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Anti-Christian Bias?

Jill

Do UC schools discriminate when they refuse to give credit for classes based on textbooks by Bob Jones University? According to the perpetual-victim Evangelical set, yes.

Now, it’s obviously problematic if religious discrimination is actually going on. But refusing to accept a science credit for a creationist “biology” class doesn’t seem all that unreasonable to me. A student simply won’t be able to compete in an upper-level bio class if all he learned is “God created the earth in seven days, and Darwin was wrong.” Similarly, he’s gonna have a hell of a time in an upper-level lit class if he’s been reading nothing but the Bible and C.S. Lewis for four years, and all he’s been taught to do is extract Christian messages from the books he reads.

Religious education is fine. But when the religious part of it trumps everything else, to the point where students aren’t really learning the things that will prepare them for academic life in college, it seems that the problem is with religious schools not doing their job, not with colleges discriminating.

22 thoughts on Anti-Christian Bias?

  2. The science classes seem really problematic, but speaking as someone who has taught college history, I’m not that fussed about “Christianity and American History,” or whatever they’re calling it. Public school U.S. history classes must really stink, because about 90% of my students show up with some really screwed up ideas about American history that have to be corrected. Screwed-up Christian ideas aren’t going to be any worse than the other screwed-up ideas, I don’t think.

  3. “They certainly have a right to say the student needs to take foundational courses. That’s fair. But when you get into the business of saying how a particular subject is taught or if it has too much of a religious overlay, then I think you are crossing a line.”

    So what, the only important feature of a class is the name? If I teach a class that is called “American History”, but spend the entire term reading the students the collected works of L.Ron Hubbard, should that count as a history credit? I mean, it’s no business of the university how I teach a class, right?

    The sheet has this excerpt from Bob Jones’s “Biology for Christian Schools,” used in unapproved courses, “The people who have prepared this book have tried consistently to put the Word of God first and science second.”

    You’re right, crazy lawyer guy, what possible objection could anyone have to this? I’m sure all the aerospace companies are just salivating at the prospect of hiring someone who’ll belive the bible over his calculator, and I for one can’t wait to ride in one of the planes they design.

  6. Agreed. You might add that graduate schools reasonably require their students to have a certain background so that they can comprehend the issues being presented to them in seminars and classes. A creationist biology class simply does not supply all the ~necessary~ knowledge that a student will need to fully participate in courses.

    I wonder if Liberty College would accept an atheist with no religious or philosophical background for their divinity program?

  7. The brand of “science” being taught by Falwellites is just another form of authoritarianism. Tell them the universe must be very old because distant objects are visible over billions of light-years, and they simply respond that the universe was created with the old light already in place. Nothing in their King James Bible is falsifiable, and angels guided the hands of the human authors so that the entire contents are literally true, and, quoting Mary McCarthy in another context, ” . . . that includes the ‘ands’ and ‘thes’. ” I work right next door to a law firm full of Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals in Houston. There is a paralegal over there whom I like, but when I get her wound up about Jesus, I think I see something akin to sexual arousal in her behavior and demeanor (sublimate those desires away into Gospel preaching, Baby).

  8. I actually think that, from an educational point of view, ID is a little less dangerous than flat-out Biblical creationism. ID accepts the scientific method: it acknowledges that the way we learn about the world is through empirical observation. It just lies about the conclusions that most scientists draw from observable phenomena. Once students get to college, you can explain to them that their teachers have lied to them, and they’ll be able to understand how and why scientists have come to the conclusions that they really have come to. Then you can send them off to the student health center, where hopefully someone will be able to help them work through their issues with having parents who didn’t love them enough to send them to schools where people told them the truth.

    Biblical creationism doesn’t just lie to students about the conclusions which most scientists have reached. It rejects the scientific method entirely. It says that the way that you learn about the universe is by reading a really old book, not by observing and making hypotheses about what you observe. The problem isn’t just fixing their mistaken understandings: they fundamentally don’t understand what science is and how it works.

    Learning ID, I think, is like coming to college only having read really bad books. Learning Biblical creationism is like coming to college not knowing how to read. I very strongly believe that we should have remedial science classes for children whose religious fanatic parents have denied them a modern understanding of how the world works. But I don’t think the place to do that remediation is at California’s flagship universities, any more than I think illiterate students should go to Berkeley to learn their ABCs.

  9. I actually think that, from an educational point of view, ID is a little less dangerous than flat-out Biblical creationism. ID accepts the scientific method: it acknowledges that the way we learn about the world is through empirical observation. It just lies about the conclusions that most scientists draw from observable phenomena.

    Actually, many would argue that creationism is more scientific than ID, because it actually makes falsifiable claims.

  10. Yeah, but it completely denies the legitimacy of the epistomological system that falsifies those claims. I’m enough of a postmodernist to say that I don’t think that creationism is wrong; it just relies on a system of knowledge that has nothing to do with science. It can’t be evaluated in scientific terms. I’m just not enough of a postmodernist to go to a doctor who’s been taught that the way you evaluate whether a treatment works is to read tea leaves or consult a book written 2000 years ago. I think it’s ok to say that students in college have to have some familiarity with the scientific method. You can believe that the Bible is literally true, and you can learn all about it in religion class. But in science class, you need to learn about a system of understanding the world that relies on very different ideas about where knowledge comes from.

  12. The Catholic Church doesn’t think ID should be in science class.

    Yeah, but that’s Catholics. They’re just Mary-worshipping pseudo-Christians who are only useful to help provide a voting and government majority until abortion and birth control are out of the way and we have a constitutional amendment against gay marriage. Once they’ve served their purpose they’ll be persecuted and/or converted to the True Faith like all the other misguided non-evangelicals.

  14. Hush, Kyra! You’re going to let the cat out of the bag before the theocracy is fully in place!

    I never suspected that of you and Kyra! Damn theocrats;-)!

  17. Jill:

    “perpetual-victim Evangelical set”–LOL! I really like that! It describes those whiners to a “T”!

    Actually, to be fair, everyone’s favorite psycho, Pat Robertson, was, as I recall, quoted as saying a couple years ago that he’s actually in favor of separation of church and state. But he was talking about the church and state in Iraq…

  18. Christianity’s Influence in American History, Special Provenance: Christianity and the American Republic, Christianity and Morality in American Literature

    These titles suggest to me that the classes simply don’t cover enough material to fulfill general requirements, which I think is a defensible position.

    Also, “viewpoint discrimination”? Using that terminology, you could argue that, say, it’s inappropriate to discriminate against a school which teaches a history class based on white supremacy. Surely they don’t want to make the argument that all classes and viewpoints are created equal?

  19. Yeah, but it completely denies the legitimacy of the epistomological system that falsifies those claims.

    They get half-credit. 😛

    The creationists actually do seem believe that their view does conform to a scientific espistemology — why else have long spews on evidence for the Great Flood or how evolution is a lie or the need for a “firmament”, etc.? They even call it “creation science”. Of course, the point of the exercise is to justify their a priori beliefs from the Bible.

    ID, on the other hand, completely throws out any scientific justification. The whole exercise is to tear down the scientific method itself. ID proponents (when they aren’t rhetorically dodging to cover the vacuity of their position) attack the methodological naturalism of science, because it rules out the supernatural! Far bolder.

    Also, “viewpoint discrimination”? Using that terminology, you could argue that, say, it’s inappropriate to discriminate against a school which teaches a history class based on white supremacy. Surely they don’t want to make the argument that all classes and viewpoints are created equal?

    Indeed. Should we accept history courses that teach Holocaust denial?

  20. Also, “viewpoint discrimination”? Using that terminology, you could argue that, say, it’s inappropriate to discriminate against a school which teaches a history class based on white supremacy. Surely they don’t want to make the argument that all classes and viewpoints are created equal?

    Sadly, that seems to be exactly what they’re getting at– and it’s not just evangelical Christians who do this. I’ve had raging arguments with students and adult friends who insist that a lay opinion is equal to (and sometimes better than) an expert opinion. It’s especially pervasive in religious studies/philosophy courses/discussions. I’ve been trying to put my finger on what drives this, and the closest I can get is that people seem to carry the American idea of equality under the law, interpreted as “everyone is equal, which means everyone is the same” out in every direction.

    I’m not sure if that made sense; I’ll be teasing through this in my own blog for sure. Maybe some folks here have ideas?

  21. Wouldn’t most of this debate be resolved with an honest analysis of how much of a “biology” class is actually devoted to the subject of the origin of life? Even if you teach that God made the frog, his little heart, lungs, and digestive system still work the same way.

    It seems wrong to dismiss the entire course based upon a couple chapters.

    Another way to view it is whether a student’s understanding of the circulatory system is flawed simply because he believes it to be God’s design, regardless of the depth of his knowedge of the chemical, biological, and mechanical processes of that system.

    Not all of biology is evolution.

    On a related note, I hate ID because it’s neither scientific nor Biblical. I don’t have a problem with evolutionists not conceding to the Bible and creationists not conceding to science, but to try to blend the two does a great disservice to both. Matters of faith need no scientific basis, and matters of science need no faith. I think that view strikes pretty close to the “official” Catholic position on the topic.

  22. Wouldn’t most of this debate be resolved with an honest analysis of how much of a “biology” class is actually devoted to the subject of the origin of life? Even if you teach that God made the frog, his little heart, lungs, and digestive system still work the same way.

    Regardless of how much evolution is taught in biology class, religious teachings still have no place in the science classroom because they do not fit the framework of a science class — i.e., there must be a testable hypothesis supportable by empirical evidence, such as the fossil record or DNA or what have you.

    Just because religion and science are not incompatible does not mean that religion should be taught in the science class. By the same token, I’m sure no church would be thrilled to have the scientific method applied to its faith.

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