For a scholar of law and
religion, the Newsweek headline sounded irresistible: “NEW
OHIO LAW LETS STUDENTS GIVE WRONG ANSWERS ON TESTS FOR RELIGIOUS REASONS.” It confirms secularists’ worst fears about the
religious right. But it wasn’t
news. It was a particularly pernicious
kind of popular fiction.
A Patheos blog post began thus:
Anti-intellectual, anti-science,
anti-education: In a disturbing development the Ohio House has passed
legislation that would allow students to give wrong answers and not be
penalized if those wrong answers are based on the student’s “sincerely held
religious belief.”
For example, “If public school students turn in work saying
the earth is only 10,000 years old, they cannot be penalized under Ohio House
Bill 164 if its their religious beliefs.”
The law “would allow students to substitute religious dogma for science.”
The story, which was picked up by many news outlets, turns
out not to be true. The bill
provides that a school “shall not penalize or reward a student based on the
religious content of a student’s work.”
It evidently reflects a concern about students being prevented from
expressing their religious beliefs when they are relevant, in English or
History classes. If a student is given
the opportunity to choose a book to study, she should be able to pick part of
the Bible; if asked to write about someone they admire, they should be able to
pick Jesus Christ. There are anecdotes
in which teachers have not allowed religious answers to otherwise open-ended
questions, sometimes under the misimpression that the First Amendment forbids
students from discussing their faith.
(It doesn’t.) There’s a real
concern here to which the bill responds.
Nothing in the legislative language suggests that students can avoid
doing the work that is assigned.
This episode, which went viral – the Patheos story got more
than 20,000 shares on its first
day – shows an enormous appetite for stories that show that crazed demons
are taking over American politics. That
kind of Manichean story is, of course, the key to Trump’s success, but this isn’t
only about him. Here the left is doing
it too.
The great challenge of contemporary polarized American politics is to
construct a narrative in which everyone can recognize themselves and see a
place for themselves. Trump has no
interest in that. The next president had
better. Episodes like this one aren’t
helping.