Church and State: Getting Back Together for Education?
Don Duncan sits with ease, a kind smile wrinkling his gentle face framed in golden hair. He sets his tea down on a charming mess of sheet music, eyebrows suddenly furrowing as he recounts the catalyzing incident that made him resign as a trumpet professor at Wichita State University in Kansas.
“All of a sudden, almost an overnight click happened with this student Aaron, and he turned on me.”
As a devout Christian, Duncan has always sought ways to enrich his teaching experience as a trumpet professor. So when he said one or two sentences asking his students to “see how Bach put his faith in his music” or “consider what Easter is about” before performing at a local church, he didn’t think there would be any problems. And there weren’t, until Aaron, a Unitarian, reported Duncan to the Director of Wichita State’s School of Music for violating the separation of church and state.
“Well, what’s wrong with that?” asks Duncan. “Nobody else was offended by it. They saw the spirit that I was presenting—I was just sharing my heart.”
Christianity has had an interesting affair with education. Before the 19th century, the two were considered a single unit—Harvard began as higher education for ministers in 1636. However, scientific discoveries and developments made in the last two centuries have split them apart, and their relationship has never been the same since.
Robin Capcara, the faculty administrator for Carnegie Mellon’s Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, confirms this trend, saying that “Among faculty administrators, Christianity and Mormonism are viewed in the most negative light. And so if you are a committed Christian or a committed Mormon faculty member, people are going to be expecting you to mess up and be rude.”
This expectation is not unfounded. This past February, Thomas Payne, professor of criminal justice and devout Christian, filed a lawsuit against the University of Southern Mississippi, claiming that he was unfairly penalized for sharing his faith in the classroom, which he believed to be a First Amendment right. He reportedly received negative evaluations, was denied a promotion as well as a contract renewal.
However, one Hindu graduate student told the courts that Payne did not simply share his faith, but forced it onto his students, telling them “anyone who is not Christian is going to hell.” When students came to him for academic advice, Payne would tell them to “pray about it.” While Payne did not address this accusation, he did say “As a Christian, I am called on to be evangelical…[B]y that I mean when I am asked about my faith, that I stand up for my faith…which is appropriate and not illegal.”
Payne’s is only one of many separation of church and state cases that seem to involve Christian plaintiffs and defendants. Downing v. West Haven Board of Education in 2001 was about a teacher who wore a “JESUS 2000 — J2K” t-shirt. Van Orden v. Perry in 2005 debated the constitutionality of Ten Commandment monument at the Texas State Capitol. In 2010, Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, the student organization in the University of California, Hastings College of the Law banned LGBT students from becoming voting members despite their Christian faiths.
Does this mean that Duncan could have avoided the incident if he practiced any religion other than Christianity? Maybe.
“People in higher ed have x higher opinions of Hindus, Muslims, Jews, atheists, and agnostics. They don’t expect them to act badly,” Capcara says.
Kunal Ghosh, a vivacious physics professor at Carnegie Mellon for almost 15 years, is easily one of the most popular faculty members on campus. A devout Hindu, Ghosh has the kind of energy that makes him seem more likely than Duncan to be accused of sharing too much of his faith. Yet Ghosh has “never had a problem with his religion and teaching career.”
And it’s not because he hides it better than Duncan.
“Do I give examples of religious things in the middle of class? In a very teasing way, yes. For example, if you have a wall of uniform charge, it does not change from place to place, it’s always the same. Then I give the example that it is like being near God. If you are near God, you will see God everywhere. But you don’t have to believe in God to understand this. Does this change the physics? No. I just use them as examples. I do not need them.”
Furthermore, he has had “some students, who come out, who can talk about Hinduism. Then I explain stuff that I believe in. And many of them are scientists, but in spite of all that we find all these other areas which physics cannot explain.”
So how did Ghosh manage to teach and practice Hinduism for nearly 15 years while Duncan lasted only 6? Robin Capcara suggests it might be a combination of history and a difference in doctrines.
“It really began in the 19th century; the advent of Darwinism, Freudianism, and Marxism—three different world views that challenged that there was a God at all, or that you needed a God to do intelligent research and explore the world.”
Capcara additionally points out that these worldviews largely challenged Christianity and Catholicism, as the first large waves of Asian immigration did not hit the U.S. until the 20th century. Therefore, Eastern religions were rarely present during the first dramatic clashes between church and state.
It is also clear that the difference in doctrines between Western and Eastern religious philosophy contributes to the negative bias towards the former. Many Western religions require believers to evangelize while Eastern religions urge self-meditation and improvement.
When asked what he would do if his own son had a professor sharing non-Christian viewpoints in class, Duncan answered, “if some guy was speaking garbage, or what I perceive to be garbage, then yeah, I would come to his defense if appropriate.”
Ghosh on the other hand, explains that Hindus “believe that all religions are the different paths to God, and it depends on your taste. When people were suffering in the Middle East because of the Romans, there was a need for Jesus Christ, who was God himself that incarnated at the time to rescue the people there, and it worked for many, many people. And similarly, the Buddha. The Buddha was one of the greatest people who ever lived on earth—they’re all just different paths.”
But Capcara, also Christian, believes these contrasting viewpoints actually help universities embrace the diversity they so strongly advertise to students in today’s globalized world.
“If the university had a bias, it was towards secularism. It continues today, but it’s lessened a little bit in the last 20 years, with the advent of post-modernity. It has brought with it an openness to multiple ways of knowing, and multiple ways of thinking.” According to Capcara then, universities are starting to accept that religion and secular education are “two different ways of knowing, and they can be complementary.”
It seems that higher education professors do indeed believe religion and education are complementary. In a 2007 survey conducted by Neil Gross, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, and Solon Simmons, Assistant Professor of Conflict Analysis and Sociology at George Mason University, a surprising 76.6% of 630,000 undergraduate professors identified themselves as spiritual people. 19.6% said they do not believe in God, but in a Higher Power; 4.4% said they sometimes believe there is a God; 16.9% is doubtful but believes there probably is a God; and 35.7%—the largest chunk—said that they had no doubt God existed.
Given the long and complicated history of church and state, how could a surprising majority of the country’s most dedicated intellectuals consider themselves spiritual?
“The main reason for religion is there is a this hunger within you, that in spite of everything you are doing, why aren’t you happy? I was born, I grew up, and then I will die—what’s the point? Is there no meaning behind all of this?” says Ghosh. “That’s why I think science and religion are complementary things, not antagonistic things. Religion is an experimental science that covers many regions where today’s science does not reach.”
