injected into the popular sermon a wider
  emotional range, including overt appeals to the
  horrors of hell

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Universal Free Education

• United States first country to take as an ideal
  and first to transform that ideal into a reality
• 1647 Massachusetts Bay Colony mandated public
  education to ward off the efforts of that old
  deluder, satan, to keep men from the knowledge of
  the Scriptures.
• By 1670s every New England colony except Rhode
  Island had similar laws

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Curriculum

• Learned ABCs from scripture-saturated schoolbooks
  or from the Bible itself
• Aimed for conversion as well as literacy
• If there was an overriding purpose to American
  colonial education, it was to nurture and sustain
  a Christian civilization (70).

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Myth

• Once upon a time American education was secular
• Wrong! From their beginning, common public
  schools were very much a part of an unofficial
  yet powerful Protestant establishment

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New England Primer
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The New England Primer
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Horn Books
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Noah Websters Speller
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McGuffeys Readers

• Conveyed considerable religious knowledge
• By 1890 the standard reader
• Told stories about children
• Cultural literarya shared set of morals,
  aesthetics and beliefs

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Sunday Schools

• Fostered religious literacy by
• publishing and distributing religious tracts
• constructing a vast network of libraries, which
  just before the Civil War accounted for most of
  the nations total libraries and nearly half its
  total library volumes
• Taught middle-class morality

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Bible and Tract Societies

• The first genuine mass media in America (83).

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Colleges

• Americas first 3 colleges were established to
  educate clergy
• Harvard-1636
• William and Mary-1693
• Yale-1701

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Early 19th Century America

• Sectarian Protestantism was starting to give way
  to nonsectarian Protestantism
• Tendency to emphasize morality
• New form of religion less sectarian, less
  doctrinal, more emotional, and more
  moralisticLittle children, you must seek rather
  to be good than wise.

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Evangelicalism

• Stressed experience of conversionScarecrow Faith
• Lack of elementary knowledge of Christianity
  would constitute evidence of authentic faith.
• What for generations had been shamefulreligious
  illiteracywould become a badge of honor in a
  nation besotted with the self-made man and the
  spirit filled preacher.

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ReligionEntertainment

• Abraham Lincoln When I see a man preach, I
  like to see him act as if he were fighting bees
  (89).
• After Civil War, many Americans grew tired of
  theological controversies.
• Gravitated toward a lowest-common-denominator
  faith

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How Religions Strayed

• Liberal and evangelical Protestants split
• Social Gospel saw sin and salvation as social.
  More important to care for the poor than memorize
  scripture
• Evangelicals focus on individual behavior.
  What would Jesus do?
• Both reduced religion to morality
• Thomas Paine My religion is to do good.

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Pious Politics

• President Eisenhower baptized while in office on
  Feb. 1, 1953
• Under God phrase added to Pledge of Allegiance
  in 1954
• In God We Trust becomes nations official motto
  in 1956

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Judeo-Christian Nation

• Re-historicized as a Judeo-Christian nation due
  to influx of Catholic and Jewish population
• The three joined together to fight Godless
  communism
• Affirmed one God who Creator, Lawgiver, and
  Judge, who inspired the Bible, acted in history,
  and adopted Americans as a chosen people of sorts

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Children of Abraham

• Re-historicized as a Judeo-Christian-Islamic
  nation in 1990s
• People of the book
• Share a common ancestry
• One God who speaks through prophets, acts in
  history, and will judge human beings in the last
  days

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Rewriting Religion

• Sacrifices religious literacy (specificity) for
  tolerance
• Lowest common denominator morality
• Spirituality
• religion stripped down to its experiential
  dimension
• Do-without-religion
• Religion without memory

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