Religion & Belief1mo ago · 105 comments
Should religion be taught in public schools?
Education about belief, or indoctrination on the taxpayer's dime? And who decides which religion gets the classroom?
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Add your comment- Liam1w ago
honestly the fact that this is still a debate in 2025 tells you everything. the kids are going to learn about religion whether you like it or not. from youtube. from tiktok. from their friends. from extremists who figured out the algorithm. at least in a classroom there's a teacher who can add context. the choice isn't 'religion or no religion.' it's 'us or the algorithm.'
- Priya1w ago
This is the most important comment in this entire thread and I hate that it's buried down here.
- Iris1mo ago
I taught high school world history for 22 years. You literally cannot explain the Crusades, the Reformation, the partition of India, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or frankly anything in human history without explaining what people believed and why they were willing to die for it. The curriculum already teaches religion — it just does it badly and pretends it isn't.
- Theo 213w ago
I am a public school teacher with 22 years of experience. The practical reality nobody talks about: most teachers are NOT trained to handle this. I have colleagues who genuinely believe their job is to save children's souls. Putting religious content in the curriculum without massive teacher training reform is just handing them a loaded weapon.
- Theo3w ago
Counterpoint: most teachers aren't trained to handle climate change or mental health either and yet here we are teaching both. 'Teachers aren't ready' is an argument for better teacher training, not for ignorance.
- Feli1mo ago
Raised Jehovah's Witness. Left at 19. What I needed wasn't for religion to disappear from school — I needed someone to show me there were other frameworks for meaning, other traditions, other ways of being. A good world religions class might have gotten me there years earlier. Isolation protects orthodoxy, not children.
- Taylor1mo ago
Teaching ABOUT religions = essential history. Teaching kids to BELIEVE one = a state picking a god. The whole fight is people blurring those on purpose.
- Leo2w ago
Here's my genuinely controversial take: religion should absolutely be taught in public schools — AND sex ed, AND evolution, AND climate science, AND how to do your taxes, AND basic cooking. Our curriculum is a disaster of omissions because every topic has a lobby against it. We've optimized for inoffensiveness and produced helplessness.
- Yuki2w ago
the taxes thing is so real. my 17 year old knows what the Protestant Reformation was (barely) but has no idea what a W-2 is. priorities are broken across the board not just on religion
- Jamie _x3w ago
I asked my 14-year-old what she knew about Hinduism after nine years of American public schooling. She said 'they have a lot of gods?' That's it. That's the whole education. Over a billion people's living tradition reduced to a shrug. We have already made a choice — we chose ignorance. I'd like to choose something better.
- Sam B.1mo ago
my daughter came home from school last year and told me her teacher said evolution was 'just a theory that not everyone agrees with.' That's religious infiltration already happening in science class. Maybe we should have the religion conversation IN religion class instead of having it corrupt every other subject.
- Priya1mo ago
Counterpoint: separating religion into its own box might actually make the science class problem worse, not better. If kids learn that religion is a legitimate academic lens in one class, some of them will try to apply it in physics class. You can't compartmentalize worldview.
- Drew 213w ago
grew up atheist in a small southern town. religion was taught in my public school constantly. not 'about' religion. religion. i knew every bible verse they wanted me to know by fifth grade. nobody asked my parents. nobody asked me. so forgive me if i dont trust the 'we can keep it academic' crowd.
- Liam K.3w ago
I hear you and I believe your experience was real. But that's an argument for doing it right, not for doing nothing. Medical schools used to teach incorrect things. We fixed that by improving the teaching, not abolishing medicine.
- Noah3w ago
The medicine comparison doesn't work at all and I'm tired of seeing it. Medicine has a falsifiable, empirical standard we can grade against. Religious 'accuracy' is — by definition — contested by every single tradition simultaneously. Who writes the test? Who grades it? What's the right answer on the final exam about the resurrection?
- Alex3w ago
Nope. Comparative religion is an actual academic field with actual peer-reviewed journals and actual scholarly consensus on historical facts. You don't have to rule on whether God exists to teach that the Council of Nicaea happened in 325 CE or that Muhammad received the first revelation in the Cave of Hira. Facts are facts.
- Morgan R.1w ago
I spent three years teaching a World Religions elective at a public high school. The conversations in that room were some of the most alive, careful, honest I've ever witnessed teenagers having. Kids pushing back. Kids sharing. A Muslim girl and a Jewish boy actually becoming close friends over shared Abrahamic texts they'd never realized they shared. Tell me again why we're against this.
- Casey1w ago
This is a beautiful anecdote and I believe it completely. I also know that your experience depended heavily on YOU being a thoughtful, careful teacher. Scale that to 130,000 public schools and tell me how many of those rooms look like yours vs. how many become something else entirely.
- Alex1w ago
The scalability argument always sounds smart until you realize it's an argument against improvement in any domain. 'Not every teacher can do this well' is a reason to invest in teacher training, not a reason to abandon the idea.
- Avery _x1w ago
my grandmother fled a country where the state taught religion. mandatory. one religion. hers was the wrong one. so you'll understand why 'the government should teach religion' hits different in my family.
- Drew1w ago
I understand and I honor that history. But the opposite extreme — a state so aggressively secular it pretends religion doesn't exist — has its own casualties. France has been running that experiment for decades and the social fractures are not pretty. Neither extreme is freedom.
- Quinn R.1mo ago
The fact that we can read Homer, study Greek mythology in depth, analyze Norse legends — all in public school — but the moment someone says 'let's teach what Islam actually believes' half the country loses its mind tells you everything about whose comfort we're really protecting.
- Elena4w ago
I'm a pastor and I'll say it: I don't want public schools teaching religion. Not because I'm afraid of scrutiny — because I've seen what state-mandated religion does to faith. It flattens it. It makes it rote. The Soviet Union made atheism mandatory and produced more genuine believers per capita than almost anywhere. Compulsion kills conviction.
- Ravi4w ago
Wait, are you actually citing the Soviet Union as an argument here? The mechanism there was persecution, not just mandatory classes. That's an enormous leap.
- Taylor4w ago
The point stands at a smaller scale. When my kids have to memorize Bible verses for a grade, religion becomes homework. It stops being sacred. The pastoral argument for keeping church and state separate isn't just constitutional — it's spiritual.
- Hana2w ago
I'm Muslim and I WANT my children to understand their faith in an academic context alongside other traditions. Religious isolation breeds the kind of 'us vs them' thinking that I spend half my life fighting against. Shared literacy is the beginning of shared humanity.
- Marco2w ago
As a Jewish parent I feel this deeply. My kids have more Jewish education than most, but they come home not knowing how to explain their own traditions to their friends because their friends have zero context. Nobody benefits from this wall of mutual ignorance.
- Taylor 921w ago
My grandmother survived partition. She watched people die over the exact question of which god a region belonged to. When people in these comments treat religious education as some quaint curriculum debate, I want to shake them. This stuff has stakes. Actual, lethal, generational stakes.
- Omar1mo ago
Every time I read these debates I think about the kids who aren't represented. The Sikh kid in Georgia. The Hindu family in rural Ohio. The Muslim child in an Alabama school. For those kids, what gets 'taught' isn't education — it's a daily lesson in whose culture counts.
- Priya B.2w ago
I went to a private religious school and I'm telling you: being inside a bubble is genuinely dangerous. I didn't meet a person from a different faith tradition until I was 18 and I was TERRIFIED of them. Not because my parents were bad people. Because ignorance is terrifying and it masquerades as safety.
- Elena4w ago
There's something almost funny about the people most loudly opposed to teaching religion in schools being, in many cases, the same people who want prayer brought back to schools. Like — you want the practice but not the scholarship? Make it make sense.
- Feli4w ago
Those aren't necessarily the same people at all. You're flattening two very different communities into one convenient straw man.
- Morgan4w ago
they overlap more than you'd like to admit. ive been to those school board meetings.
- Iris3w ago
The moment a teacher says 'and THIS is why Islam/Christianity/Buddhism is beautiful,' the lesson is over and the sermon has begun. That line is crossed every single day in public schools across this country and nobody wants to admit it.
- Sam 921w ago
The 'us or the algorithm' framing is genuinely the most clarifying thing I've read on this topic. My nephew came home last year explaining why one religion was 'basically evil' because of a 47-second video he'd watched seventeen times. The classroom absolutely lost that round.
- Drew1mo ago
Here's the take nobody wants to say out loud: parents who object to teaching religion in schools are often the same parents who ARE already teaching their kids a specific religion at home and at church. They don't want scrutiny. Academic study creates scrutiny. That's what they're scared of.
- Theo1mo ago
completely false. i object because i dont want the state having ANY role in my kids spiritual formation, full stop. not because im scared of scrutiny. my faith can handle questions just fine, thanks.
- Theo1mo ago
Then a purely academic, descriptive class about world religions shouldn't bother you at all? 'This is what Buddhists believe, this is the history of Islam, this is how the Reformation changed Europe.' That's not spiritual formation, that's history and social studies.
- Theo1mo ago
The problem is it never stays 'purely academic.' A teacher's own beliefs bleed in. The selection of sources reflects bias. The amount of time devoted to each tradition sends a message. There is no view from nowhere. A 'neutral' class on religion taught by a devout evangelical is not the same class as one taught by a secular humanist.
- Liam1mo ago
By that logic we shouldn't teach history either because teachers have political views. We shouldn't teach literature because teachers have aesthetic preferences. At some point you have to trust the institution to do its job imperfectly rather than ban entire subjects.
- Liam1mo ago
Can we talk about the fact that in many states, extracurricular Bible clubs can meet on school grounds with teacher sponsorship but a comparative religion elective gets voted down at the district level? The bias isn't in teaching religion — it's in which religion gets the quiet green light.
- Yuki2w ago
Here's the real issue nobody will say out loud: conservative Christians want it taught because they assume Christianity will dominate the curriculum. Secular progressives oppose it because they fear exactly that. Both sides are actually arguing about power, not education. The kids are an afterthought.
- Ravi2w ago
That's a pretty cynical read. Some of us just... want our kids to understand the world? Not everything is a power struggle.
- Leo _x1mo ago
I went to a British school where we had 'Religious Studies' as a compulsory GCSE. We covered Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism, and secular ethics. Nobody got indoctrinated. Several of my classmates came out MORE religious because they finally understood their own faith in context. The American framing of this debate seems almost paranoid from the outside.
- Noah S.1mo ago
The American framing exists because America has a specific constitutional history and a specific culture war context that Britain doesn't share. 'But it works in the UK' is genuinely not the argument you think it is.
- Hana2d ago
I've lived in four countries. The ones where kids grow up knowing almost nothing about religion produce adults who are either weirdly hostile to it or weirdly susceptible to the first charismatic version they encounter. Religious literacy is a vaccine. You don't give a vaccine because you want the disease.
- Sam2d ago
That vaccine analogy is going to be used by every youth pastor in America to argue for evangelism in schools, congratulations
- Elena2d ago
If your analogy can be misused, that's not an argument against the analogy, it's an argument for being precise when you use it. The point stands.
- Ravi1w ago
Imagine being a Sikh kid, a Jain kid, a Zoroastrian kid, in an American public school. Your entire existence is a footnote if you're lucky and invisible if you're not. The status quo isn't neutral. The status quo already picks winners.
- Nina3w ago
I find it fascinating that we teach children to read and count before they can truly consent to the worldview those skills will let them access, but somehow introducing them to world religions is uniquely coercive. Every form of education shapes the child. The question is always just: shaped toward what?
- Casey1mo ago
My kids go to a public school in a small Southern town. They already pray in class. The teacher leads it. Nobody calls it 'teaching religion' but that's exactly what it is. So the ship has sailed in a lot of places — the debate is just who gets to pretend otherwise.
- Drew3w ago
I find it genuinely wild that we're debating whether kids should learn that Ramadan exists, that the Torah is a foundational text of Western law, that the Bhagavad Gita influenced Gandhi, who influenced MLK, who changed America. This is not exotic knowledge. This is basic literacy.
- Kofi 921w ago
I am a pastor and I do not want public schools teaching my faith. Full stop. What they teach will inevitably flatten it, get details wrong, present it alongside things I consider false equivalencies, and send kids home thinking they've understood something they've barely touched. I'd rather they taught nothing than taught it badly.
- Diego1w ago
With respect — and I do mean that — this argument proves too much. Biologists could say the same about high school biology. Historians say this about high school history constantly. 'Don't touch it because you might oversimplify it' can't be the standard or we'd have no curriculum at all.
- Theo B.2w ago
I taught AP World History for fifteen years. Religion woven through history honestly and comparatively: transformative for students. I watched kids who came in with contempt for 'the other side' leave genuinely curious. It CAN be done. But it requires intellectual courage from teachers and administrators that the current system actively punishes.
- Priya _x2w ago
What does intellectual courage look like when a parent storms the school board threatening to have you fired for spending one week on the Five Pillars? Because I've seen that happen to a colleague. She was a brilliant teacher. She quit.
- Yuki L.2w ago
Then the problem is the school board culture, not the curriculum. Fix the school boards.
- Drew T.2w ago
Oh great. 'Just fix the school boards.' Why didn't anyone think of that. Problem solved everyone.
- Nina4w ago
Literature is FULL of religious allusion. Without basic religious literacy students literally cannot understand Paradise Lost, The Brothers Karamazov, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Beloved, or half of Shakespeare. We're already teaching religion through literature — just without context. That's worse.
- Quinn2w ago
I want to push back gently on something in this whole discussion. We keep saying 'teach about religion' as if that's obviously neutral. But choosing WHICH religions to cover, how much time to give each, whose texts to cite, whose internal disputes to acknowledge — all of those are editorial choices with political consequences. There is no view from nowhere.
- Nina R.2w ago
Sure, but that's also true of every history class ever taught. We don't respond to the impossibility of perfect neutrality by teaching no history. We teach better history. This argument proves too much.
- Avery2d ago
What nobody is saying in this thread: indigenous spiritual traditions. Native American beliefs. Animist traditions across Africa and the Pacific. Every time we have this 'religion in schools' debate, we're really having a debate about how to arrange the Abrahamic traditions plus maybe Buddhism, and everything else is invisible again. The Sikh kid comment touched on this but we need to go further.
- Marco T.1mo ago
Religion class in my Catholic school was the best and worst thing that happened to me. Best: I know more about theology, philosophy, and the history of ideas than most people I meet. Worst: it took years to separate the knowledge from the guilt. The subject matter isn't the problem. The coercive delivery method is.
- Riley3w ago
The Constitution actually settled this 60+ years ago. You can teach ABOUT religion (secular, academic, comparative). You cannot lead students IN religion. Engel v. Vitale, Abington v. Schempp. This isn't complicated. What IS complicated is that half the people in this debate don't know those cases exist.
- Noah3w ago
Ah yes, the Supreme Court, that infallible institution. Because everything they decided in the 1960s is obviously permanent and correct and we should never revisit any of it.
- Riley K.1mo ago
Comparative religion should be a graduation requirement. Full stop. If you cannot explain the basic tenets of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism, you are not educated. You are just confidently ignorant.
- Quinn1w ago
The answer isn't a semester-long course. It's woven throughout. Religion shows up in ancient history, in art class, in literature, in social studies, in current events. The question shouldn't be 'do we have a religion class' but 'do we integrate religious context throughout the curriculum.' Most schools do this terribly. Some do it well. Scale the ones that do it well.
- Iris1w ago
This sounds great until you realize it requires every single teacher across every single subject to have adequate religious literacy. Have you MET most social studies teachers? I say this with love as someone who was one.
- Feli1d ago
Former school board member here. The practical reality: any religion curriculum proposal immediately gets captured by whoever shows up to the three meetings where it's decided. And the people who show up are almost never the people this thread is imagining. They're organized advocacy groups with very specific agendas. The idea of a measured, scholarly, comparative religion course is lovely. The political process that would actually produce it is a nightmare I've watched play out in real time.
- Theo M.1d ago
This is the most deflating and probably most accurate comment here. Good policy ideas get eaten alive by bad political processes all the time. Doesn't mean the idea is wrong. Means we need to think harder about implementation and who controls it.
- Iris K.3w ago
My honest opinion after thinking about this for years: the question should not be 'should we teach religion' but 'at what age.' Elementary kids don't have the cognitive framework to engage with religious claims academically without it bleeding into belief formation. High school juniors and seniors absolutely can. The answer is probably both yes and no depending on grade level.
- Sam1w ago
Comparative religion was the single most useful class I took in high school. Not because it made me religious. Because it made me stop being an idiot at dinner tables, in boardrooms, and in every country I've visited since. That's not indoctrination. That's just being a functioning adult in the actual world.
- Priya3w ago
Hard disagree with the whole framing here. Religion isn't a 'topic.' It's the organizing principle of most of human civilization for most of human history. Not teaching it is like not teaching gravity because some people find it inconvenient.
- Priya1mo ago
Atheism and secularism should be covered too if we're doing this. They're philosophical positions about meaning and morality just like any religion. If you teach Buddhism but not secular humanism you've already tilted the table.
- Maya _x3d ago
The conversation keeps assuming 'religion class' means some formal dedicated period. But the real opportunity is just training teachers to not flinch. A history teacher who confidently explains why the Crusades happened, what motivated both sides, what Islam looked like in 1095 — that's religious education. It's already supposed to be happening. We're mad about a solution to a problem that should be solved anyway.
- Ravi3d ago
lol 'confidently explains what motivated both sides of the Crusades' in a public school in the American south. i'll wait.
- Riley3d ago
And that's exactly why the political pressure on curriculum is the actual fight, not whether we 'should' teach religion. We've already decided we should. The question is whether we have the civic spine to actually do it honestly. Most school boards don't. That's a board problem, not a religion-in-schools problem.
- Marco1mo ago
I grew up atheist in a very religious community. What I always wanted wasn't for religion to be banned from school — I wanted to understand WHY everyone around me believed so fervently. A good comparative religion class would have helped me enormously. Instead I just felt alien and confused for years.
- Liam2w ago
Literature alone would do half the job if we taught it properly. You cannot read Dante, Toni Morrison, Dostoevsky, or Chinua Achebe without religious literacy. The fact that we've hollowed out literary education is the real scandal here.
- Priya R.2w ago
This is actually a great point that almost nobody makes. The secularization of literature education has produced kids who read The Scarlet Letter as 'a story about a woman who cheated' rather than as a deep argument about the relationship between institutional religion and individual conscience. That's not a richer reading. That's a poorer one.
- Alex M.3w ago
teach kids logic and critical thinking first. then they can evaluate religion, science, politics, everything else themselves. but we dont do that either so here we are.
- Drew1mo ago
The argument 'who decides which religion' is actually answered pretty easily by any competent curriculum committee. You teach the major world religions by number of adherents and historical impact. Nobody needs to 'decide' — the list basically writes itself. This excuse for not doing it is intellectual cowardice.
- Ravi T.1mo ago
Indigenous spiritual traditions have more adherents in some regions than several of the 'major' religions and are almost never included in these curricula. The list does NOT write itself. It reflects who had the power to write it.
- Morgan1mo ago
This is a genuinely good point and I've never seen it raised in this debate before. Thank you.
- Liam L.6d ago
My kids are in a public school that does this really well, integrated into history and lit like someone in this thread suggested. My daughter knows what Ramadan is, knows why Diwali happens, knows the basics of the Reformation — and she's nine. She's also not confused about what she believes. Kids can handle information. We underestimate them constantly.
- Casey B.1w ago
okay but who writes the curriculum tho. like genuinely. a school board in rural alabama and a school board in portland oregon are going to produce two very different 'objective' religion courses and both of them will call it neutral. that's the whole problem in one sentence.
- Sam1w ago
This is a real concern but it applies to literally every subject. History curriculum varies wildly by state. Science curriculum varies. Sex ed varies enormously. We don't say 'therefore no history class.' We say 'we need better standards.' Same answer here.
- Iris6d ago
atheism should be included in any honest survey of world belief systems and i will die on this hill. it's a coherent philosophical position held by hundreds of millions of people. the moment a 'world religions' course skips it is the moment it becomes advocacy by omission.
- Priya K.6d ago
Atheism isn't a religion though. You can't include 'the absence of X' in a course about X. That's like including silence in a music appreciation class.
- Theo5d ago
That's genuinely one of the worst analogies I've ever read on the internet and that is saying something. Atheism is a position on the question of gods. A course about beliefs about gods that doesn't address the position of 'no gods' is incomplete. Secular humanism exists. Philosophical naturalism exists. These are developed systems of meaning. They belong in the conversation.
- Nina M.1mo ago
ok but who writes the textbook tho. whoever writes the textbook controls the framing. that's not a small problem that's the whole problem
- Casey1mo ago
bold of you to assume any public school has teachers qualified to teach this. my school district can barely find certified math teachers
- Morgan1mo ago
This is actually the most practical objection in this entire thread and everyone's ignoring it. Training and curriculum development for something this sensitive takes serious resources. Who funds it? Who sets standards? The abstract debate is fun but implementation is where it all dies.
- Alex _x5d ago
I went to a madrassa as a kid and a public school simultaneously. Both taught me things. One taught me to memorize. One taught me to question. I needed both actually. The answer is never 'shut one down.' The answer is always 'make both better.'
- Zara3w ago
my kids school did a 'world religions' unit and the teacher spent three days on christianity and literally one paragraph on buddhism. that's not education that's just prejudice with a syllabus.
- Avery1mo ago
Grew up in a school that pushed one faith hard. Took me 20 years to realize 'education' had actually been a decade of fear.
- Noah R.1w ago
I don't want the government teaching my children anything about my faith. Full stop. The government is bad at this. The government is bad at most things. My temple, my family, my community are where religious education belongs. Keep the state out of it.
- Ravi1w ago
Then homeschool. Public school exists for ALL kids, including the ones whose families have no religious community, or whose parents work three jobs, or who are in foster care. Those kids deserve religious literacy too.
- Sam _x1w ago
Separation of church and state exists for a reason. Teaching religion in a government building, funded by government money, taught by government employees — I don't care how 'objective' you make it, you're already blurring the line. Hard no.
- Hana1w ago
The First Amendment doesn't prohibit teaching ABOUT religion. The Supreme Court said this explicitly in Abington v. Schempp in 1963. It prohibits school-sponsored religious practice. These are not the same thing and conflating them is either ignorance or deliberate bad faith. Please read a case before invoking the Constitution.
- Jordan1mo ago
You can't understand a single war, painting, or country without religious literacy. Pretending it doesn't exist makes kids dumber, not freer.
- Morgan T.1mo ago
Whose religion, though? The second you say 'teach it' you have to answer 'which one,' and that question has started actual wars.
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