TEACHING RELIGION IN WORLD HISTORY
Part I: THE LIMITATIONS OF BELIEF
Dr. Robert Strayer
Earlier this year, Dr. Robert Strayer, author of the textbook, Ways of the World, wrote a fascinating two-part reflection on the AP World Facebook page about teaching religion in world history.
With his permission, I am reposting his reflections below.
Dr. Strayer offers some good advice to those of us who incorporate religion into our world history curriculum. For example, he reminds us that we must remain agnostic "about the validity of the "truth-claims" in world history."
And in Part II, he notes the importance of showing how religion changes and evolves over time.
The heart of religious life, it seems to me, involves human interaction with an assumed but invisible realm. At least until the European Enlightenment, the assumption that such a realm existed, that there is more than meets the eye, was pretty much universal, though expressed and experienced in a great variety of ways.
For some it was the realm of God, the gods, spirit or spirits, located variously above, beyond, beneath or within the human and visible realm. Sometimes this found expression as “theism”, a belief in the reality of supernatural beings to which humans might relate. At other times it found expression in less clearly personified ways as a sense of the sacred, the holy, the numinous, the mysterious, the source of all life and being.
Whatever our own religious outlook…or lack of one…historians must remain agnostic about the validity or the “truth-claims” of religion, treating it as a human phenomenon and a dimension of human experience. But we must also recognize its enormous significance for human life and for historical development.
Historians in general and the AP World History curriculum framework in particular consider religion largely as a “belief system,” a set of ideas, theologies, doctrines, creeds, philosophies and beliefs. Such an outlook lies behind the debate about Zoroastrianism. Is it monotheistic or polytheistic/dualist? The first thing to say about such an “intellectual” take on religion is that religious “beliefs” are often ambivalent, conflicted, and murky.
Most foundational religious texts after all deny the possibility of capturing the reality of the Divine in language or intellectual formulations. To Hindus the Divine has been described as “Thou against whom all words recoil” and the best we can say about God is “neti, neti” or “not this, not this.” The Dao de Ching declares that “The Way that can be spoken is not the eternal Way.” The Quran defines Allah as “The One beyond compare.” The Buddha told his followers “Be a light unto yourself; betake yourselves to no external refuge. Hold fast to the Truth. Look not for refuge to anyone besides yourselves.” The Jewish prophet Isaiah declared that “as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts, says the Lord.”
None of this has put a dent in the outpouring of religious language, but those formulations are often anything but clear-cut and definitive. Hinduism is often regarded as wildly polytheistic, but Hindu philosophers also put forward the notion of Brahman, a primal unitary energy infusing all things. Only Brahman is real; all else is an illusion. Thus Hinduism might be considered “monistic” if not “monotheistic”. To Muslims, the Christian notion of the Trinity makes it a polytheistic religion. Early Buddhism largely did without God or the gods, but subsequent versions of the faith turned the Buddha into a kind of divine being and populated the universe with other supernatural beings to whom the faithful might turn for assistance.
The point here is the limitation of “belief” as a way of thinking or teaching about religion. No doubt, beliefs have often been important and served as a source of conflict and division both within and between religious traditions. But religion is about more than belief as I hope to suggest in Part II of this posting.
Part II: BEYOND BELIEFS: BEHOLDING, BEHAVING, AND BELONGING
So beliefs are important in the teaching of religion, but it is equally important to show how they have evolved and changed over time.The elaborate Christian doctrines that emerged in the 3rd and 4th centuries and later were very different from the simpler teachings of Jesus. As the religious tradition of India in what we now know as Hinduism evolved over time, it developed a wide variety of philosophical understandings and practices. The Islam of the Shariah and of the Sufis both traced their origins back to Muhammad and the Quran, but they were very different understandings of Islam. We need to be very careful about defining any of the religions we teach as definitely and clearly this or that. For historians, the emphasis is on “process” rather than “essence”.
But beyond belief, other dimensions of religious life are even more fundamental and more historically significant. One of them is “beholding”, which refers to the interior dimension of religious life, what practitioners claim to have experienced: visions, ecstatic state of consciousness, an awareness of Divine Presence, hearing a voice of God, a sense of the sacred or the holy.
Historians, of course, can neither validate nor refute claims about inner experience, but we must acknowledge their significance. Something happened to the Buddha sitting under a tree in northern India, to Jesus during his 40 days in the wilderness, to Muhammad in the cave outside Mecca. Those inner experiences motivated and inspired their behavior and drew millions to follow them. Perhaps the best way to get a handle on “beholding” is to have a look at the writings or poetry of those in the more mystical branches of their traditions: Rumi and Hafiz in the Islamic world; Mirabai from the bhakti expression of Hinduism; St. Francis, Julian of Norwich and Hidegard of Bingen in the Christian world; Du Fu and Li Po from the Chinese Zen/Daoist tradition. In all such cases, “belief” took a back seat to inner experience.
Yet another focus for the teaching of religion in a world history context involves behaving. Behaving points in the first place to the visible rituals and practices of religious life: Buddhist meditation; Catholic mass; Muslim’s 5x/day prayer; Jewish holidays; chanting; singing; sacred dancing. For many, such practices were surely far more significant than the elaborately articulated beliefs of the learned elites.
But behaving also refers to the moral, ethical, and legal prescriptions for living in the world which religions so often express: the Jewish 10 Commandments, the 5 precepts of the Buddhists, the Sharia of Islamic law codes, Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. While beliefs surely differed across religious communities, many have argued that there is a common thread running through the ethical values of many religious traditions. That common thread was one that emphasized the overwhelming importance of love, compassion, or kindness. It might be interesting to have your students consider whether the classical religious traditions are more similar or different.
A final dimension of religious life, and one quite available to historical reflection lies in belonging. Belonging suggests the institutional, social, and political dimension of religious life. As religions spread and became embedded in institutional frameworks, the acquisition of wealth, power, and hierarchy grew more prominent. The difference between the early Christian “house churches,” established by Paul and often led by women, gave way to a far more elaborate bureaucratic structure with an all-male leadership.
And when Christianity became official within the Roman Empire, what had been an intermittently persecuted minority became closely aligned with state authority and more than willing to ostracize and persecute those who disagreed with officially prescribed doctrines. As Buddhism spread across Central Asia and into China, it acquired state support and its monasteries often became places of considerable wealth.
And in the 9th century, the Chinese state took drastic action against this Buddhist establishment, ordering some 260,000 monks to return to normal life as tax paying citizens. Thus historians can reflect on the various ways in which religiously-based identities have shaped human communities, supported and challenged political authority, generated conflicts/wars, and prompted social protest.
In short, religions are far more than “belief systems.” They also become vehicles for profound inner experience; they provide practices and rituals to sustain the faithful; they establish ethical/legal guidelines for living in the world; and they give rise to communities of belonging, which interact with state authorities and social structures in various ways. All of this can be examined historically.
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