Chapters 3 and 4
Summary by James R. Martin, Ph.D., CMA
Professor Emeritus, University of South Florida
Chapters 1 and 2
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5 | Chapter 6
Chapter 3: Eden (What We Once Knew)
The success of the New World or American experiment depended on the abundance of basic literacy. Both Europeans and Americans believed that social order depended on morality, and morality depended on religion. Church and state both depended on a populace able to read and understand the Word of God. The theory was that reading the Bible would sustain the social order by fostering faith and ethical behavior. In response the colonists passed laws in the seventeenth century requiring children to learn to read the Scriptures and other good printed books in the English language.
"The Most Literate Place on Earth"
After the American Revolution, children needed to learn to read to be good Protestants, but also to be good citizens. The American experiment in republican government that extended suffrage without regard to economic means (but still in regard to race and sex) depended on informed citizens for its survival. Children learned to read to free themselves from sin and to liberate themselves from monarchs, to save their souls and to save the republic. Although seventieth and eighteenth-century New England became perhaps the most literate place on earth, reading literacy was not as common in the southern and middle colonies. However overall literacy for both men and women was higher in the colonies than in the Continent.
"Scripture Learnt"
Colonist and early Americans mainly used literacy to read the Bible. But Americans also imported, published and read countless catechisms (i.e., summaries of principles of religion in questions and answers) such as the 1647 Westminster's Assembly's Shorter Catechism, and the Anglican catechism. In addition, the average weekly church-goer in New England listened to around seven thousand sermons in a lifetime or fifteen thousand hours of religious presentations. That is roughly ten times the required class time of today's four-year college student. Religious books made up about half of the books printed in the colonies between 1639 and 1689. In colonial and early national America, literacy and religious literacy were combined. It was not possible to become literate without gaining a Protestant religious literacy as well. Religious literacy as noted was limited to Protestant literacy. Anti-Catholicism was a key component, and other religions were not included.
Household
People become educated from various sources including homes, churches, newspapers, almanacs, books, libraries, museums, theological tracts and political pamphlets, Sunday schools and workplaces. Six venues were particularly important in delivering religious education to early Americans including: homes, churches, schools, Sunday schools, Bible and tract societies, and colleges. In the seventeenth and eighteenth-century homeschooling was the norm. In 1642 the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed legislation that required families to teach their children to read and understand the principles of religion. New York, New Haven, Plymouth, Pennsylvania, and Virginia passed similar legislation.
Church
Early Americans also acquired religious education in the church, and meeting house attendance was required by law as early as 1635 in Massachusetts. Puritanism involved a four-part sermon that included text, doctrine, reasons, and uses. Sermons emphasized scripture, reading it, understanding it, and applying it. Anglican preaching in Virginia, South Carolina, and Maryland also focused on the Bible.
The First Amendment that outlawed any federal religious establishment, but established religious freedom provided all Americans with a religious option they could call their own. Baptists and Methodists overtook the old colonial standbys such as Congregationalists and Episcopalians (as the Anglicans were renamed after the Revolution).
School
Universal free education was first offered in the United States. In 1647 the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed a law that instructed towns of fifty households to appoint teachers of reading and writing, and towns of one hundred households to establish grammar schools. Virginia passed similar laws and the burden of education passed from homes to schools. There were dame schools (run out of housewife's kitchens), grammar schools, private academies, petty schools (one room elementary schoolhouses), and evening schools. From the beginning the curriculum emphasized religion, and early literacy education was essentially a course in Christianity. The publicly funded common school emerged in the 1820s and they were very much a part of the Protestant establishment. They were essentially little nurseries of piety and religion and their goal was to turn out good citizens and good Protestants.
The New England Primer
During the colonial period the "ordinary road" from illiteracy to learning was the hornbook, a one page lesson on a paddle-shaped board. It usually included the alphabet, a list of vowels of common two-letter combinations, a cross, the Lord's Prayer, and a short invocation of the Trinity. This primitive primer yielded to a series of school books that combined spelling and syllabification with scripture readings and catechism. After the Bible the New England Primer became the best-selling book in colonial and early America. Like the hornbook the New England Primer was mainly a primer on religion. It included a series of rhyming couplets (usually biblical) and woodcuts that provided a way to memorize the alphabet. For example: A In Adam's Fall We sinned all. B Heaven to find; The Bible Mind. C Christ crucify'd For sinners dy'd. The primer taught the Calvinist theology of the Puritans including the fear of God and its morbid preoccupation with sin and death and everlasting judgment. It also included the Lord's Prayer and the Apostles Creed, Bible quotations and a list of biblical names. In addition it included the following famous prayer in the 1737 edition: "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take." With this book and other similar books religion permeated the classroom in early America.
Noah Webster's Speller
Noah Webster's speller was the first great best seller in American history. Noah's publications also included his 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language that focused on standardizing the writing and speaking of American English, and his 1833 American translation of the Bible, but his most popular creation was The American Spelling Book first published in 1783. Webster's speller was full of Bible quotations and other information related to religion. Webster's lessons emphasized morality as well as theology and he called his narratives "Lessons of easy Words, to teach children to read, and to know their duty." Webster's speller was more secular and less sectarian than the New England Primer, and focused on reading with religious lessons interspersed, but one-third to one half of the content was devoted to religion.
McGuffey's Readers
The McGuffey readers debuted in 1836 and delivered a considerable amount of religious knowledge to American youth. By 1890 they had become the standard school readers in thirty-seven states. These readers told gripping stories about children and included such ditties as "Twinkle, Twinkle little star" and "Where there's a will, there's a way." They had a socially conservative focus on middle-class morality of frugality, hard work, and self control. They were also focused on teaching theology, and God was the book's leading character. These readers provided instruction in God's creation and Providence, the sinfulness of humans, the primacy of salvation through Christ for the next life, and the necessity of righteousness and piety in this life.
As schoolbooks evolved from the New England Primer, Webster's spellers and McGuffey's readers they equipped generations with a shared set of religious information. Students of these books understood the basics of church history and were capable of understanding debates about slavery, temperance, women's rights, war, and poverty.
Other Pious Schoolbooks
There were many competing schoolbooks but they all stressed the Fourth R along side, reading, writing, and arithmetic. Some of these included Dilworth's New Guide, readers by Charles Sanders like "The Bears and the Bees," "The Cat and the Lobster," "God Made All Things," and "The Child's Prayer." Alternatives also included The Franklin Family Primer, The First Dixie Reader, and Richard Gilmour's Catholic readers. All of these books had a religious tone.
Sunday School
Sunday schools that migrated from England had a different purpose in the United States: teaching working class children how to read. However, in the 1820s this model changed under the American Sunday School Union to focus on cultivating religious literacy. Where common schools were initially for boys, girls were the main students in Sunday schools. These schools fostered religious literacy with a vast network of libraries and religious tracts. They focused on understanding the meaning of Bible stories and became the primary means for socializing the rising generations into evangelical culture. Common schools began to focus on basic literacy, while Sunday schools focused on religious literacy. The Sunday school became the main way to indoctrinate Protestant youth outside of the family.
Bible and Tract Societies
Religious literacy was not evenly distributed across the United States. Some parts of the country were in the religious darkness and "spiritual ignorance" as one evangelists commented. Hundreds of nonprofit Bible, tract, and missionary societies were developed to promote religious literacy. The Boston-based Society for Propagating the Gospel (SPGNA) was created for educating the Indians and others in North-America. Other organizations included the General Baptist Tract Society (1816), the American Tract Society (1825), and as noted above the American Sunday School Union. Together these organizations created the first mass media in America. For example the SPGNA distributed 1566 primers, 969 spellers, 768 New Testaments and 310 Bibles.
College
America's first three colleges (Harvard (1636), William and Mary (1693), and Yale (1701)) were all founded to educate clergy and emphasize religion. By the Revolution there were nine degree-granting colleges, and instruction in these schools emphasized discipline and religion. Students were required to attend chapel services and college presidents were typically Protestant ministers. As late as 1905 a research study of religion at state universities concluded that these institutions were more Christian than the average community.
Toward a New Religion
By the early nineteenth century sectarian Protestantism began to give way to nonsectarian or nondenominational Protestantism, that emphasized morality rather than theology. Where the New England Primer taught children that they were sinners and that Jesus died to save them from their sins, the McGuffey readers taught children that God wanted them to work hard, save their money, tell the truth, and avoid alcohol. It became more important to believe in Jesus and the Bible than to know what Jesus did or what the Bible said. According to the author, this new religion was more of a threat to religious literacy than the forces of secularism.
Chapter 4: The Fall (How We Forgot)
This chapter includes the nineteenth-century battle inside American Christianity between piety and learning. Christianity today is about loving Jesus, but it does not require knowing much about Jesus, the Bible or any particular Christian religion. The purpose of this chapter is to explain how America's fall into religious illiteracy happened. A wave of secularism washed away our memories of Bible stories and their heroes. The Supreme Court's 1960s ruling that banned prayer and devotional Bible reading in public schools had a lot to do with this wave, but demand for practical subjects edged religion and other traditional subjects out of the public curricula. In addition, a new form of Protestantism called evangelicalism emerged that did not focus on religious literacy. America's fall into religious illiteracy was not caused by secularists trying to banish religion, but instead by well-meaning Protestants, Catholics and Jews intent on saving religion from the changes of modernism.
The Second Great Awakening
Around 1800 the Puritan's view that God predestined each person before birth to either heaven or hell gave way to the view that all are free to accept or reject the saving grace of Jesus and determine their own destiny. Revivals were held with potent mixes of religion and entertainment. Evangelicalism had supplanted Puritanism, and Methodist and Baptist had displaced Congregationalists and Anglicans. As new religious options became available (e.g., spiritualism, Adventism, Mormonism) competition increased between the various religions including Protestants and Catholics. Although revivalism made converts by the millions, these new Christians were different from those of the past. Gradually nondenominational uniformity eroded the specifics of denominations as Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists joined to form a united evangelical front. As Americans grew tired of theological controversies they gravitated to the lowest common-denominator - faith, but this further reduced religious literacy. This Second Great Awakening aided in the national religious amnesia.
Dimensions of the Sacred
There are six dimensions of the sacred including: doctrinal/philosophical, narrative/mythic, ritual/practical, experiential/emotional, ethical/legal, and social/institutional. Different religions focus on different dimensions. Puritanism emphasized the doctrinal and experiential dimensions of religion to spread religious literacy. Evangelicals on the other hand have ignored and even discouraged religious learning. Although evangelicalism is responsible for the vitality of religion in America, it is also responsible for the lack of understanding of religious doctrine. Evangelicalism was assisted in this decline by liberal Protestantism that shared the same emphasis on morality and experience at the expense of doctrine. However, the story of Americans' decline into pious ignorance includes schools and colleges, as well as churches.
Nonsectarianism and the Public Schools
From the beginning the goal of public education was to produce good citizens and that required that schools were based on a religious foundation. The problem was how to inculcate religion without dividing religious groups against one another. The solution was the concept of generic religion, or nonsectarianism, or nondenominationalism. Both tolerance and intolerance fueled this nonsectarian view. Protestants desired to get along with competing denominations, but this did not extend to Roman Catholics. Protestants wanted a unified front against the wave of Roman Catholic immigration and the Catholic form of brainwashing that was viewed as incompatible with liberty.
Horace Mann's approach to universal education included five elements: 1. Teach piety, 2. limit religious education to those doctrines that were not controversial, 3. locate classroom piety in the moral truths of Christianity, or Golden Rule Christianity, 4. use the King James Bible as the foundation, and 5. allow for three religious rituals in public schools including prayer, hymn singing, and devotional Bible reading. One obvious problem with this generic schoolhouse faith is that it is not generic since it excludes every religion other than Protestantism.
Bible Wars
The Roman Catholic church objected to Horace Mann's approach to education, particularly the King James Version of the Bible. Catholics had their own version, the Douay-Rheims based on the Latin Vulgage translation of the fourth and fifth centuries. Their version included footnotes and commentaries. In 1844 there were Protestant-Catholic riots related to whose Bible would be read in public schools and some Catholic churches were burned to the ground. This eventually led to the realization that a generic religion does not exist and subsequently to legislation that mandated completely secular, Bible-free public education.
Godless Schools
The Bible wars produced four important results:
1. It became nearly impossible to discuss religion in most public schools. Some schoolbooks continued to include Bible passages, but subjects such as bookkeeping, sewing, and science edged out theology.
2. Hymn singing, praying, and Bible reading were consolidated, included at the beginning of the school day and became empty ceremonials.
3. Morality was substituted for religion as Christianity morphed into generic moralism.
4. There was a rapid growth of parochial education among Catholics.
The Christian religion today is mainly based on moral views on premarital sex, homosexuality and abortion rather than a belief in Jesus's divinity.
Nonsectarianism and Higher Education
Higher education resisted secularization longer than the public schools, but the values of research, specialization, and professionalization became more important than the pious preoccupations of the prior model. Higher education gave way to student choice rather than a fixed curriculum, learning skills rather than learning content, emphasis on science rather than theology, and electives in literature, science, and the arts rather than mandatory theological instruction. The nonsectarianism, or unsectarian university became the guiding idea of higher education reform.
Establishing Unbelief
The secular university turned religion into a specialization known as religious studies. College courses reduced religion to morality or more specifically reverence, trust, obedience, faithfulness, sincerity, honesty, helpfulness, health and happiness, or essentially doing good. The idea of nonbelief was established when a 1890 South Carolina act established that an infidel or atheist could not become president of the University of South Carolina.
From the Head to the Heart
A variety of trends transformed Christianity into religious amnesia including: from intellect to emotions, from doctrine to storytelling, from Bible to Jesus, and from theology to morality. Gradually the demands of democracy, romanticism, and commercial capitalism produced a belief in intuitive, folk wisdom over the sophisticated knowledge of the well-to-do. Populist preachers viewed debates about doctrine as beside the point and theological education as useless. Instead they viewed feeling and acting, a heartfelt relationship with Jesus, and practical action to reform sinners as a more urgent focus. This spiritual anti-intellectualism produced Christians who would endeavor not to know Jesus, but to feel him.
From Doctrine to Storytelling
Prior to the Revolution, Sunday sermons were based on the classical themes of Calvinist Christianity: sin, salvation, and service, but the old fashioned sermon was criticized for being dry, dull, and dogmatic. Parishioners wanted to be entertained and ministers learned to give them what they wanted, colloquial sermons light on Christian doctrine, but peppered with personal stories about friends dying and giving birth, and entertaining anecdotes about farms and factories. The progression from doctrine to storytelling worked. It filled the churches and produced conversions. The story sermon became the norm for both liberal and evangelical Protestants. By the end of the Civil War, robust religious instruction was mostly a thing of the past.
From the Bible to Jesus
The idea that the Bible should be the sole authority in matters of Christian faith and practice came under attack in the nineteenth century. Darwin's evolutionary theory, and advances in geology challenged the conventional wisdom. Evangelicals responded by reasserting the divine authority of the Bible, but liberal protestants responded by pledging their allegiance to Jesus alone. Evangelicals gradually came around to the same idea that Christian life was an encounter with Jesus, not the Bible.
From Theology to Morality
Protestants needed a foundation to work together to Christianize the nation and vanquish the Catholic menace. They couldn't use doctrine since Baptist and Episcopalians disagreed on infant baptism, Lutherans and Quakers disagreed on the sacramental nature of Holy Communion, and Universalists disagreed with most Protestants on the afterlife. So Protestants found a basis for cooperation that combined Christianity, republicanism, and capitalism. They asked themselves, "What would Jesus do?" Religion was reduced to morality and doing good.
The Judeo-Christian Tradition
A postwar revival of religion occurred in the 1940s and 1950s. President Dwight Eisenhower was baptized in office in 1953, "under God" was written into the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, and "In God We Trust" became the nation's motto in 1956. Protestants, Catholics, and Jews came together to fight godless Communism and they all saw themselves as adherents to a common faith. Eisenhower referred to the idea as "the Judeo-Christian concept." Eisenhower felt that religious faith was what was important, not the specifics of that faith. The concept was referred to as "Faith in faith." In the 1940s and 1950s Americans were only Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish and military dog tags came with only those three religious preferences to support that view. Although this changed somewhat after the 1960s the Moral Majority or religious right used Judeo-Christianity to attack liberal democrats as well as godless communism. Today the Christian Coalition has replaced the Moral Majority and "values evangelicals" paper over real theological differences and water down the traditions to find common ground.
Abrahamic America
Today the Judeo-Christian model is being replaced by a Judeo-Christian-Islamic model or Abrahamic model of American religions. Multireligious America may soon become a Judeo-Christian-Buddhist-Hindu-Islamic-Agnostic-Atheist society. The tendency to replace doctrine with spirituality and morality is motivated even more by the fact that many Buddhist don't believe in God, and many Hindus believe in more than one God. Today we live in a moral republic, but not an intellectual one.
Fundamentalists and Other Intellectuals
The exodus away from religious literacy met with some resistance. Some viewed revivalism as charlatanism, or simply a lot of noise and rant with no desire for knowledge. Fundamentalists were perhaps the strongest resisters. They published a series of theological tracts in 1910 and 1915 attacking liberal Protestants for emphasizing social improvements in this world over salvation in the next world, and evangelicals for a lack of attention to the plain facts of the Bible.
Confessionalists-Experientialists-Moralists
There are different ways to divide American Christianity into groups. One might simply separate them into liberal and conservative camps who disagree on cultural politics, or family values rather than theology. However, a more relevant division includes three groups:
1. Confessionalists who emphasize Christian doctrine, and encounter God through reason,
2. Experientialists who emphasize experience, and encounter God through emotions, and
3. Moralists who emphasize the ethical dimensions, and encounter God through the will.
Most Protestants and Catholics have moved away from confessionalism to some combination of experience and morality, and the majority of Christians have now collapsed religion into the moral dimension. Most Americans respect other religions, but they are not interested in learning anything about them. As stated early in this book, Americans are religious, but are profoundly ignorant about religion. The author argues that this is reversible.
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Go to the next chapter: Prothero, S. 2007. Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know - And Doesn't. Harper San Francisco. Chapter 5: Redemption (What to Do?).
Related summaries:
Dawkins, R. 2008. The God Delusion. A Mariner Book, Houghton Mifflin Company. (Summary).
Martin, J. R. Not dated. Religious Affiliations Surveys 1972-2018 (Summary).
Martin, M. and K. Augustine. 2015. The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case against Life After Death. Rowland & Littlefield Publishers. (Note and Contents).
Miller, E. L. 1992. Questions That Matter: An Invitation To Philosophy, Third Edition. McGraw-Hill, Inc. (Summary).
Shermer, M. and P. Linse. 2001. The Baloney Detection Kit. Altadena, CA: Millennium Press. Ten questions to ask when examining a claim. 1. How reliable is the source of the claim? 2. Does the source make similar claims. 3. Have the claims been verified by someone else? 4. Does this fit with the way the world works? 5. Has anyone tried to disprove the claim? 6. Where does the preponderance of evidence point? 7. Is the claimant playing by the rules of science? 8. Is the claimant providing positive evidence? 9. Does the new theory account for as many phenomena as the old theory. 10. Are personal beliefs driving the claim? Baloney detection kit