Religion Class

This semester I signed up to take Religion 101 for gen ed requirement. The official title of the course is "Religions in the United States," and I thought it would be fun because I like learning about other religions. However, it's not exactly what I expected. I was anticipating studying the beliefs of a lot of different religions, but instead, the focus is really on the history of all of the religions in the United States: how they have developed, adapted, etc. It's actually really disappointing. We are studying all major religions in the U.S., but we are going through them so quickly - one week for each religion - we don't have a chance to learn anything worthwhile about them. It's rather pointless. The first thing we studied was Native American religions. For the entire week our teacher in class as well as our outside readings kept saying how important it is to understand Native Americans and their religious practices, because they are so frequently overlooked. I was totally psyched. Great, I thought, I don't know a lot about Native American religions, so this should be a fabulous opportunity. Unfortunately, we only learned three common elements of their religious practices: that they are rooted in the land, that they have a history of a struggle for survival (what with colonization and all), and that they are ways of life, completely inseparable from other parts of their culture. I am not exaggerating, this is really all we learned about their religions and this is word-for-word what was on the test. After all that jazz about the under appreciation of Native Americans, and the importance of recognizing and understanding their spiritual practices, we scarcely learned anything about them.

Something else has been bothering me about this class. At first I couldn't quite put my finger on it, because pretty much everything we've been learning is technically true. However, I think the problem lies in what is not being taught. We move through everything at a very rapid pace, too fast to get the whole picture of the historical events we're studying. When we were learning about Judaism two weeks ago we were taught that Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year and an object associated with it is the shofar. That's it. On Friday we spent about ten minutes studying the Great Awakening. Really now, that is simply not enough time to properly understand anything. We are also not getting an accurate view of these historical things because we are looking at them through a modern lense. I've noticed that my teacher and classmates seem to judge every religion, person, and historical document we look at by how tolerant they are of other religions. For instance, white colonial settlers who were nice to the Native Americans are good. People who were not are bad. Pure and simple. Back in the day, tolerance was not on most people's priority lists - they placed importance on an entirely different set of values. But rather than looking at their values and examining the complexities of the situations that gave way to what we now call intolerant behaviors, we just judge them based on their tolerance. It is pretty pointless and, I think, impossible to truly study history in this way.

On a more positive note, we have had one interesting assignment. We are all required to attend a service of a religion different than our own. There are a lot of different options - Jewish synagogues, Buddhist temples, pretty much anything you can think of. I ended up going to an Antiochian Orthodox church yesterday morning and I must say, it was pretty cool. It was really different, and I definitely learned a lot from it. After the service we were able to talk with the deacon and ask him questions. He was very nice and I think our conversation was productive, although I really wish we could've had more time to talk with him. Hopefully I have enough information, because I have to get a 5 page paper out of this visit.