In the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Tim Hall, a K-12 Social Studies Instructional Specialist at Vance County Schools and former president of the North Carolina Council for the Social Studies, learned in real time that he didn’t know how to teach his students about religion.
“I was teaching about Islam, I was doing the text and just kind of doing the historical viewpoint. A student just raised their hand and said, ‘Is Islam really a religion of peace?’ And I really didn’t know how to answer it at that time,” Hall said.
“At first there was the anxiety associated with that — what you say and how you say it and making sure the kids understood it is a religion of peace. But I’m trying to wrap my head around 9/11 as well.”
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North Carolina is one of few states in which public schools’ social studies curriculum includes at least some form of religious literacy education. Despite that, most educators are unprepared, like Hall once was, to teach about religion academically or simply avoid it out of fear of pushback.
Experts say world religions need to be taught in the classroom in order for students to understand the full historical and cultural context of their social studies curriculum. But first, North Carolina needs to have better training, firmer guidelines and absolute transparency.
North Carolina’s standards
It’s important to know religious literacy is not about promoting religion in schools but about helping students understand how religious communities have shaped history, culture and civic life, Hall told Carolina Public Press. He founded Religion Matters to encourage educators to teach religious literacy from a nondevotional, academic perspective.
The state standards allow educators to teach about religion academically, which is “constitutionally appropriate and historically necessary,” Hall said, but they aren’t as thorough and consistent across the state as would be ideal. In North Carolina, learning objectives related to religion mostly appear in the world history and civic literacy standards and briefly in American history.
“World History is designed to be a historical study of societies, nations, economies, events and cultures of the many regions of the world, providing historical background for each area and details inclusive of change over time, historical impact, religion, diplomacy, culture practices and beliefs, and economic, political, and social institutions,” the Standards for World History states.
One learning objective within the Standards for American History addresses religion, which states students should “distinguish religious beliefs and human reasoning in terms of their influence on American society and culture,” compared to five of the World History objectives.
Course catalogs for high schoolers may offer a dedicated world religions class as an option for students, but that tends to be only at larger schools, Hall said. Most schools lack a qualified educator to teach the class or simply don’t want to offer it for fear of parent pushback.
“I appreciate the standards, but the guidance in the standards is brief and uneven, so how religion is taught in the classroom varies widely from classroom to classroom and district to district,” he said.
“So North Carolina standards do include religion, but guidance is often thin, which means implementation depends heavily on individual teachers’ preparation and comfort level.”
Vicki Garlock, founder of World Religion for Kids and a former Warren Wilson College professor, said one downfall of the state is that there’s not even an agreement on which religions should be taught, let alone how to do it or to what extent.
Teachers vary in whether they choose to focus on five, six or seven of the “major world religions,” and the ideas on which religions should be taught can be outdated. For example, Confucianism and Taoism are often emphasized, despite not being widely practiced anymore, Garlock said. That can lead to other religions that are more pertinent to today being left out.
“Unfortunately, we’re operating at a very, very basic level,” she said.
“There’s not even agreement on which religious traditions should be covered, so a lot of times, Confucianism and Taoism show up in the standards (…) and yet, those are not considered to be major world religions currently being practiced by people.
“Just as a simple example, Sikhism is the fifth-largest religion in the world, and most people in America don’t know anything about it. It’s one of the largest immigrant groups we have right now, people from India being the largest immigrant group, and many of those people are Sikh.”
Why teach about religion?
As a social studies teacher, Hall didn’t put much thought into teaching about religion until after Sept. 11. In the aftermath of the attacks, the Federal Bureau of Investigation found hate crimes against Muslims in the U.S. increased seventeenfold, and misconceptions led to the conflation of different religions with Islam, like Sikhism, also leading to hate crimes.
But when global events have an element of religion involved there also tends to be a surge in good-faith interest in religious literacy, Hall said. The majority of religious literacy education work came out of Sept. 11, and there’s been another recent surge due to the Israel-Hamas war and even the Russia-Ukraine war.
With misinformation rampant, Hall quickly learned it was going to be important for both himself and his students to understand religion not just historically but as it related to current events.
Part of Hall’s work now is to convince social studies educators why religious literacy matters and why they should make it a priority for their students. He says being religiously literate is crucial to having a well-rounded education and understanding of the world.
“Religious literacy helps them understand global conflicts and cooperation, interpret historical events and political movements, engage in respectful dialog with religiously diverse communities and also practice constitutional reasoning about religious freedom,” Hall said.
“What I like to do is frame it civically — religious literacy is really civic literacy in a diverse democracy. Students need to understand how religious ideas shape public life and how the Constitution protects religious freedom of belief.”
Garlock’s perspective veers a bit more into the personal. She’s the author of several children’s books made to teach elementary school children about world religions. She began writing them after working at a progressive Christian church where she wrote multi-faith Sunday school lessons.
She hopes her books can serve as a source for teachers wanting to teach age-appropriate lessons on world religions, not just to grow their religious literacy but so students can see a part of themselves represented that is often left out.
“It’s more than just religious literacy — the other piece of it that’s really important to me is this idea of identity,” Garlock said. “Religion is part of kids’ identity from the get go, and these students need to be seen.”
“In the (language arts) world, they talk about books being windows and mirrors. They are windows into worlds outside of your own, but they also are mirrors of ourselves. And I think that one of the things that has happened because people are so nervous when it comes to talking about religion is that we tend to push it aside. We need to realize that we are also essentially squashing a really important component of many students’ identity.”
Barriers to teaching about religion
Despite the state’s standards, Garlock doesn’t necessarily feel like religious literacy is being prioritized in a meaningful way, which can make it difficult to fine-tune or work on specifics.
“We don’t have a situation where all these people are trying to do religious literacy and now we’re trying to figure out the nuances of how to do it. I don’t think we’re there yet,” Garlock said.
“A lot of what (Hall) and I are trying to do is just get people to realize, one, the importance of it, and two, encourage them to do something, and we can sort of sift through those details later.”
Research shows there are four reasons for why religious literacy isn’t prioritized in public schools on a wide scale, Hall said.
The first is that most educators aren’t trained on how to teach about religion academically. There’s also a fear of violating the First Amendment unknowingly because some teachers misunderstand it to mean they simply can’t talk about religion in the classroom, even in an academic context, Hall said.
Greg Wallace, a professor at Campbell University Norman Adrian Wiggins School of Law who specializes in religious freedom, said teachers can certainly legally talk about religion academically, provided they don’t violate guidelines set by the US Supreme Court regarding the Establishment Clause.
So teachers must be neutral, meaning they cannot favor one religion over another or denigrate a particular religion. They also must be noncoercive, so they can’t advocate or attempt to make students believe in any particular religion.
Naturally, a push to teach about religion in a more widespread way could lead to more instances in which teachers violate these principles intentionally or unknowingly. However, removing or avoiding lessons on religion sends the message that it isn’t worth learning about, Wallace said.
“It can teach young children that religion really isn’t important, it’s not to be believed, it’s something for older people and weirdos, so you don’t want to send that message,” Wallace said.
“Finding the right balance is very, very difficult when you have to bring this into an intersection of a classroom, you have parents, you have the First Amendment sort of hovering over it. It’s a very delicate balance.”
Then there’s the issue of limited instructional materials and a lack of knowledge on where to look for them, so even teachers who want to teach about religion find it difficult to know where to start.
That’s why Hall compiles teaching materials for social studies teachers across the country to let them know that they can and should be teaching about religion in the classroom and to help prepare them. In December, the National Council for the Social Studies approved his proposal to reaffirm the importance of its Religious Studies Companion Document and agreed to advocate for professional learning opportunities that “equip educators to teach about religions in ways that are constitutionally sound, culturally responsive, and academically grounded.”
But the most prominent reason educators don’t teach about religion is because they are concerned about pushback from parents or the broader community.
Moving forward
While it seems inevitable that some will disagree with a heightened focus on religious literacy in classrooms, there are ways educators can be conscious of such concerns while still teaching the necessary historical and cultural context.
For one, teachers might feel compelled to simplify lessons on religion in order to fit them in during the year, but it’s important to avoid making sweeping generalizations about religious communities, Hall said. To not essentialize religious traditions, Hall said teachers should ensure students understand religions are internally diverse, are embedded in their respective cultures and can and do change over time.
“Seeing those changes in religion and making sure our students have that skill set so that when they see different religious traditions, they can start making those connections to it, so that they can not essentialize any religious tradition,” he said.
“That’s what I want to avoid, saying, ‘All Jews believe this, all Muslims believe this, all Hindus believe this.’ That’s not true, because the internal diversity within that tradition over time and space really changes what these religious traditions look like at any given point.”
Some might worry that teaching about all types of religions could violate students’ religious freedom. The law is clear that religion can be taught as an academic subject in public schools, Wallace said, but whether it veers into a violation of religious freedom is a matter of how the individual teacher approaches it or in how it shows up — or doesn’t — in the guidelines.
“The devil is in the details in that way because I think that it all depends on the instructional guidelines, and even more importantly, on how those instructional guidelines are applied,” he said.
If educators or the state at large decides to move in the direction of more of an emphasis on religious literacy, transparency will be the key, Wallace said. North Carolina has made it clear through legislation like the Parents’ Bill of Rights that it views parents as the ultimate authority on what their child learns in school, meaning parents could likely opt their student out of lessons on different religions if they’re made aware. It’s crucial teachers give parents that choice, he said.
Religious literacy is just like any social justice issue, Garlock said. She knows this isn’t one all are on board with, but that doesn’t make it any less important to her.
“Progress is slow, and you just have to keep plugging away at it, you know,” she said.
“You take the people you have in the movement, and you work at it. So there are people out there, there are parents out there, there are educators out there, there are certainly administrators out there who realize the importance of this. You just keep building your foundation. You just keep building your base.”
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