I. (Re)introducing Religion as a Legitimate Subject of Study in American Public Schools

Historically, religion did play an important role in the education of American citizens. Even after the adoption of the First Amendment to the Federal Constitution in 1791, and the subsequent disestablishment of official churches at the state level in the first half of the nineteenth century, the reading of the Protestant Bible and of the Ten Commandments, as well as non-denominational prayers, remained mandatory in the vast majority of schools. The influence of religion in American public education began to decline at the end of the nineteenth century as religious exercises gradually disappeared from the classroom. For instance, a report written by Columbia Teachers College in 1912 explained that in schools across the country, “religious instruction is either entirely eliminated or else reduced to the … most formal elements.”Footnote ⁶ The secularization of American public education became fully realized after the Supreme Court extended the scope of the First Amendment to the individual states in the 1940s: Religious instructionFootnote ⁷ and mandatory prayersFootnote ⁸ were ruled unconstitutional, as well as the devotional reading of the Bible,Footnote ⁹ and the teaching of creationism in biology classes.Footnote ¹⁰ The state—whether local or Federal—could no longer favor one belief over another, or even religion over non-religion, as this bore the risk of making atheists or followers of minority faiths feel as second-class citizens. These decisions did not mean, however, that any reference to religion had to be categorically kept out of public schools. On the contrary, the Supreme Court explicitly held that a non-devotional and strictly academic approach to studying religion or the Bible was constitutional. Yet, as a result of the Court´s First Amendment jurisprudence, religion as a subject of study also became largely overlooked in public schools across the country. In addition to being considered too controversial, religion was discarded as irrelevant for the education of democratic citizens in a world thought to become more and more secularized due to advances in technology and science.

Given this suspicion or disinterest towards religion in American schools, why, starting at the end of the 1980s, was it reconsidered as an important aspect of public education? This development was first the result of the resurgence of what José Casanova has called “public religions”—namely conservative Evangelical Christianity—in the United States.Footnote ¹¹ The so-called “Christian Right”—which was then emerging as a political force under Ronald Reagan´s first presidency—regularly asked lawmakers and judges across the country to legally reinstate the Bible, prayers, and creationism in the classroom. On the one hand, conservative Christians thus contributed to turning the topic of religion and education into an important public issue during that period.Footnote ¹² On the other hand, the absence of religion in the curricula was also criticized by progressive organizations who supported the project of a multicultural education. The main goal of this pedagogical reform—introduced in the 1960s—was to better consider the history and contributions of ethnic and racial minorities, as well as women, in the public school curriculum. The multicultural turning point of public education had so far ignored religion in education until the 1980s, when scholars, educators, and progressive interest groups started to ask for its inclusion into educational standards. American society needed to adapt to the changes in its religious landscape: The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which removed the restrictions on immigration from Asia and the Middle East, had indeed led to a significant increase in the number of non-Christian minorities in the United States, notably Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs.Footnote ¹³

At the end of the 1980s, against this backdrop of a growing diversification and politicization of faith, state Boards of Education—supported by scholars, educators, religious lobbies, and church and state separation advocacy groups—started to introduce new courses about religion in public schools. In 1988, California was one of the first states to make teaching about religion compulsory in middle school history curricula. In 1995, the Clinton administration signed the Federal Guidelines on Religion in Public Schools into law, making clear to every school district in the country that “public schools [can] teach about religion …”, and that “comparative religion, the Bible as literature, and the role of religion in the history of the United States and other countries are permissible school subjects.”Footnote ¹⁴

In every American state today, world history and world geography curricula require students to learn about the characteristics of major world religions, as well as about their cultural, social, and political influences. The religions studied in American public schools are mainly Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. US history courses also include references to important religious figures and movements, as well as to minority faiths and to the role of African-American churches under slavery. It is thus not religious education per se—as it is in Germany—but rather it is education about religion, taught transversally, from a strictly academic, non-devotional, and non-sectarian perspective.Footnote ¹⁵

II. The Promotion of “Democracy-Friendly” Religions Through Public Education

Thus, after decades of avoiding religion in the classroom, the diversification and politicization of faith have triggered a change in consciousness among state officials, scholars, educators, and interest groups. The latter grew aware of the resilience of religious identities in the public sphere. As a result, religion has come to be reconsidered as an important resource for the education of citizens within a pluralistic American democracy. In that sense, courses about religion—as they have been introduced across the country since the 1980s—carry a clear civic objective. They are intended to increase awareness of religious differences and to foster intercultural understanding among students. According to the National Council for the Social Studies—which develops educational standards for history and geography—these courses are intended to “decreas[e] religious illiteracy and the bigotry and prejudice it fuels,” and thus to foster an “effective and engaged citizenship in the nation and the world.”Footnote ¹⁸

It could be further argued that the content of courses about religion in the United States reflects a specific, democracy-friendly approach towards faith—one that could be characterized as a “civilized pluralism.” This normative narrative, which “reflects how religious differences should be apprehended by students … favors moderate, reflexive and ecumenical religions, and highlights examples of interfaith encounters, while downplaying instances of conflicts and violence.”Footnote ¹⁹ State educational standards, for example, stress the positive relationships between diverse religious traditions: California invites history teachers to “emphasize the common features” between Christians, Muslims, and Jews, as well as “the many ways in which [they] interacted.”Footnote ²⁰ In Texas, standards for world history require students to learn about the “interactions among Muslim, Christian, and Jewish societies in Europe, Asia and Africa,” or about the “interactions between Muslim and Hindu societies.”Footnote ²¹ Similarly, a survey of world history textbooks shows that they strongly emphasize the three Abrahamic faiths’ shared values and theologies and draw parallels between the Koran, the Hebrew Bible, and the Christian Bible. The textbooks also emphasize the three religions’ “sites of encounters” and instances of peaceful “cooperation” and “connections.”Footnote ²²

Yet one must also note that, despite recent initiatives aimed at fostering the teaching of religion in American public schools, these courses are still often limited to a mere presentation of religious facts mainly taught from a historical perspective. In most states, there is also a lack of systematic training for teachers. The discrepancies between the civic objectives assigned to these courses and their actual implementation—explained in part by the legal burdens of the First Amendment—eventually question the extent to which a constitutionally secular state can engage with religion and foster a normative pluralism via the sphere of public education.Footnote ²³

III. Courses About Religion as a Political and Identity Issue

Moreover, the ambition of an academic and pluralistic approach to religious diversity in the classroom is further complicated by the fact that teaching about religion in the United States has also become a contentious political and identity issue in recent years. Accordingly, religious interest groups actively attempt to influence the design and implementation of courses about religion, which sometimes triggers conflicts with public officials, educators, and scholars. These advocacy groups—whose main objective is to defend the rights and the social and political interests of people who identify as members of their religious community—are involved at all stages of the adoption process of both state educational standards and textbooks: They petition the Boards of Education, send hundreds of comments to the Boards and publishers when standards and textbooks are released to the public before their official adoption during the phase of public review, and sometimes even sue the Boards and publishers over what they consider an improper depiction of their faith.

Non-Christian minority religions in particular—Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs—have made the introduction of courses dedicated to their faith in public school curricula an important part of their identity strategies. Textbooks provide them with a unique medium to accustom generations of citizens to their beliefs, but also to display an attractive public image by countering stereotypes and emphasizing the compatibility of their values with those of American society. The creation of lobbies was specifically dedicated to monitoring and influencing educational standards and textbooks. These lobbies included the Hindu Education Foundation and the Council on Islamic Education, for example, while some broader advocacy groups—such as the Hindu American Foundation and the Council on American-Islamic Relations—have also made education one of their main focuses in recent years.

Over the past decade, for instance, the Sikh Coalition—the main Sikh-American interest group—has managed to convince Boards of Education in California, Texas, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, New Jersey, New York, and Tennessee to make the study of Sikhism compulsory in these states’ schools. By ensuring that millions of students will learn about their beliefs, the objective of the Coalition is to promote a “cultural shift in the minds of Americans” so that “future generations of Sikhs will be appreciated” in the United States.Footnote ²⁴ Yet, religious minorities not only want to be included into educational standards and textbooks, They also see courses about their religion as an opportunity to control and shape the public narrative on their beliefs and identity. They thus directly attempt to influence the content of educational materials. In that respect, religious interest groups particularly target what they consider to be negative descriptions, stereotypical iconography, or the use of complicated concepts that could be hard to understand for most American students. Hindus, for example, have systematically rejected the characterization of their faith as polytheistic or pantheistic, suggesting to Boards of Education and publishers that they would rather describe their theistic system as being dominated by a Supreme Being, a more common concept in the American context. More generally, minorities aim to stress the civic virtues of their faith,Footnote ²⁵ refusing to be associated with instances of violence and intolerance or with poor treatment of women. In a letter sent to the Colorado Department of Education prior to the adoption of the 2018 educational standards, the Sikh Coalition wrote that “nondiscrimination is a central focus of the Sikh religion, [which] explains why the founders of Sikhism rejected the caste system, gender inequality, and religious exclusivity.”Footnote ²⁶ In 2016, the Sikh Coalition also asked the California Board of Education to explicitly mention in educational standards the fact that “Sikhism is … based on the belief in one God and the equality of all human beings,” and the “rejection of the caste system.”Footnote ²⁷

But the pluralistic ambitions assigned to courses about religion are also being challenged today by the “Christian Right.” Since the 1960s, religious conservatives have been unsuccessful at reversing the Supreme Court’s secularization of American public education, failing to bring back the Bible, prayers, or the teaching of creationism into the classroom. In recent years, however, they have strategically used the new emphasis on religion in school curricula as an opportunity to rehabilitate the place of Christianity in the civic imaginations of American citizens. On the one hand, they have attacked the positive treatment of religious diversity in textbooks, questioning in particular the way Islam is portrayed. In several states, for example, they have called for the boycott of world history textbooks or brought lawsuits against teachers, school districts, and publishers accused of promoting Muslim beliefs while marginalizing Christianity.Footnote ²⁸ On the other hand, religious conservatives also seek to promote a distinct Christian worldview in the curricula. In 2015, for instance, the Texas Board of Education—where seven members out of fifteen self-identified as Christian conservatives—adopted new textbooks for high school US history courses in accordance with the educational standards drafted five years earlier. Strongly criticized by church and state separation advocacy groups, these textbooks reflect the traditional conservative narrative about the United States as a Christian nation. The textbooks mention the “importance of Judeo-Christian tradition” for the “American founding,” with a specific emphasis on “biblical law,” while Moses is presented as one of “the individuals whose principles of laws informed the American founding documents.”Footnote ²⁹

The claims and mobilizations of religious interest groups—whether minorities or conservative Christians—illustrate how the public governance of religion in the United States is a conflicted process, shaped by the interplay and negotiations that take place between diverse state and non-state actors. These groups also defend, through their positions on faith and education, competing representations of the country’s collective identity.

I. The Difficult Integration of Islam into a Structurally Unequal, Christian-Dominated System of Religious Education

If reunification had initially raised questions for the future of religious education in Germany, the most important challenges today, however, are those triggered by Islam. Since the 1970s and 1980s, Muslim organizations have repeatedly asked for equal treatmentaccording to Article 7-3 of the Basic Law, so they can provide Islamic education in public schools alongside Catholics and Protestants. This is of course an issue of right—being granted the same opportunities as members of other religious groups—but it is also, more generally, an issue of inclusion and recognition. The institutionalization of Islamic education in public schools would signal that Muslims, whose number is constantly increasing—they are now about 6% of the populationFootnote ³¹—are officially acknowledged as an important part of contemporary German society, not simply perceived as foreigners or migrants, bound to eventually go back to their respective countries. In 1984, the Education Ministers of the various Länder—Kultusministerkonferenz—agreed that, given the growing number of immigrants in Germany, Islamic education needed to be included in public schools.Footnote ³² But, despite the growing assertiveness, organization, and mobilization of Muslims, the inclusion of Islamic education into German public schools has been a very slow process until today. The case of Islam thus testifies to the deep inequalities at the heart of the German system of religious education, which is structurally biased towards Christian churches.

Accordingly, if the Basic Law of 1949 provides for freedom of faith and conscience and prohibits the establishment of an official church in Germany. But the state is, in practice, not completely neutral towards religion as a special partnership exists between the government and Christian churches via the legal status of Public Law Corporation—Körperschaftsstatus (PLC)—that is granted to some religious groups. The PLC status was first established by the Weimar Constitution, adopted in 1919, and Article 137 states that:

Accordingly, therefore, a religious community that is a PLC can indirectly collect taxes through the state, but also appoint prison, hospital, and military chaplains. Furthermore, the status of PLC gives access to public funding for hospitals or religious schools. Being a PLC, however, is particularly crucial when it comes to religious education, as only legally recognized groups can offer instruction in public schools, participate in accredited teacher training programs in public faculties of theology, and have the salaries of teachers paid by the state. This close relationship between the state and religious communities has been characterized as a “positive accommodation model of democratic secularism” by political scientist Alfred Stepan. He further describes this arrangement as a “historically constructed and negotiated, often consociational, bargain” between Christian churches and public authorities.Footnote ³⁴

In that context, therefore, it is not surprising that this PLC status has precisely been the main legal and institutional obstacle for minorities willing to cooperate with the state and to teach their religion in German public schools. According to the Basic Law, the decision to grant the PLC status is made at the local level, by the Länder, which base their assessment on a number of specific criteria, including an assurance of the group’s permanence, size, and respect for the constitutional order and fundamental rights of individuals. These criteria, which fit the history and organizational model of the Catholic and Protestant churches,Footnote ³⁵ have proved very problematic for minorities, especially for Muslims who are not as institutionalized as Christian groups, do not have a central authority, and are often divided into several branches. As Stepan sums it up:

Some Alevite groups did manage to obtain PLC status, but until the turn of the twenty-first century, requests made by most Muslim communities had been almost systematically rejected, thus de facto restricting their rights and influence within German society and, more particularly, in the sphere of public education. This situation has slowly begun to evolve over the past few years. The rise of a global and political Islam; 9/11 and other terrorist attacks perpetrated by extremist Muslim groups; the fact that hundreds of young Germans chose to join the ranks of ISIS in Syria and Iraq; and the arrival of close to one million refugees from the Middle East in Germany since 2015. These developments have made German public authorities aware that it was in their best interest to develop a close partnership with Muslim communities and, more particularly, to foster Islamic education courses in public schools in order to better monitor, and even influence, what is being taught to young German Muslims.

As theologian Rolf Schieder explains it, religious education in Germany carries an intrinsic civic mission. The state has historically used Christian religious education as a means to foster a civil religion—to fight religious fundamentalism, intolerance, and separatism, and to turn young believers into respectful, open-minded, and pluralist citizens.Footnote ³⁷ How, according to Schieder, is that “civilizing” of religion made possible, despite the constitutional requirement for state neutrality towards religious groups? This is done in an implicit manner by controlling the training of religious education teachers. They study for many years at departments of theology of public universities that are largely independent from churches where they critically learn about their own religion, are taught to interpret the texts by themselves, to develop their own opinion, and to not blindly follow the teachings of a higher authority. As Schieder puts it, religious education teachers:

As a result, religious education in public schools is different from what children learn with their family or at their place of worship. Historian Jean-Paul Willaime similarly explains that public schools, because of their very nature and specific requirements, almost automatically “include[] [the] religious facts [they teach] in the citizenship of pluralist democracies,” and thus help to “objectivize” and civilize religious identities.Footnote ³⁹ Religious education courses in public schools show students that their beliefs can be an object of scrutiny and examination, and thus “contribute to the epistemic ability to consider one’s own faith reflexively.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Accordingly, as Schieder also argues, it is in the best interest of the German state today to provide a space for Islam in public schools. In that way—and as it is already the case with Catholic and Protestant religious education—the state could better control the content of courses and the training of teachers, prevent fundamentalism and foreign influences, and promote liberal, democratic values among Muslim children. Therefore, a greater institutional recognition of Islam in Germany, and the inclusion of Muslim communities within the positive accommodation framework of religion-state relations—notably through the expansion of Islamic education in schools—is no longer the particularistic, undue demand of a foreign minority but has become, in the eyes of many, a crucial political and civic necessity. In 2008, for example, Wolfgang Schäuble—then-Minister for the Interior—officially acknowledged that an Islamic religious instruction, consistent with Article 7-3 of the Basic Law, should be introduced in public schools across the country.Footnote ⁴¹ Over the past decade, a growing number of Muslim groups have been effectively granted the status of Public Law Corporation, thus enabling them to provide Islamic religious education. As a result, the number of Islamic religion classes has significantly increased all over Germany. Länder with existing programs of Islamic education—such as Rhineland-Palatinate, Baden-Wuerttemberg, Bavaria, North-Rhein Westphalia, Lower-Saxony, Berlin, and Hessen—have recently announced plans to expand Islamic religion courses to additional grade levels and schools. Many of those Länder directly cooperate with local Muslim communities to develop their course offerings and to draft the curricula.

Yet, the institutionalization of Islamic religious education in German public schools is bound to be a long-term process, notably for practical reasons: There is a need for more faculties of Islamic theology to properly train the growing number of school teachers, and these faculties in turn need to hire scholars of Islamic theology, of which they are currently very few in Germany. In 2010, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research—Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung—decided to support the establishment of centers for Islamic Theological Studies at several universities by creating professorships and junior research groups, for example. According to the official guidelines, these centers are intended to become “internationally recognized places of Islamic theological research that educate and promote scholars of Islamic Theology to be later employed at schools and universities.”Footnote ⁴² The centers will be funded by the Federal government and the Länder. Currently, Islamic theological studies exist at the Universities of Tübingen, Frankfurt-Giessen, Münster-Osnabrück, and Erlangen-Nürnberg. In 2018, Humboldt University in Berlin announced the establishment of the Berlin Institute for Islamic Theology—“BIT.”to officially open in the Winter semester of 2019/2020. The BIT will be responsible for training imams, theologians, and religious education teachers. It was developed in collaboration with scholars and members of the Berlin Senate, as well as with the largest Muslim associations in the city. In that respect, the University purposely sought to have different Muslim sensibilities represented within the BIT´s Advisory Board so as to maintain a position of neutrality and, more generally, as a way to fulfill the mission of the Institute: To “emphasize[] a theology of diversity” and “in particular [to] give due consideration to Sunni and Shia teachings in comparison.”Footnote ⁴³ Yet, the decision to invite a representative of the Islamic Association of Shiite Communities of Germany to be part of the Advisory Board, although the organization is allegedly close to groups monitored by the German intelligence services, was decried by liberal Muslim figures, as well as by CDU and Green politicians, who argued that the presence of a “conservative” organization within the Board contradicts what should be one of the main goals of the BIT: To counter and prevent religious extremism.Footnote ⁴⁴

II. Towards an “Integrative,” Interdenominational Religious Education in German Public Schools?

Beyond the inclusion of Islamic religious instruction, other initiatives have emerged in recent years in order to adapt Germany’s system of religious education to an increasingly diverse society. Some have suggested replicating what has been done in Canada and other European countries: Abandoning the confessional, sectarian, and Christian-dominated model of religious education in favor of what Wanda Alberts has called an “integrative” approach to teaching religion.Footnote ⁴⁵ In that case, religious education courses would still be mandatory and part of the regular school curriculum, but it would be interfaith, taught mainly in an academic perspective, and thus inclusive of all students, who would not be separated along religious lines anymore. Today, this trend remains marginal in Germany, although there have been a few experiments with integrative religious education. Since the 1990s, for example, the Land of Hamburg has provided a course called “Interreligious Religious Education” or “Religious Education for All,” instead of the traditional Protestant and Catholic classes. The goal of this course, which was initiated by the Evangelical Lutheran Church, is to foster dialogue about differences and diversity among students. The decision to replace the sectarian classes with a more inclusive, interfaith education was made because of the very diverse religious landscape of the Land of Hamburg, which houses a significant migrant population, and where more people identify as religiously unaffiliated than as Protestants. In Hamburg, non-Christian religious groups—Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists—directly contribute to the religious education curriculum, teaching materials, and training programs for teachers.

Is it possible to assert, however, that this type of interfaith course will become the norm in Germany, and that the country will at some point definitely move away from a denominational approach to religious education, towards an integrative model? This is unlikely to happen in the short to medium term, as the influence of Christian churches remains too strong. It is not surprising, in that respect, that both the Catholic and the Protestant leaderships in Germany have supported the inclusion of Islamic education in public schools: It allows them to deflect the debates over whether to give up the entire confessional, sectarian system of religious education in favor of an academic and comparative “religious culture education” for all, based on a phenomenological approach to the study of religion.Footnote ⁴⁶ Arguably, this latter model—successfully adopted in Québec, England, and Scandinavia, for instance—would certainly make it easier to integrate minorities and would be better suited to a pluralistic, secular democracy, where the number of non-Christians, unaffiliated citizens, and non-believers keeps increasing. But it is also a model of religious education that does not give much space or power to religious communities. In that sense, the expansion of confessional Islamic education in Germany is what paradoxically contributes today to the preservation of influence of Christian churches in public schools across the country, as well as, to their special and historical relationship with the state.