Prying Open a Closed Mind

Presidential politics has once again pushed religious fundamentalism onto the front page. As George W. Bush was forced to back-pedal on his relationship to a fundamentalist university with an embarrassing history of racism, John McCain went on the offensive against some of the most popular fundamentalist public figures. Through all this, pundits pontificate about the appropriate role of religion in politics.

But left unexamined is a much deeper question with important implications for education and public life more generally: Are fundamentalist religious faith and the modern world compatible? To raise that is not to be irreligious or question the value of spirituality and religious faith. It merely asks a question the culture would prefer to ignore: Can one be a thinking person in the modern sense and a fundamentalist?

Nowhere is that question posed more sharply than in a public university. An example from my "Critical Thinking for Journalists" course:

A student came to my office after a recent class discussion that covered disputes about truth and knowledge claims in contemporary society. She explained that she came from a strict Christian family that believed in a literal interpretation of the Bible and that the discussion in class about different approaches to the concept of truth was leading her to question some of those doctrines.

I told her that confusion over such questions wasn't unusual, or bad, and that questioning beliefs was what college was all about. She understood, but that didn't reduce her distress. She feared she would have to choose between the reassuring fundamentalism she had grown up with and a new intellectual life that seemed exciting but full of uncertainty.

She was right; she has a choice, and the paths are mutually exclusive. The choice is commonly framed as being between religion and science, or faith and the secular world. But in fact, the choice is between different understandings of religion and the role of faith in modern life.

My central point is simple: One cannot be an intellectual (used in a broad, non-elitist sense to mean any person engaged in serious inquiry about how the world works) in a meaningful sense and hold onto fundamentalist beliefs about the nature of truth and language. That simple fact is largely ignored in university life because educators, and the culture in general, can't quite figure out how to deal with the fact that the religious fundamentalism of a significant chunk of the population is incompatible with education in the modern sense.

Such a statement is not an attack on religion or spiritual attempts to understand questions about human existence and the natural world that are beyond the ability of rational systems to comprehend. It's not even an attack on fundamentalism. Despite the fears of many, universities are not engaged in a conspiracy to strip students of their faith. But if we take a central mission (no matter how rarely realized) of the university to be to foster questioning of authority structures and of the taken-for-granted assumptions of a culture, then students inevitably will question faith systems as well as political, economic and social systems. Such questioning is not an attack, any more than criticizing U.S. government policy is an attack on democracy. It is simply an exercise of human intelligence, creativity and moral responsibility.

Fundamentalist students often deal with these tensions by choosing church-affiliated schools. But given the mandate of state universities to educate the public, conflicts inevitably arise on campuses like mine, the University of Texas. Most administrators would prefer the problem go away, or at least remain invisible, but professors know that it crops up fairly regularly. I have yet to find a way to finesse the issue; talking honestly with students about my views sometimes leaves them feeling as if I have attacked their beliefs.

But even more dicey is the question of faculty members who hold such beliefs, for in a fundamental sense they are not qualified to teach in the modern university. When interviewed by a journalist for a story about a conservative fundamentalist Christian colleague of mine, I made this point, arguing not that he should be fired but that we should consider the crucial issues his teaching raises. I expected criticism; I got total silence. That silence, which I take to be about the fear of engaging the issue, prompts me to expand on those comments, not out of disrespect to my colleague but to suggest the culture cannot forever ignore such a basic tension.

My undoubtedly harsh-sounding assessment that faculty with fundamentalist beliefs are unqualified to teach in a modern public university is based on two arguments.

First, one of the foundational principles of a modern university is that everything -- every theory and bit of evidence and proposition and argument --is up for grabs, is potentially wrong. A corollary is that there have to be some generally accepted rules for defending evidence, arguments and theories.

So, in an open intellectual atmosphere, nothing can be assumed to be true. A theory about the nature of the cosmos or the proper functioning of government can never be taken to be definitive and final. The history of inquiry is a history of change in ideas and understandings; being an intellectual means, in part, accepting that what we take today to be the obvious truth is quite possibly dead wrong.

Another aspect of intellectual life is being willing to subject one's evidence and arguments to critique from others, following shared rules about how that argument and critique can go forward. Those rules are always being contested, but some rules are basic. One is that the evidence and argument have to be accessible to others.

In a free society, one is free to assert that a single god encompasses all truth, that knowledge of that fact is acquired through faith, and that the question is settled, permanently. But such claims do not make sense in an intellectual arena committed to an open process of critical inquiry. If a professor contends that all propositions, in the end, can be judged true or false on the basis of a principle that is asserted but cannot be defended by an open intellectual process, that is tantamount to rejecting the basic premises of the university.

Another problem arises around fundamentalist notions about language. Literalist claims about how one reads a divine text are so radically inconsistent with contemporary understandings of language that, again, those who hold such a view and incorporate it into their teaching are embracing a non-intellectual, if not anti-intellectual, worldview.

A discussion I once had with a fundamentalist Christian graduate student sharpens the language question, and highlights the problem of trying to be an intellectual who will not engage intellectually on certain questions.

Although we had very different approaches to life and scholarship, the student -- I'll call him Fred -- and I had been talking for some months. He would wander into my office every few weeks for a quite lively debate about media, politics and religion. One day, Fred asked me to explain my concerns about literalist ideas of Biblical interpretation. I began by pointing out that there are many different kinds of writing in the Bible: parables, poetry, accounts of historical events, assertions of moral rules. Do you read those all the same? I asked. He acknowledged that he didn't.

So, I continued, you establish an interpretive framework for understanding how to approach different kinds of material in the Bible. Yes, he agreed.

So, I asked, you use an interpretive framework to understand the text, but you claim that you do not interpret the text? Fred stopped for a moment, pondering how to respond. He had a choice of either exploring the implications of it with me or simply abandoning the discussion. He chose the latter.

Then, in the last substantive comment I made to him, I suggested that he had a choice: He could either hold onto such beliefs or he could be an intellectual, but he couldn't do both.

Fred earned his Ph.D. and went off to teach at another public university. I am not particularly worried that he will inappropriately inject religion into his classroom, that he will proselytize on the job. He was an honorable fellow who seemed to understand why that would not only be inappropriate, but counterproductive for his cause, just as I understand that proselytizing for my politics in the classroom is both wrong and ineffective.

I am worried, however, that Fred will model for his students a stunted approach to intellectual life. From many discussions with him, I know that he was a person who enjoyed asking questions and discussing a variety of issues with others, including those who disagree with him. But that final conversation with him made me realize that he had been playing by a different set of rules than I.

I had assumed that when he engaged me in conversation about a question, he was open to being changed. I am not shy about arguing forcefully for positions and ideas I believe in, but I do that with an acute awareness that I could be wrong. I have been wrong, many times. But I found that on key issues, Fred didn't share that view. I assumed he was willing to offer evidence and argument that another person could evaluate to defend his views. He wasn't. It wasn't that he thought he was so smart, but that he knew his god was the definitive source of truth and that he had had a bead, now and forever, on the path to know that god.

I had always known that Fred was out to convert me, which never bothered me. I was, in some sense, trying to convert him to a different way of seeing the world. So long as we were both playing by the rules, such a discussion could have been productive, for both of us.

The sad part is not just that he wasn't open to learning from me, but that his approach made it difficult for him to teach me anything. Professors know that the most important educational experiences involve learning that goes both ways. I did learn a few things from Fred, but the most important lessons he might have been able to teach me were lost in the huge intellectual divide that separated us.

I know such exchanges between secular and religious people are possible. In the peace-and-justice movement, I sometimes work with people whose commitment is based in faith. I learn from them, and I hope they learn from me. That is possible because their conceptions of faith, truth, and language do not preclude them from those exchanges, nor does the fact that faith systems are not meaningful to me block me from engaging them. What differences we have can be understood and bridged by a commitment to public conversation in a pluralist society.

That's why I say this is not a clash between the religious and the secular, but between different conceptions of religion. The student who came to my office after class, nervous and confused about the choices she faced, knew that she could expand her horizons and retain a faith in her god, but she knew that she couldn't do that and retain the fundamentalist faith of her family.

These questions are important not only to university folks, but to the whole culture. Public debate about fundamentalism and politics typically turns on questions of hot-button issues such as abortion and gay rights. But the deeper issue is what kind of public sphere, what kind of democratic dialogue, is possible when fundamentalist claims to truth have such force in shaping discourse.

This is an issue on which there is no obvious compromise, no easy way to cut a deal. The fundamentalists, I suspect, have long known that, and their organizing strategies are geared not toward compromise but toward control. Those who want the modern university to remain modern -- and who hope for a rich public sphere that allows for maximal public participation -- need to think about what that kind of university and public sphere -- what kind of knowledge -- we are willing to fight for.