A federal appeals court struck down a key part of Florida’s law restricting race and gender discussions in public colleges and universities on Tuesday.
The same people celebrating the ruling are also decrying a recent decision by the Texas State Board of Education that allowed biblical passages to appear on a secondary school reading list. The former is academic freedom, and the latter a violation of it. Naturally.
It’s easy to reconcile these positions by arguing that one is a religious matter and the other is secular. Clearly, it’s wrong to push one’s religion in the classroom. Therefore, we can rely on “separation of church and state” to privilege the speech of Florida college professors over that of Texas secondary teachers.
But for this distinction to matter, we require a clear definition of religion. What constitutes a religious belief as opposed to a philosophical opinion? Certainly not the mention of God — the Buddhist religion is staunchly atheist, yet it is held to the same standards as Christianity or Judaism in academia.
Religions have a number of key components. They tend to include, in one form or another, unquestionable dogmas, heresies, priesthoods, and rituals.
Let’s consider the famous “is-ought” problem posed by philosopher David Hume. It is impossible to prove that one “ought” to do something using only descriptive statements.
For example, just because you can prove that stealing from someone will upset him, or damage the legitimacy of anti-theft laws, or cause him to seek vengeance on you does not itself prove an imperative that you shouldn’t steal. Only if you consider his feelings, the legitimacy of the law, or your own safety to be intrinsically valuable does the imperative become binding. And while these considerations may come naturally, they are not the product of unassailable deductive reasoning.
In other words, when put to the incessant questioning of a two-year-old, “but why?” the answer must eventually become “because somebody said so” or “that’s just the way it is.” At least one moral postulate is necessary for the system to function.
Religion provides a workable axiology. It’s the oldest form of intellectual value theory known to man.
Everyone worships something; some of us just know it.
Consider veganism, for example. Committed vegans accept the intrinsic value of all animal life as a moral postulate. They consider eating meat or animal products to be sinful behavior that violates their moral code. Someone else eating meat doesn’t affect vegans in the slightest, yet they consider it an insult to a higher moral truth that they have postulated.
Imagine a Christian professor objecting in the classroom to the morality of same-sex marriage. He would be violating the separation of church and state. Yet when a professor asserts that veganism is morally superior to meat-eating, this is protected by academic freedom.
Even the most clinical theoreticians who reject progressive dogmas (which few actually do) often find themselves speaking with reverence of The Science (capital S, of course) and what it tells us. Far be it for us to rise above our stations and question the anointed Experts and their wisdom.
The problem is not the presence of value judgments in education. Had human education failed to privilege any one way of thinking over any other throughout history, we’d have never left the caves.
What’s more, absolute neutrality toward social issues is not only a fiction, but it’s an undesirable one. I, for one, would not favor living in a society where children were taught that a set of values that leads them to Hitler is on equal footing with those that lead them to Martin Luther King Jr.
The extent to which religious practices should be allowed into the public sphere is a matter of debate. The trouble comes when educators try to play by a different set of rules by classifying their religious practices as different from religious practices they don’t like.
While the Florida ruling allows educators to espouse their faith toward race and gender dogmas, the Texas ruling requires that the Bible be taught strictly from a neutral, historical perspective. The double standard here should be painfully obvious.
The secular religion phenomenon has some clear benefits attached to it as well. It is most often through their religion that people find communities and become motivated to do good for the world. Atheists who wouldn’t be caught dead in a church might still be motivated to form groups and serve their communities by other commitments that fill the void of traditional faith (such as environmentalists cleaning up parks).
After all, the is-ought problem demonstrates why no amount of clinical analysis can tell us what is ultimately worth loving, protecting, or forbidding. If one must reject the Abrahamic faiths, better that he find another outlet through which to do good than abandon good altogether.
The problem comes when “doing good” crosses the line from picking up trash in your neighborhood into blocking the roads because you didn’t get your way in the presidential election. Secular religions are seldom guided by ancient wisdom; they’re frequently guided by edgy teenagers on social media and ivory tower intellectuals who are safely insulated from the real world. For that reason, they often end up directing people’s religious zeal toward ends that are counterproductive.
Secular religions, even when they are predicated on principles that nobody disputes, are still systems of faith. Whenever we give educators the power to impart their faith onto their students, we run the risk of indoctrination that the founders feared.
Taking God out of the equation does not erase this concern. If anything, it amplifies it.
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