Today, my best friend shared this quote from Max Lucado:
Christ distributes courage through community; he dissipates doubts through fellowship. He never deposits all knowledge in one person but distributes pieces of the jigsaw puzzle to many. When you interlock your understanding with mine, and we share our discoveries . . . When we mix, mingle, confess, and pray, Christ speaks.
Recently, my sociologist students were asked to discuss the differences between three terms - religion, religiosity, and spirituality. Almost all of them gave answers that extols the values of spirituality (which was viewed as a solitary and individual affair) and dissed religion big time - sharing stories of how they had been hurt, disillusioned and disappointed by a church, synagogue, or temple congregation when they were younger. Religion to them empty, dry, and meaningless. It compared to spirituality in the same way that a stale Chips Ahoy cookie would compare to a homemade Toll House cookie hot from the oven. I spoke about how all human institutions and groups are made up of human beings and that human beings are fallible and imperfect and that any group - religious or not - made up of humans has its share of problems. I spoke about the value of community in my response and asked what value they could find in a community of believers - whatever the religion - and none of them came up with a single idea. My prompts and examples fell on deaf ears - this was a class full of people who had had their fill of religion and wanted none of it and this included those who still attended religious services!
I'm not sure where to go from here - this question comes up in every class and in every class the response is the same. I have no idea how best to respond to this. Whatever a student's religion, it saddens me deeply that they find no value in sharing that faith with other believers. Our society is individualistic and the divide between people seems to have grown immensely even during my lifetime. I'm not a preacher and my job as an instructor is not to share my religious viewpoint; however, as a scholar of religious studies I've visited many religious services in a wide variety of religious traditions and I've seen much of value there and I've experienced the Divine and met an answer to the hunger that is spirituality. How do I share that?
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Keep doing what you're doing, Nancy. If I had any new suggestion to make, it might be to start a folder of quotes like the Max Lucado one above. When you feel like your prompts are falling on deaf ears, as you say, post a quote, and give your students a mini-assignment: "What does this quote mean to you?" Challenge them to deal with a new thought, rather than idly shrugging it off.
ReplyDeleteI fully appreciate where you're coming from regarding the 'deaf' ears, too. In a class last semester, we had one week's subject dealt with religion from a sociological standpoint. Despite our text taking an overall positive tone on the subject, pointing out the great personal comfort religion has given people through the ages, and the artistic achievements and charitable works it has inspired, etc., pretty much every student posted something scornful and dismissive about the very concept of religion.
Most interestingly, whenever I would (easily) counter a negative assertion ("all religion does is judge people! It never helps them!") with simple facts, my posts were roundly ignored.
As irritating as that was, it seemed to go hand in glove with what was actually most shocking to me: the profound ignorance about any religion at all. I mean, head smackingly ignorant! One girl wondered why we even needed both Judaism and Christianity, since they both believed in Jesus.
All of which to say, you do an excellent job, Nancy. The people who go through your classes can't help learning Something (possibly despite themselves ;-) and if all you do is plant good seed, then rest assured God will send someone else along to water, and reap the harvest. :-)
Thanks! I can and do at least share some of the experiences I have had doing fieldwork and how my students in religious studies classes that do the required fieldwork inevitably come away with a positive experience of something good being there - from the friendliness of a small Christian community to the peace and beauty that pervades Buddhist temples to the ornate richness present in an Orthodox Christian service to the sense of a shared history as a people who endured much that comes from a Friday night Sabbat ceremony. There is so much that is beautiful in religion - it's a shame to focus on the fact that religious institutions are full of sinners.
ReplyDeleteNancy, I have had the same experience with teaching. So many people, even those who are devout, are coming from negative experiences with religion. They therefore dismiss all of religion as a very bad idea.
ReplyDeleteMaybe if you compare it with another broad institution, you might have some luck. For instance, there are terrible teachers out there, but there are also wonderful ones. You can ask what they've learned from their good teachers, and what they learned from having a bad teacher. Then you can ask if having a bad educational experience ruined them on the idea of education at all (and since you're teaching college-level student, I assume they're not totally opposed to education).
I don't know if that'll help or not.
Tanya, that's a good idea - I have mentioned that hypocrisy, etc., is a part of ALL human institutions and not just religion.
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