A new study suggests mandatory teaching about world religions in public schools can increase teenagers’ respect for religious freedom and other constitutional rights.
The research, released May 8 by a Virginia-based think tank, studied 400 ninth-graders who took the course in the Modesto, Calif., public schools. The district has offered the class since 2000. It is the only required course of its type in the United States, according to Charles Haynes, senior scholar at the Freedom Forum’s First Amendment Center, which sponsored the study.
Modesto’s program offered a unique opportunity to ask, “What does it mean to take religion very seriously in the curriculum?” Haynes said, in a press briefing marking the study’s release. “In many places, people are very afraid to touch it.”
But the study “shows the ingenuity and initiative of Modesto paid off,” said Emile Lester, the study’s co-author and a professor of government at Virginia’s College of William and Mary. The small city — population around 200,000 — is located in California’s Central Valley, which is sometimes referred to as the state’s “Bible Belt.” Unlike other areas of the vast and diverse state, the Central Valley has long had a largely Protestant population, with a high percentage of conservative evangelicals. However, recent decades have seen dramatic growth in Asian immigrants to the area — among them significant Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist and Hindu communities.
The half-semester class initially studied seven major world religions in the chronological order of their establishment. The course also included study of the First Amendment’s guarantees for freedom of conscience, taking note to include that atheists and agnostics are also protected by the same guarantees.
“Modesto handled the inevitable tensions brought about by diversity in a productive way, by crafting a course on world religions and the American tradition of religious liberty,” said Patrick Roberts, a political scientist at Stanford University in California, who was the study’s other co-author.
Students, whom researchers interviewed in-depth before and after the students took the course, emerged more likely to have respect for those of other religions and for religious freedom and other First Amendment ideals.
For instance, prior to taking the course, 80 percent of students said it was acceptable for students of all faiths to wear religious symbols on their clothing while in school. After taking the course, 85 percent agreed with that statement. There were similar increases in the percentage of students saying that a candidate’s religious views should not exclude him or her from public office and that those of all faiths had an equal right to erect religious displays on private property.
Although the increases were modest, the researchers said, they were nonetheless statistically significant.
The study also found that students gained more respect for the similarities between world religions after taking the course. Prior to the course, about 46 percent agreed with the statement, “all religions share the same basic moral values.” Afterward more than 63 percent agreed with that statement.
But that result did not reflect an increase in syncretistic religious beliefs among students, the study’s authors said.
There was not a statistically significant decline in the percentage of students who agreed with the statement, “I believe that one religion is definitely right, and all others are wrong.”
The course was not designed to change students’ views of their own faith. Parents and religious leaders of all stripes were included from the beginning in the curriculum’s development, said a Modesto teacher who helped design the course and teaches it.
For instance, leaders at First Baptist Church of Modesto endorsed the curriculum to their large congregation, said Jennie Sweeney, who teaches the course as well as history classes at Modesto’s Johansen High School.
They “felt that it was important that the students be knowledgeable in all of the world traditions, and that none of the traditions would play first base or center, or would hold the center attraction,” she said.
The full report is available on the First Amendment Center’s Web site at www.firstamendmentcenter.org. (ABP)
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