No Religion Without Truth: Why Stanley Fish is not just plain wrong but insidiously wrong

In this copy of the article from Today's New York Times, uber-academic Stanley Fish
proposes that we can't teach religion while bracketing the truth claims therein.

The proposal is a reaction to an up-coming cover story (2 April, 2007) in Time Magazine that proposes we should teach religion in schools. The number one fear, of course, is indoctrination, etc., (not that there's any of that in our schools already!).

Fish seems to suggest that because you can't separate from religion its truth claims, you can't study a religion in any meaningful way without subscribing to its truth claims. I seriously doubt this.

For one thing, as a professor at a college where the major for every one of our college students is Biblical Studies (CCU), I do not believe that studying a religion or its teachings, even in the most tendentious of environments, means you'll end up subscribing to its truth claims!

For a second point: I grew up in one of the world's most secular nations, Australia, and yet throughout my years in Primary and Secondary school we all had to study a religion and attend "religious instruction" each week. Moreover, instead of being a benign presentation of, for me, the Christian religion, it was ONLY taught by priests or pastors of actual churches, and not the proposed but questionable sterile objectivity suggested by the Time Magazine piece. In other words, the instructors really wanted you to believe this stuff and made no pretenses to the contrary. But by the time I was in grade 12, I was one of three (3) seniors who would have made any claim to having a faith of some kind.

Quite in line with the above point, anyone who has lived in Britain will testify to the fact that the more educated a person is, the more likely he/she will have a well developed sense of the content of the Bible and at the same time the less likely to make any claims about belief in that content.

So for me, it is entirely possible and indeed common for people to study religion and bracket its truth claims. I'm a firm proponent of just such a study in US schools because, among other things, Christian discourse is the foundational discourse of Western society (with or without a faith). As a Westerner, I care less for the study of Eastern religions (Islam, Buddhism, etc.), but as someone who wants a better tomorrow for the West, I think it's vital.

But, not to let Fish off the hook that easily, we have to ask why on earth he would come up with such a claim?

Let's just note that the reason Fish wants to tie into an inseparable knot the study of religion and the acceptance of its truth claims is because he wants to mask his own preferences under the guise of an elevated view of religion.

That is, if he proposes a high view of religion (can't study it without the truth element), then he seemingly doesn't offend religions types, while seeming to objectively interact with the proposal of whether as a society we should study religion more seriously.

This offends me as a rational person and annoys me as a confessional Christian. It reminds me of when I first started teaching at CCU and I took a call from a newspaper about whether I thought a degree at such a school would be as legitimate as it would be at a secular institution. My response was that in many ways it was more legitimate because we're more honest. (I know that sounds crazy, but hang in there.)

I said that I believed we were more honest because we communicate to people our ideological assumptions and our world-view right up front. We wear it on our sleeves and we declare it publicly without shame. The standard secular institution makes claims to be objective and postures itself as rigorously attentive to truth, but everywhere tolerates a secret shame: the fact there is a whole slew of ideological interests on the part of the faculty.

That is, the realities of ideological leanings are openly confessed at a religious institution, but the SAME realities of ideological leanings are classically denied at secular institutions; thus making the secular institution, to invoke Nietzsche, a classically "insidious" one.

Of course, I'm not saying that one is academically better than the other, far from it, I'm simply pointing out how each relates it's understanding of truth to its discourse about truth. And I'm doing this because Fish's article is an instance of the insidious kind . . . what's worse is that I think he must know that.

Whew . . . I got all the way through and only made one horribly predictable pun on the word "Fish."