If learning about evolution is essential for understanding contemporary science, if learning about sex is essential for adolescent health, is learning about religion any less essential for understanding a world of powerful and often literally explosive religious allegiances?

After a quarter-century of complaints about the eclipse of religion in history textbooks and others used in the public schools, a kind of consensus has emerged. As Charles Haynes of the First Amendment Center operated by the Freedom Forum puts it, "Knowledge of the world's religions is essential for comprehending much of history, literature, art and contemporary events" -- and conveying that knowledge in public schools is constitutional.

That doesn't mean it is easy. Parents, school boards, administrators and teachers are justifiably nervous about bias, proselytizing and community division. Reports of proposed Bible courses that are theologically loaded do nothing to calm these fears. Alongside those who worry that teaching about different religions will turn into preaching on behalf of one are those equally worried that such teaching will convey the relativistic message that religious differences are inconsequential.

So while the past scrubbing of religion from academic subjects has been modestly repaired, courses teaching directly about major religions remain few and almost always elective.

One exception is Modesto, Calif. For the past five years, all ninth-graders have been required to spend nine weeks studying major world religions. The course begins with a segment on the First Amendment and religious liberty in the United States, then describes in succession, though not comparatively, the beliefs and practices of Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Sikhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The semester's other half covers world geography; apparently, students should know about seven spiritual continents as well as the physical ones.

In a rare example of empirical research in this area, Modesto's experience has been studied by Emile Lester, a visiting professor of political science at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va., and Patrick S. Roberts, an assistant professor at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va. Their report, "Learning About World Religions in Public Schools," is available from The First Amendment Center's offices at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

Surveying approximately 400 students with 75 written questions before and after they took the world religions course in the fall of 2004, the researchers found that after the course, students expressed modest increases in their already strong support for religious liberty and their weaker support for other First Amendment rights like freedom of speech and assembly. The course increased students' basic knowledge about world religions and stimulated student interest in learning more about major faiths.

After the course, students were far more likely to view all major religions as sharing "basic moral values." But this increased appreciation of similarities among faiths "did not contribute to religious relativism or encourage students to change religious beliefs," the researchers write. Students did not conclude that "differences between religions are negligible or that choices about religion are arbitrary whims." In fact, later in-depth interviews with a sample of students showed that students' personal faith was more likely to be invigorated than enervated.

Modesto was not a problem-free setting for such an undertaking, said professors Lester and Roberts, who also interviewed school administrators, teachers and local religious leaders.

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