When law professors grouse behind closed doors, one of their favorite topics is how law students lack fundamental knowledge and skills they were supposed to get in high school and college. According to prevailing wisdom, law students don’t know how to write a proper sentence, are ignorant of the most basic historical facts, have no concept of economics, and couldn’t construct a syllogism to save their lives.
Much of this is curmudgeonly hazing of the young by the old that is a regularized and institutionalized rite of one’s transition from youth to age. “In the good old days, we actually learned things in school.” Having passed the forty-year mark and hence being an official curmudgeon, I shall indulge in a little whining of my own. My complaint is the lack of basic religious literacy among law students.
To be fair, this is not just a phenomenon of law students or the young more generally. A 2010 Pew survey found an appalling lack of religious knowledge in the United States, which is by many measures a highly religious country. More than half of Protestants could not identify Martin Luther as a leader of the Protestant Reformation. And about four in 10 Jews didn’t know that Maimonides was Jewish. Forty-five percent of Roman Catholics didn’t know that, according to church teaching, the bread and wine used in the Eucharist becomes the body and blood of Christ. (Interestingly, atheists and agnostics scored higher than religious adherents in the survey).
It’s my sense that the mainstream of the American educational system eschews teaching about religion, not necessarily out of hostility, but out of a fear that religion is too hot and divisive a topic to handle in polite company. The demise of universal Sunday School or Read more