I just invented a new Voltairian muse for consideration. Dr. Roquentia, after Sartre’s lead in Nausea, is the opposite of Dr. Pangloss, convinced that we are in a state of perpetual, inevitable decline. Dr. R. is unmoved by evidence to the contrary concerning improvements in society because he can always sense unease and emptiness in this change.
I thought of the good doctor not while reading the boorish WSJ hit piece on Jill Biden for being labeled “Dr.” because she has only a PhD rather than an MD. It’s an acceptable editorial convention, but hardly one that should be irritating enough to belittle the owner of the title. Dr. R. would lose the honorific, too, being merely an advanced student of the jeremiad in his own narcissistic pursuit of identity.
No, instead I thought of this new caricature while reading National Review to catch up on what is troubling one corner of the conservative mind here as Our Glorious Leader tries to subvert democracy. There are always unwritten assumptions in NR opinion pieces, as if the righteous world lurks just out of reach in the shadows. In this one, there is a quick slap for “intersectional” scholarship, or perhaps just how it might influence public discourse or policy. More centrally, though, the background zeitgeist is the assumption that it is a moral good for children to be raised to be religious like their parents, and that American society is diminished by the reduction in religiosity in America of late. Dr R, sensing a comfortable decline into misery, laments perhaps a bit too ironically given that the recovery from religionless nihilism was central to Nausea.
The author, Cameron Hildritch, might be surprised to learn that there is an alternative and less ideological way of regarding secularized education. It is merely the best agreement we can achieve about what is factual in the world. At a policy and curriculum level, there is no antagonism towards “hokey superstitions” at all. They simply aren’t mentioned because no one can agree on which ones are properly teachable as fact. The lack of centrality of religious ideas in secular education may be alarming to folks at NR, but is the best way for us all to get along and preserve religious freedom. Indeed, that is a central thesis of the scholarship that the oped invokes.
So what about the scholarship from American Enterprise Institute that is cited in the article? It’s a well balanced and nuanced look at the statistics and scholarship about religious affiliation and what drivers and effects participate in that affiliation. It is noticeably short on broader international insights, however; the Islamic world and India are largely unmentioned. Still, there is an interesting dive into the history of religious conflict and prejudice in America, including the Blaine laws that were efforts to eliminate Catholic school funding via the state. The entangled relationship between racism, religious affiliation, and violence is examined, and some international comparisons help to build out a central thesis that when religious affiliation is diverse and no one creed is centrally entangled with governance, there is less resentment between groups and possibly increased general religious interest.
But back to the role of secular education and, note, that marriage also seems to play a role in preserving and increasing religious commitment. With regard to education, however, the thesis is not quite what Hildritch imagines it is. While religious education from early on increases the likelihood of later religious commitment, it doesn’t follow that exposure to secular education should reduce religious interest per se. There is no direct denigration of religion in secular education, in general. So it can still be argued that while more religious education leads to more religion, there is no reason to suspect that more religious education combined with secular education wouldn’t lead to the same outcome. It’s just a time commitment problem it seems. But it does lead to my second point on this matter: if the religious ideas are so existentially and psychologically and manifestly true, then why don’t they compete better against this onslaught of secular teachings? Why is a lack of time influential at all? There is still Sunday (or Friday) and maybe Wednesday evenings as well.
Ultimately, both AEI’s Lyman Stone and Hildritch do agree that shunting government money to religious schools via voucher programs or something like them would likely increase the attendance at those institutions, and would thereby likely thwart the loss of religious interest amongst a subset of the American population who think religious education is valuable. Whether this would be enough to intervene in the general trend away from religious involvement in America or Europe remains to be calculated.
While Hildritch erects and ignites a straw man of sorts that secular education is promoted by progressives as a way of freeing minds to explore intersectionality, the AEI report is less inflammatory and worth understanding in some of its other analyses. For instance, if churches are losing membership due to being old fashioned in their presentation, could they update their methods to be of more interest to young people? The answer, based on some comparisons between Lutheran churches that use a diversity of presentation approaches from old organ music to contemporary-style music, and so forth—but with a fairly rigid orthodoxy of belief—is no, apparently not. So the rub of cosmopolitanism or modernity or whatnot can’t be compensated for by better alignment of the church with that background noise of secular life.
Dr. R. is amused, though. He hadn’t realized things were as bad as they are; he considers changing his middle name to Schadenfreude. All this madness of scientific progress and technological prowess is finally shown to be as hollow as the Earth itself. Dr. P., his nemesis, is last seen canoeing blithely over the edge surrounded by icebergs, coughing from COVID. Chaotic secularization is proclaimed in all the realms as the mad price of freedom, and never mind that soon everyone is as happy and secure as a Netherlander, there will be some kind of reckoning… he’s just not sure when.