Helping Students Achieve “Civic Multiculturalism” with Religion

(Originally titled “How to Talk About Religion”)

From the Marshall Memo #432

In this Educational Leadership article, Indiana University/Bloomington professor Robert Kunzman says students need to become fluent in talking about religion and its role in society, cultivating what he calls civic multilingualism. “They need to recognize how religion influences our public square,” says Kunzman, “and learn how to talk across religious and other ethical differences as we navigate our public life together.” Here are his suggestions on how schools can help:

• Focus on respect versus tolerance. Respect “requires an appreciation of why religious adherents believe or live the way they do,” says Kunzman – for example, why some Muslim women choose to wear headscarves. “Students who have this understanding of their fellow citizens’ religious commitments will be better equipped to thoughtfully discuss those commitments, especially when conflicts arise in the public square.”

• Respect doesn’t mean endorsement. “We demonstrate civic respect toward others not by agreeing with them, but by striving mightily to understand what they value and why and then being willing to explain our disagreements,” says Kunzman. 

• Reasonable doesn’t mean right. “Reasonable disagreement is the heart of civic virtue,” he says. “But even when we recognize the reasonableness of other perspectives, we might conclude that competing arguments have a stronger case.”

• Religions are internally diverse. Some Muslim women regard headscarves as symbols of gender oppression, and some Christian Scientists avail themselves of conventional medical treatment. Examples like these help students refrain from stereotyping and overgeneralizing – and help those within a tradition to recognize that there are different perspectives even among the “faithful.”

• Public and private mix but shouldn’t match. “The distinction between public and private not only protects and accommodates reasonable disagreement but also provides room for those who believe in absolute or singular truth,” says Kunzman. “The message to such students should be that good citizens don’t need to abandon their convictions that absolute truth exists, and they have substantial room to live their private lives in accordance with those convictions, but no one gets to fully impose his or her version of that truth in the public square.”

• Students should know their teachers’ convictions – about respectful conversation. Teachers’ personal views should usually remain in the background, but their passionate conviction about respectful conversation and reasonable disagreement should be front and center – along with their willingness to model “learning as you go.” Students should see models for dealing with questions like: What are my biases in approaching this issue? What are the strongest arguments for competing perspectives? How do competing perspectives criticize my own views? How does this issue affect people whose perspectives and experience I don’t, or can’t, share? 

“How to Talk About Religion” by Robert Kunzman in Educational Leadership, April 2012 (Vol. 69, #7, p. 44-48), http://www.ascd.org; Kunzman is at rkunzman@indiana.edu.