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."

tongue speaking mystery and madness

There's a bizarre clip from the Borat movie at this link. It's a group of "tongues speakers" . . . um, slaying Borat in the Spirit, I guess. Sacha Baron Cohen is incredibly cheeky here; as he starts to be overwhelmed by the Spirit he sticks his tongue out and feigns a nascent gift of tongues.

I saw Borat last night. There are scenes in that movie which I never ever want to see again (eeewwwww!), but sadly they remain vividly impressed into my mind.

The Lotus foot and female misshapenness

I recently blogged about seeing a picture of a Japanese woman’s bound feet on my Yahoo! page. However, as I started to think on this image, it evoked for me the question about the degree to which it is a metaphor of women in our society and particularly within the Church. I realize that the point I’m making is not a new one, but I thought that perhaps the visual aid we have here might at least be an occasion to think about the matter further.

Take a close look at the image (right) and note just how bizarre it looks to see her toes wrapped around and under her feet like that. Even now when I look at it, I still think it’s her hand holding her foot. In other words, her foot is so horribly contorted into a fundamentally unnatural position that it’s hard to process the image accurately because it no longer looks like a normal foot.

The final product of binding, if done correctly, is called the “Lotus Foot” and women with lotus feet wear lotus shoes. A girl’s feet would be allowed to grow until she was about four or five and the feet were about four inches long (the ideal size). Then, in order to begin the deformation, the four lesser toes were broken and pulled down and stretched towards the heel and then set in place by constant binding that hindered growth and ensured the deformation and thus the creation of the lotus foot. (Though it's hard to process, the woman on the left reveals, from a different angle, her lotus feet without their bindings .)

It’s very easy for us to think that the bound foot thing is so “obviously” unnatural, and how we could never conceive of doing such a thing. Yet there are people for whom it is normal. And there was a time in Japanese history when the practice was considered as an achievement of the culture’s ideals.

What the bound foot should expose to us is that it is often normal to assume the unnatural is normal. Just because we assume a degree of normalcy with the way women currently operate in our contemporary environments, even if it appears to be healthy and with little complaint, doesn’t make it automatically in harmony with the divine order of things. Take a look at the foot again and note that some people think this is okay and normal because that’s just traditionally the case.

So isn’t it not only possible but likely that even expectations of women in our society, traditional expectations, require a woman to contort herself and subject herself to social or emotional misshapenness, in order to fit the traditional ideals and norms. I think so. I also think that within the Church in particular, there is a gross and deliberate distortion of women brought on by early social and emotional binding practices.

I was talking to one woman friend recently who was taking one of my classes. She remarked that she didn’t feel like she had that much to say in class. I happened to know that this was completely erroneous and that she did in fact have a lot to contribute (seriously and in a technical way). But what was happening was that she noted that the male students appeared to speak with such confidence and assumed that they must have more to say, since she wasn’t going to speak with such confidence. My argument to her was that as a female growing up in the non-urban Midwestern USA she had been conditioned to assume that she really didn’t have that much to contribute but that men did. By contrast, I noted that within the class the male students really did assume that they had a freedom to assume confidence in what they had to say. Both I thought were the products of social conditioning, since it wasn’t the case that everything the men said should have been said with confidence, and vice versa.

So now, having seen this woman’s bound foot, I rethink this experience in terms of social and emotional or psychological misshapenness. The image is for me a tangible metaphor of the sad reality of women in our society . . . still. It’s all the worse that much of this misshapenness is brought on as an attempt to seek the divine ideal within the Church.