The need for religious literacy

The Case for Christian Schools part 7

“To have another language is to have another soul” - Emperor Charlemagne

Over the last twenty years, I have seen occasional signs of a resurgence in Latin teaching in the state sector, but they have tended to fizzle out. The recent emergence of Christian classical schools and homeschooling curricula in the US and, far more tentatively, in the UK is a promising development, and I hope that it might amount to more than the earlier attempts. It would be good, too, to see the compulsory literary component of modern language A-levels restored. One can complete seven years of study of French or German in England without ever having read a whole book in the target language. For our examinations, we had to read three.

My own love of languages started at age 11, when I took compulsory Latin classes. I enjoyed French, too, though not quite as much. There was something enchanting about learning an ancient tongue which belonged to such an alien and distant civilisation. At the age of 12, I managed to pester our school chaplain, the late Rev’d Ronald Darroch, into teaching a few of us classical Greek after school. In the end, I took all three languages to A-level. This was all in a state, grant maintained school, not a private school: almost unthinkable now, alas.

In classical literature, what drew me most was poetry. Translating verse, even more than prose, shows just how unscientific an act translation is. Imagine, for instance, translating Shakespeare into Japanese - which is, nowadays, my second language. Just think of how much nuance would be lost. Plays on words, cultural and historic references, effects of rhyme and metre, and especially jokes: all these would be lost. Some words may have no direct equivalents, and even those which seem to may have quite different implications. Does the modern English concept of the word “love,” for example, map identically onto any word in Japanese? There is of course such a word in Japanese, but its precise connotations are different. Japanese students often ask what the English word “love” really means. To make anything like a good translation, you would need to know not only the Japanese language, but to be as fluent as possible in the culture that it preserves and imparts. And even then, the translation can only go so far. It involves interpretation, which does not mean merely registering meaning, but imparting meaning, too. And this is true not just in translation between languages, but of all our cognitive interactions with the world.

Language does not just express what we think: it defines how we think. Learning languages, as Charlemagne put it, gives you additional “souls,” or to put it into the modern language of psychologist Lena Boroditsky, “cognitive toolkits,” even “parallel universes.”

A religion is much like a language. Each offers a different way not just of speaking about reality, nor even just of perceiving and interpreting reality, but a different inter-relationship with reality. Teaching religious issues by theme, rather than teaching religions systematically in their own right, ultimately precludes fluency in any religious tradition. It is like teaching scraps of vocabulary from Mandarin and Pashto to someone who is barely literate in their own native tongue. To learn another language, you need to learn its grammar, not a disparate bunch of words. And to understand the grammar of another language, you need to know the grammar of your own.

The Church of England once called for a return to the systematic study of religions in their own right in its 2014 Review of Religious Education in Church of England Schools:

“Crucially, a return to the systematic teaching of specific faiths in their own terms is the key to improving children's understanding. In line with the Statement of Entitlement that means the skills being developed are the skills of understanding and interpreting each faith in its own terms and not imposing illegitimate overarching constructs on material that develops within widely different cultural and intellectual contexts.” – Foreword to “Making a Difference?”: A Review of Religious Education in Church of England Schools

What we need to aim at, instead of uncritically imposing unacknowledged and alien cognitive codes onto religions, is to try to attain some degree of fluency in the religions themselves. But you cannot learn a second language unless you already speak a first.

There are sound historical reasons why children in historically Christian nations who do not have any other religious commitment should first of all be fluent in Christianity, whether or not they and their families are believers. For a start, the Bible, liturgy, history and the theology of the Christian Church are key components of the grammar of European and national history, literature, philosophy, music, politics and art. An analogous case can be made for classical education. Biblical literacy is going the same way as classical literacy. There are those who wish to expunge any serious study of pre-modern English or other European literature (already pretty much achieved in the modern languages syllabus) as the pernicious work of “dead white males.” History is to be studied primarily as a catalogue of the errors of our unenlightened forebears, showing just how wonderful secular modernity is, and why what is still wrong with it is all the fault of people too dead to defend themselves. Yet, it is simply impossible to have any fluency in the last two thousand years of European culture without knowledge of these spheres and the capacity to take the claims of each seriously.

In the case of Religious Studies, many A-level students (Senior High School in US terms) will never have needed to touch a Bible, let alone read an entire book of it. St Paul and Isaiah are names as vaguely recognised as Cicero or Sophocles, known merely as sources of quotes to be mined for examination points. That is not to mention Plato or the Qur’an or the Bhagavad Gita. What our educational masters count as religious literacy does not involve reading or listening to any religious texts on their own terms at all.

Failure to teach our pupils fluency in the Christian and classical philosophy, literature and history of Europe, far from leaving them open to a wider variety of ideas, in fact stunts their sympathy for any tradition at all outside modern western materialism. And even that philosophical language is absorbed uncritically, to the extent that it is taught as the ‘neutral’ and ‘objective’ language from which all others are to be judged. If you are not fluent in one language, it is impossible to learn a second. We risk turning our children into the philosophical and spiritual equivalents of the stereotypical Brit abroad who, when Johnny foreigner doesn’t understand, just keeps saying the same thing louder and louder until he gets the ice cream.

This is emphatically not to say that we should learn Christianity at the total expense of other religions, or European literature and history at the expense of a wider view of the world. Rather, a deep understanding of our European intellectual and artistic heritage gives a far better and more sympathetic vantage point for the study of Islam or Chinese religion, for instance, than the uncritical adoption of a relativistic approach. There is more overlap in their “languages” than there is with that of western secular modernity, and this is precisely what can open our minds to the idea that there may be something more than just a relativist worldview. It can open minds to the possibility of real truth.

The irony of this is that if Religious Studies is offered from a theological perspective and takes seriously the truth claims of the major faith traditions, it can offer a genuinely critical perspective to the otherwise arbitrary and coercive set of so-called “British” values imposed by the State. The study of theology is far more conducive to encouraging dissent and free thinking than the cosmetic liberties which relativist “neutrality” purports to afford, but ultimately channels into uniform thraldom to dominant cultural motifs.

The relativist vacuum being opened in schools does not free the mind, but imprisons it in the monoglot perspective of the Anglophone world. Conversely, the study of the European Christian and classical heritage in their own right can enable a far greater and deeper interaction with the rest of the world. It gives a basic structure of knowledge on which to hinge other things, and a pattern of thinking which can find analogues in other cultures. One cannot learn another language without a good command of one’s own. We risk leaving our students speechless, and so allowing their mouths to be filled instead with the words of whomever they hear shouting loudest.