Most Misunderstood Concepts
Faculty experts clarify commonly misunderstood concepts in religious
studies, economics, and criminal justice
compiled By casey huff
“Religious Studies” in Public Education
Bruce Grelle is a professor in the Department of Religious
Studies and director of the Religion and Public Education Resource
Center at CSU, Chico. His areas of teaching and research are comparative
religious ethics, religion and politics, and religion and public
education. He serves on the American Academy of Religion’s
task force on “Religion in the Schools” and on the statewide
steering committee of the California 3 Rs Project (Rights, Responsibilities,
Respect): A Project for Finding Common Ground on Issues of Religion
and Values in Public Schools. He has co-edited two books, Explorations
in Global Ethics: Comparative Religious Ethics and Interreligious
Dialogue (Westview Press, 1998) and Christianity and Capitalism:
Perspectives on Religion, Liberalism, and the Economy (Center
for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1986).
Myth. Faith. Cult. Symbol. Ritual. The ways that these and other
concepts are used in the field of religious studies are often misunderstood
by the general public. But perhaps none of them is more misunderstood
than the concept of “religious studies” itself. Religious
studies emerged more than 30 years ago in both the United States
and Britain to designate a new approach to the study of religion
in higher education. But the adjective “religious” contributes
to frequent misunderstandings of the nature and aims of these “studies.”
Traditional forms of religious instruction seek to inculcate particular
religious viewpoints and values. By contrast, religious studies
employs perspectives from the humanities and social sciences in
an effort to understand more about human beings by exploring the
full range of their religious beliefs and practices as they appear
in different times and places. Unfortunately, many outside the field
continue to confuse “religious studies” with a faith-based,
pious, confessional, theological, or devotional way of teaching
and learning—a form of religious indoctrination rather than
a form of critical investigation.
This misunderstanding is even more widespread in public elementary
and secondary education. Many Americans hold the mistaken belief
that the Supreme Court’s school prayer decisions in the 1960s
mandated the removal of all references to religion from the public
school environment. However, in Abington School District v.
Schempp (1963), the court made a clear distinction between
public school sponsorship of prayers and religious practices on
the one hand, and the academic, “objective,” or neutral
study of religion on the other hand. The former was found to violate
the establishment clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,
but the latter was found to be perfectly consistent with constitutional
principles. Following up on this distinction, many of us have tried
to combat the problem with the adjective “religious”
by insisting on the preposition “about.” In the context
of public education, so this argument goes, we should say “teaching
about religion,” never “teaching religion”;
always “education about religion,” never “religious
education.”
Despite the terminological ambiguity, the academic study of religion
is now firmly established in public higher education, and something
of a new consensus has also developed regarding religion’s
place in the curriculum of public elementary and secondary schools.
In the 1980s, a broad range of educational, religious, and civic
organizations endorsed a series of statements recognizing that knowledge
about religions is not only essential for understanding history,
culture, and society in the United States and around the world,
it is also an integral part of education for democratic citizenship
in a pluralistic society. Subsequent consensus statements have set
forth guidelines for how to teach about religion in public
schools, and these guidelines have been distributed to every public
school in the country by the U.S. Department of Education. The guidelines
include
• The school’s approach to religion is academic,
not devotional.
• The school strives for student awareness of religions,
but does not press for student acceptance of any religion.
• The school sponsors study about religion, not the
practice of religion.
• The school may expose students to a diversity of
religious views, but may not impose any particular view.
• The school educates about all religions, it does
not promote or denigrate religion.
• The school informs students about various beliefs;
it does not seek to conform students to any particular
belief.
—A Teacher’s Guide to Religion in the Public Schools,
p. 3
These guidelines reflect current law regarding religion and public
education and are rooted in the religious liberty principles of
the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Job Creation and Sound Economic Policy
Michael Perelman is a professor in the Department of Economics.
The author of 17 books, he is the most prolific author in his department.
He enjoys teaching a wide range of courses, from Introduction to
Macroeconomics and Introduction to Economic Thought to Economics
of the Future and Marxist Economic Thought. He likes to write about
the ideas discussed in his classes. His most recent book is Manufacturing
Discontent: The Trap of Individualism in a Corporate Society
(Pluto, 2005).
The promise of job creation drives much economic policy, but the
relationship between job creation and sound economic policy is often
misunderstood. Business demands tax breaks, relief from environmental
protection, and a host of other special treatments, all in the name
of creating jobs. Jobs are even given as the justification for tax
cuts for the very rich. Policies that aim to improve working conditions
or protect the environment come under attack as “job killers.”
At the same time, while employment in the United States has been
going up, the availability of good jobs is narrowing.
During the 1970s, blue-collar jobs began to disappear. Later, the
same jobs for which we were preparing our students also became scarcer,
and those jobs that remained often paid less. Many of the largest
employers refuse to pay a living wage, forcing their workers to
rely on public resources, placing an even larger burden on society.
This erosion of middle class jobs has created a widening gulf between
rich and poor in this country.
Although the largest corporations win the most benefits by playing
the job card, they actually perform poorly at creating jobs. According
to a 2000 report from the Institute for Policy Studies, although
the sales of the top 200 corporations worldwide account for the
equivalent of 27.5 percent of world economic activity, they employ
only 0.78 percent of the world’s workforce. After all, Wall
Street does not reward corporations for creating jobs, but for eliminating
them.
A sound economic policy would reward business for actually creating
good jobs rather than merely promising them. A sound economic policy
would promote good jobs by investing a great deal in both education
and research and development. A sound economic policy would retrain
displaced workers and do everything else possible to strengthen
U.S. competitiveness through high-wage, high-skill policies.
Lenient Criminal Justice System
Lori Beth Way is coordinator of the Criminal Justice Program
in the Department of Political Science. Way earned her PhD from
the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. Her research interests
include police discretion, women and the criminal justice system,
women and politics, and public law. She is currently working on
projects that consider proactive (or self-directed) police patrol,
police and city efforts to deal with large-scale events, and Supreme
Court justices’ concurrences.
There is a tendency to believe that the United States is more
lenient on suspected criminal offenders than most other countries.
Furthermore, many individuals believe the legal protections provided
suspects in the U.S. result in guilty people “going free.”
In many ways, these beliefs are both myths.
The United States imprisons more of its citizens than any other
Western democracy and often many times more than nations with similar
rates of crime. We are also the only Western democracy that executes
offenders. Most first world nations abolished the death penalty
between the 1960s and 1990s. Some nations, such as France, have
fought extradition requests from the United States because they
have such strong opposition to the death penalty. According to the
United Nations, 84 percent of executions take place in just four
countries: China, Iran, the U.S., and Viet Nam. On many different
measures, the United States is a comparatively punitive society.
The myth of criminals escaping justice because of some legal mistake
with a case has embedded within it several assumptions or corollary
myths. First, this myth implies that a high percentage of defendants
have their case decided by means of a trial. That is not at all
the case. As is widely known to criminal justice professionals,
but not to the general public, more than 90 percent of defendants
plead guilty (for example, Siegel and Senna, 2004). Second, many
people believe that if a court rules that legal errors were made
(from jury instructions to issues with the constitutionality of
a search), the charges are dropped against the defendant and the
accused walks away from court free. Again, this depiction of the
administration of justice is inaccurate. If a trial court has erred
in some way, most often the defendant will receive another trial
in which the error is to be rectified, usually with the result of
another conviction (which does not run afoul of double jeopardy
protections). Some point to the insanity defense as another means
for murderers to escape justice, but, in reality, it is used in
less than 1 percent of cases, and those found not guilty by reason
of insanity spend indefinite periods of time in mental hospitals.
As we continue to balance the ideals of safety and justice, there
needs to be greater realization that the United States is comparatively
a very punitive society and that legal protections of suspects do
not generally result in leniency. Of course, many Americans might
(quite reasonably) still believe that we have the most just system
in the world, but accurate international comparisons are necessary
to make that claim a sound one. |
