“A dictatorship of relativism”

The National Post published an article roughly two weeks ago about the issue that Quebec schools face as they try to determine the presence of religion in the classroom. The article is titled, “Losing faith in Quebec.” The author explains that there is a new course being added to the provincial school curriculum, to replace either the Catholic or Protestant Christian denominational one, and that “Covering Christianity, Judaism, aboriginal spirituality, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, the new course will be mandatory even in private religious schools, most of which receive partial government funding.” The course is called “Ethics and Religious Culture.”

The article introduces Professor Barry Levy, who teaches religion at McGill University. Levy’s informed opinion addresses the consequences of the intent to teach religious knowledge in the proposed course. The article notes that Mr. Levy “considers it a success if his university students have mastered a single religion when they graduate.” Levy maintains: “What’s going to happen in these contexts is it’s going to be totally shallow, totally meaningless. The only message is going to be [that] they are all of equal value. And the people who are genuinely committed can’t buy that argument.”

I find this argument compelling but also of a singular perspective. There is a difference, I feel, between breadth and depth. Religion, I think, only really points toward and perhaps thereby reveals meaning if it is taken up at the deeper level—however, this belief is the result of my own experience with “religious knowledge,” and it has been informed by a particularity. If the new course comes to pass as Prof. Levy prophesizes, then deep religious thinking will be lost, and students will gain a flatter image of a constellation of religions. Yet a new perspective might argue that this very breadth could be what informs a new and as-yet unheard of Ethics, something of a new religion.

I am not sure what form of knowledge this “shallow” course will actually impress upon students, because it might take on the tone of history or anthropology rather than theology. Yet I believe that "religious knowledge" that is characterized by depth not breadth, while it may inform a student’s perspective, does not belong in the curriculum. Just as in my view any denomination should be separate from a multicultural state, anything deeply religious should be separate from the state-run public education system.

So I envision the new course to be like a conventional and contemporary gym class. In gym class, students learn about different sports, they try out a new one every few weeks. They are given an introductory glance at the fundamentals of most conventional athletic and healthy practices and strategies. They learn, for example, the dimensions of the court and the official rules. Yet no student who has only taken gym glass can say that they have really delved into any sport, that they have specialized and learned what it feels like to really know it and to play it, to understand what it even means to know that sport. Granted, there are some generally gifted overall athletes. There are also those that are able to grasp foundational connections common to many religions. My point is that, in the same way that the value of gym class lies in its being an introduction to specific sports and not in teaching the “essence” of any sport, the value of this new class will reside in its breadth, not its depth. A critique of gym class is that it doesn’t teach every sport played across the globe—its focus is on those sports familiar to the dominant culture. Another is that you may get a former football player trying to teach students how to play basketball. So I guess class is like a launch pad. In religion, just as in sport, rising to a new level involves a certain commitment of/from/in/with the individual.