The Literacy We Lost
In the days after September 11, 2001, a Sikh American named Balbir Singh Sodhi was murdered outside the gas station he owned in Mesa, Arizona — killed by a man who later told police he wanted to 'kill some ragheads' in retaliation for the attacks. Sodhi was not Muslim. He was not Arab. He wore a turban and a beard as an article of his Sikh faith, a tradition with no connection to the attackers beyond the killer's own confusion. His death opens a course about religious literacy: not tolerance, not devotion, but the civic skill of knowing what you are looking at.
Learning Objectives
- 1Define religious literacy per Diane Moore's framework and distinguish it from both religious tolerance (an attitude) and personal devotion (a practice) — literacy is an analytic and civic competency
- 2Close-read the First Amendment's Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses and explain, in your own words, the holding of Abington School District v. Schempp (1963) on the constitutional status of academic study of religion in public schools
- 3State fairly, without resolving, the Prothero/Armstrong debate over whether religious traditions are fundamentally different or fundamentally convergent, and identify what evidence would bear on each position
- 4Apply William James's functional definition of religion to a documented case of religious-literacy failure and explain what the failure cost
- 5Distinguish a religious-literacy failure (a factual and categorical error, e.g. conflating Sikhism with Islam) from a disagreement about a tradition's truth claims — and explain why this course addresses only the former
A Death in Mesa, Arizona
On September 15, 2001, four days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a man named Frank Roque drove to the Chevron station he had passed many times in Mesa, Arizona, and shot the owner five times. Balbir Singh Sodhi was forty-nine years old, an immigrant from Punjab, a father, and a Sikh — a member of a monotheistic tradition founded in fifteenth-century India by Guru Nanak, a tradition with its own scripture (the Guru Granth Sahib), its own ethical code, and no doctrinal, historical, or theological connection to Islam or to the men who carried out the September 11 attacks. Sodhi wore a turban and an uncut beard, articles of his faith commanded by the tenth Sikh guru, Gobind Singh, as visible markers of the Sikh community's commitment to courage and equality. Roque, by his own account to police and to a jailhouse informant, had gone looking to "kill some ragheads" in the days after the attacks. He did not ask Sodhi what he believed. He appears not to have known that Sikhism existed as a distinct faith at all. He saw a turban, a beard, brown skin, and drew a conclusion — factually wrong on every count that mattered — and a man died for it.
Sodhi's murder was not an isolated data point. The Sikh Coalition, a civil rights organization founded in direct response to his killing, has documented hundreds of bias-motivated incidents against Sikh Americans in the years since — vandalized gurdwaras (Sikh houses of worship), assaults, workplace discrimination, and children bullied at school — the overwhelming majority rooted in the same confusion that killed Sodhi: an assumption that a turban signals Muslim identity, and a further assumption, no less mistaken, that Muslim identity signals terrorism. Both assumptions are false, and both are literacy failures in the precise sense this course is built to address. The first conflates two entirely distinct religious traditions with different founders, different scriptures, different histories, and different theological content. The second conflates a global religious tradition of roughly two billion adherents, the overwhelming majority of whom have no connection whatsoever to political violence, with the actions of a small, widely condemned-within-the-tradition minority.
"A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden — beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them."
Durkheim, writing as a sociologist rather than a theologian, offers a functional definition of religion built around what religious systems DO for the communities that hold them — uniting believers into a shared moral community — rather than around what any tradition claims is metaphysically true. This functional lens is one of the tools this course uses throughout: describing what a tradition accomplishes socially without adjudicating whether its beliefs are correct.
This course exists because of failures like the one that killed Balbir Singh Sodhi — and because those failures are not confined to street violence by confused private citizens. They recur, with real consequences, at the level of national policy. In the years following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, multiple journalists and later official inquiries documented that senior American officials and military planners had, at critical junctures, an incomplete grasp of the Sunni-Shia distinction within Islam — a distinction with roots in a seventh-century succession dispute (which this course covers in full in Unit 6) that shapes present-day alliances, sectarian violence, and governance across the Middle East. A 2006 report by the Congressional Research Service and multiple contemporaneous news investigations noted that some American officials tasked with post-invasion planning struggled to explain, in basic terms, the difference between Sunni and Shia Islam — a gap in literacy that mattered enormously, because Iraq's post-Saddam power struggle ran substantially along that fault line. None of this is offered to indict any individual; it is offered as evidence that religious illiteracy is not merely embarrassing. It has a body count, and it has a policy cost, measured in decisions made by people who did not know what they were looking at.
Think About
Before reading further, write down your own working definition of 'religious literacy.' Does it mean being tolerant of other religions? Being able to name their holy texts? Something else? You will return to this definition at the end of the unit and revise it.
What Religious Literacy Actually Is
The scholar most responsible for defining religious literacy as a distinct educational goal, separate from both religious studies as an academic discipline and religious education as spiritual formation, is Diane L. Moore, founding director of Harvard Divinity School's Religious Literacy Project and the voice this course draws on most heavily for its method. Moore's framework insists on a distinction that gets collapsed constantly in ordinary speech, and getting it right is this course's first and most important task.
Religious literacy, in Moore's sense, is not the same thing as religious tolerance. Tolerance is an attitude — a disposition to accept that other people hold beliefs different from your own and to extend them basic civic respect regardless. It is a valuable social virtue, and this course does not discourage it, but it requires no actual knowledge of what any tradition teaches. A person can be perfectly tolerant of Buddhism while knowing almost nothing about the Four Noble Truths, and perfectly tolerant of Islam while being unable to name the Five Pillars. Tolerance is compatible with total ignorance of content.
Religious literacy is also not the same thing as personal devotion or piety. A devout adherent of a tradition — someone who prays, observes its holidays, and organizes their life around its teachings — has a rich, lived understanding of that tradition from the inside, and this course treats devotional insiders' accounts of their own traditions as a primary source of evidence throughout (this is what the constitutional guardrail governing this entire course means when it insists every tradition be described "in terms its thoughtful adherents would recognize"). But personal devotion to one tradition does not, by itself, produce literacy about other traditions, and it is not required for literacy about any tradition, including one's own. A person can practice a faith devoutly their entire life without ever studying its textual history, its internal legal reasoning, or its relationship to other traditions in the same historical neighborhood.
What Moore means by religious literacy is a third thing, distinct from both: a basic understanding of the internal diversity, history, texts, and social/political dimensions of religious traditions — an analytic and civic competency, not an attitude and not a practice. It means being able to state, accurately, what a tradition's adherents generally hold, recognizing that any tradition contains real internal disagreement (this is why the guardrail governing this course requires every tradition unit to name at least two live internal debates — a monolithic account of any tradition is, definitionally, an illiterate account), and being able to place a tradition's beliefs and practices in the historical and social context that produced them. Religious literacy is closer to the kind of competency you would want from a foreign correspondent, a diplomat, a judge, or a juror than from a pilgrim.
❓Concept Check
A student says: 'I don't need to study religious literacy — I already respect all religions equally.' Using Moore's framework, explain what is missing from this statement.
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Concept Check
A student says: 'I don't need to study religious literacy — I already respect all religions equally.' Using Moore's framework, explain what is missing from this statement.
The student is describing religious tolerance, an attitude of respect, which Moore's framework treats as valuable but categorically distinct from religious literacy. Tolerance requires no actual content knowledge — one can respect a tradition's right to exist while being unable to accurately describe what its adherents believe, how the tradition developed historically, or what internal disagreements exist within it. Religious literacy is an analytic and civic competency: the ability to accurately describe a tradition's history, texts, internal diversity, and social dimensions. A person can be maximally tolerant and maximally illiterate at the same time — which is precisely the condition that produced failures like the Sodhi murder, where the killer likely felt no particular hostility toward Sikhism as such (he may not have known it existed) but was nonetheless catastrophically unable to identify what he was looking at.
Cross-Curricular Connection: Intro Sociology, The Sacred and the Social, examines Durkheim's foundational distinction between the sacred and the profane as the organizing logic of religious life in any society. That unit's sociological lens — what does the sacred/profane distinction do for a community, regardless of its metaphysical claims — is the same functionalist tool this course leans on throughout, most explicitly here in Unit 1 and again when Unit 2 turns to cognitive-evolutionary accounts of religion.
Why the First Amendment Permits — and Requires — Studying Religion
A course like this one exists inside a specific constitutional space, and understanding that space precisely is itself a piece of the literacy this unit is building. The relevant text is the religion clauses of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1791.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…"
The religion clauses open the First Amendment and have generated more constitutional litigation than perhaps any other sixteen words in the document. They contain two distinct commands, not one, and the distinction between them is the hinge of this entire unit.
Read this sentence slowly, because it contains two separate clauses doing two separate kinds of work, and conflating them is one of the most common civic-literacy errors in American public discourse. The Establishment Clause — "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" — forbids the government from creating an official state religion, favoring one tradition over others, or using its power to promote religious belief as such. The Free Exercise Clause — "or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" — forbids the government from interfering with individuals' practice of their own faith (within limits set by other law). The two clauses can be in genuine tension with each other: a government action that accommodates one group's free exercise (say, a religious exemption from a general law) can look, from another angle, like an establishment-adjacent favoring of that group. Much of the last century of religion-clause jurisprudence is the Supreme Court working out where the line between the two commands actually falls, case by case, without a single settled formula that resolves every dispute in advance.
Thomas Jefferson, writing a decade after ratification, gave the Establishment Clause its most famous metaphor.
"a wall of separation between Church & State."
Jefferson, then president, wrote to a Baptist congregation in Connecticut worried about the state's ability to regulate their religious practice, offering an interpretation of the First Amendment's purpose that has shaped American constitutional culture ever since — though Jefferson's letter is a piece of political correspondence, not binding legal text, and the Supreme Court has drawn on it selectively and unevenly across two centuries of religion-clause cases.
Jefferson's phrase is not itself the law — it appears nowhere in the Constitution — but it has functioned for two centuries as the interpretive shorthand many Americans reach for first, and courts have cited it, argued over its scope, and in some rulings pushed back against reading it too literally, since a complete "wall" would arguably make the Free Exercise Clause impossible to honor (a government that walls religion out entirely cannot also, at the same time, protect citizens' free exercise of it). The tension between the two clauses is not a flaw in the Constitution; it is the Constitution doing exactly what a document governing a religiously plural society has to do — refusing to hand either total separation or total accommodation an unconditional victory.
This is the constitutional machinery your Spine Question points at directly: how do conceptions of morality and faith become constitutional law? The religion clauses are the answer in miniature — the Constitution does not adjudicate which faith is true; it regulates the relationship between government power and the fact of religious plurality, and it has needed two hundred and thirty years of case law to work out what that regulation actually requires in practice.
Cross-Curricular Connection: Intro US Law, Constitutional Rights & Liberties, examines how constitutional rights are made through an ongoing interpretive enterprise rather than settled once at ratification. The religion clauses are one of the clearest examples of that enterprise in motion: two commands in sixteen words, and two centuries of courts working out what they mean when applied to school prayer, religious displays, exemptions, and — as this unit covers next — the academic study of religion itself.
Abington School District v. Schempp: The Course's Legal Charter
The specific case that gives this course its constitutional footing is Abington School District v. Schempp, decided by the Supreme Court in 1963. The case arose from a Pennsylvania law requiring public school students to hear Bible readings and recite the Lord's Prayer at the start of each school day — a devotional exercise, not an academic one, conducted by the school itself as a daily ritual. The Schempp family, Unitarians who objected to the state-mandated devotional exercise, sued, and the case reached the Supreme Court alongside a similar Maryland case.
The Court ruled that the Pennsylvania law violated the Establishment Clause: a public school cannot conduct devotional Bible readings or state-composed prayer as a daily exercise, because doing so uses government power and government classrooms to promote religious observance, which is precisely what the Establishment Clause forbids. That much of the holding ended school-sponsored prayer and devotional scripture-reading in American public education. But the opinion, authored by Justice Tom C. Clark, did something else that matters more for this course's existence: it drew an explicit line between devotional religious exercise, which the Constitution forbids public schools from conducting, and the academic, objective study of religion and its role in history and civilization, which the opinion recognized as a legitimate and valuable part of a public education. Teaching about religion — its history, its texts, its comparative development, its role in shaping civilizations and constitutional orders — is not the same constitutional act as leading students in religious observance, and the Court's opinion treated that distinction as decisive.
This is the line this entire course is built to walk, and Schempp is the case that certifies the walk as constitutionally sound: a public-education-adjacent curriculum can study what Jews hold, what Christians teach, what Muslims practice, what Hindus, Buddhists, and nonbelievers hold — as historical, textual, and social fact, described in the terms adherents themselves would recognize — without that study becoming an establishment of religion, precisely because studying a belief system academically is not the same act as instilling it devotionally. Schempp did not invent religious studies as an academic discipline, but it gave the discipline its clearest constitutional home inside American public education, and this course, though produced for use across public, charter, and homeschool settings, adopts Schempp's line as its own operating principle: description, not devotion; study, not instruction in belief.
❓Concept Check
A parent objects to this course, arguing that any classroom discussion of what 'Muslims believe' or 'Jews hold' amounts to religious instruction forbidden by the Establishment Clause. Using Abington School District v. Schempp, explain why this objection misunderstands the relevant constitutional distinction.
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Concept Check
A parent objects to this course, arguing that any classroom discussion of what 'Muslims believe' or 'Jews hold' amounts to religious instruction forbidden by the Establishment Clause. Using Abington School District v. Schempp, explain why this objection misunderstands the relevant constitutional distinction.
Schempp drew a line between two different kinds of classroom activity involving religion: devotional religious exercise (the Court's actual holding struck down state-mandated Bible readings and prayer recitation, because these use school authority to promote religious observance) and objective academic study of religion's history, texts, and role in civilization, which the opinion recognized as constitutionally permitted and educationally valuable. Describing what a tradition's adherents generally hold or practice — 'Muslims observe the Five Pillars,' 'Jews mark the covenant through Torah' — is descriptive and historical, not devotional; it does not lead students in prayer, require belief, or favor one tradition's truth claims over another's. The objection conflates the two categories Schempp is explicitly built to keep separate. A course that never asks students to pray, affirm, or adopt any tradition's beliefs, and instead describes traditions in the terms their own adherents would recognize, sits on the academic-study side of the line Schempp drew, not the devotional-exercise side.
The Course's Honest Tension: Prothero vs. Armstrong
Religious literacy as a field does not speak with one voice about what, exactly, students should take away from studying multiple traditions side by side, and this course is built to be honest about that disagreement rather than pretend it has been resolved. Two serious, widely read scholars occupy opposite poles of the disagreement, and this course states both positions fairly, tests both across its ten units, and resolves neither for you.
Stephen Prothero, a religious studies scholar at Boston University, argues in his 2010 book God Is Not One that the popular assumption that "all religions are basically the same" — that they are different paths up the same mountain, teaching some version of the same core truths in different cultural costumes — is not only inaccurate but actively harmful to religious literacy. Prothero's argument is that this assumption, however well-intentioned, erases the very differences that make each tradition what it is: Christianity's diagnosis of the human problem as sin, remedied by grace, is not the same claim as Buddhism's diagnosis of the human problem as suffering born of craving, remedied by awakening — and treating these as interchangeable "same mountain" paths does not honor either tradition; it flattens both into a vague, contentless spirituality that neither tradition's own adherents would recognize as an accurate account of what they hold. For Prothero, taking religions seriously means taking their differences seriously, because pretending the differences do not exist is a subtler form of the same illiteracy this course is trying to correct.
Karen Armstrong, a former nun turned prolific writer on comparative religion, argues from something like the opposite instinct, most fully in The Case for God (2009) and in her work founding the Charter for Compassion. Armstrong's thesis is that beneath the genuine differences in doctrine, ritual, and cosmology, the world's major traditions converge on a shared ethical core — most visibly in some version of the Golden Rule (treat others as you wish to be treated) — and that this convergence is not a superficial coincidence but evidence of something traditions across independent histories arrived at because it answers a shared human need for compassion and moral community. Armstrong does not deny that traditions differ enormously in theology, history, and practice; her claim is narrower and, in its own way, just as serious as Prothero's — that the ethical convergence, where it exists, is real, significant, and worth naming precisely because it offers a basis for traditions to recognize something of value in each other without either side abandoning its own distinct content.
Think About
Prothero and Armstrong are not making opposite factual claims about the same evidence — they are asking different questions. What question is each scholar actually answering? Is it possible for both answers to be true at once, or does accepting one require rejecting the other?
This course does not resolve the Prothero/Armstrong disagreement, and you should be suspicious of any single unit, textbook, or teacher who tells you it has been settled. Instead, the course hands you both instruments and asks you to test them as you go: when you reach Judaism's covenant, Christianity's grace, and Islam's submission in Units 4 through 6, ask both what Prothero would ask (what is the specific, non-interchangeable problem this tradition diagnoses, and the specific cure it prescribes?) and what Armstrong would ask (where, if anywhere, does this tradition's ethical core rhyme with what you have already learned from the others?). You are not required to decide, by the end of this course, which scholar is more right. You are required to be able to state both positions accurately and use both as working tools — which is itself religious literacy in action, applied reflexively to the field that studies religious literacy.
Two Scholars, One Discipline, No Verdict
A skeptical student might ask: if two serious scholars in the same field disagree this fundamentally, doesn't that mean the field itself doesn't know what it's doing? This case study works through why the disagreement is a sign of a healthy field, not a broken one.
Consider what each scholar would say about a single concrete example: the instruction, found in some form in nearly every major tradition this course studies, to treat others as one wishes to be treated. Judaism's Hillel, summarizing the Torah while standing on one foot for a Gentile who demanded he do so, is reported to have said: what is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor — the rest is commentary. Christianity's Gospel of Matthew records Jesus teaching a version of the same rule. Islamic hadith literature records the Prophet's teaching that none of you truly believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself. Confucian teaching, which this course reaches in Unit 9, records a strikingly similar formulation centuries earlier still.
Armstrong would point to this convergence as exactly her thesis in action: independent traditions, developing in different centuries and different regions with no contact with one another, arrived at structurally the same ethical core, which she takes as evidence that this core answers something close to a universal human need for reciprocity and compassion, regardless of the very different theological architectures each tradition built around it.
Prothero would not deny the convergence exists, but he would insist it is being asked to do too much work if it is used to conclude that the traditions are "basically the same." The Golden Rule sits inside Judaism embedded in a covenantal relationship with a God who acts in history and calls a particular people into particular obligations; it sits inside Christianity embedded in a narrative of sin and salvation through a crucified and resurrected messiah; it sits inside Islamic teaching embedded in submission to the will of God as revealed through the Quran's final and complete revelation. Pull the rule out of its theological architecture and you have a nice ethical maxim; leave it in place and you have three (at least) very differently structured accounts of why the rule matters, what enforces it, and what happens if you break it. For Prothero, the shared surface sentence is real but nearly the least interesting thing about any of these three systems — what's interesting, and what a flattening "religions are all the same" account erases, is everything holding the sentence up.
Notice that this is not actually a disagreement about the facts. Both scholars would sign off on the same historical claim: yes, a reciprocity-based ethical teaching appears across these traditions. The disagreement is about what that shared fact is evidence for — a deep, cross-cultural moral convergence worth naming as such (Armstrong), or a surface similarity that obscures more than it reveals about what each tradition is actually doing (Prothero). You will be equipped, by the end of this course, to hold both readings in view at once without needing either one to win.
A Working Definition: William James and the Functional Approach
Before this course can compare traditions, it needs a working definition of "religion" itself broad enough to hold Judaism's covenant, Christianity's Trinity, Islam's submission, Buddhism's no-self doctrine, and the traditions later units will show straining the category altogether (Confucianism, Shinto, land-based Indigenous lifeways) inside a single analytic frame without distorting any of them.
The American philosopher and psychologist William James, in his 1902 lectures published as The Varieties of Religious Experience, offered one of the most influential working definitions in the modern study of religion — not a theological definition claiming to capture what religion "really" is at some metaphysical level, but a functional, descriptive one, oriented toward the individual's lived experience: religion, for James, concerns the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual people in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they consider divine. James's approach deliberately brackets the question of whether any tradition's metaphysical claims are true, focusing instead on the experiential and functional reality of religious life for the people living it — an approach this course adopts as one of its working tools, alongside Durkheim's social-functional lens introduced earlier in this unit. James asks what religion does and feels like from inside a life; Durkheim asks what religion does for a community's cohesion. Neither asks, and this course does not ask, which tradition's claims about ultimate reality are correct.
❓Concept Check
William James's definition of religion is described in this unit as 'functional.' What does that mean, and how does it differ from a definition that tried to state what all religions actually believe in common?
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Concept Check
William James's definition of religion is described in this unit as 'functional.' What does that mean, and how does it differ from a definition that tried to state what all religions actually believe in common?
A functional definition describes what religion does — for James, the feelings, acts, and experiences of an individual in relation to whatever they consider divine, bracketing the question of whether the object of that relation is metaphysically real. It differs sharply from a definition that tried to identify shared beliefs across traditions (e.g., 'all religions believe in a higher power'), because such a definition would immediately fail for traditions like Buddhism, which this course covers in Unit 8 and which has no creator god in its core doctrine. A functional definition, by contrast, can hold very different belief content (a personal God, an impersonal cosmic order, no metaphysical claim at all) inside the same frame because it is describing the shape and role of the experience or practice rather than its specific doctrinal content. This is exactly why James's definition, alongside Durkheim's social-functional lens, is useful to a comparative course that must avoid privileging any one tradition's theology as the template for what 'counts' as religion.
Applying the Instrument: Sikh, Muslim, Neither, Both
Return to Balbir Singh Sodhi. A religiously literate observer equipped with even a basic version of the tools this unit has introduced would have known several things Frank Roque did not. First, categorically: Sikhism and Islam are distinct traditions, with distinct founders (Guru Nanak in the fifteenth century for Sikhism; the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century for Islam, whose life and teachings this course covers in Unit 6 through his role in Islamic history rather than through any visual depiction), distinct scriptures, and distinct theological content, despite both being monotheistic traditions that emerged in South Asia and the Middle East respectively and sharing some surface markers of modest dress and facial hair that an untrained eye can conflate. Second, even had Sodhi been Muslim, the second link in Roque's reasoning — that Muslim identity implies support for or complicity in terrorist violence — is a statistical and categorical error of the same kind: it treats an entire global tradition of enormous internal diversity as if it could be reduced to the actions of an unrepresentative violent fringe, precisely the "monolith error" this course's constitutional guardrail is built to correct at every turn. Religious literacy would not have required Roque to convert to any faith, or to abandon his own. It would have required him to know, at a basic factual level, what he was looking at — and that gap, multiplied across a society, is what this course exists to close.
So perform the literacy the moment demanded, right here. What Roque was looking at was a Sikh man observing his tradition's articles of faith: Sikhism, founded on Guru Nanak's teaching in fifteenth-century Punjab, is a monotheistic tradition whose initiated members maintain five articles known as the five Ks — kesh (unshorn hair, which the turban exists to care for and cover), kangha (a small comb), kara (a steel bracelet), kachera (an undergarment), and kirpan (a small sheathed blade worn as an ethical commitment to protect the vulnerable, not a weapon of aggression). Its scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib, is honored as the tradition's living Guru; its gurdwaras serve langar, a free communal meal open to anyone of any faith or none, an institution of deliberate, caste-blind, creed-blind hospitality dating from the tradition's earliest period. And the misreading that killed Sodhi was not one man's private confusion: the scholar Jasbir Puar, in Terrorist Assemblages (2007), documents how the turbaned Sikh body was collectively misread in post-9/11 America into the visual figure of the "terrorist" — a patterned public misrecognition, not an isolated error, which is exactly why this course treats religious literacy as a civic capacity rather than a private virtue. This course returns to Sikhism in Unit 10, where its sant-sipahi tradition takes its place in this course's final comparative instrument.
The same instrument scales up from a single tragic misidentification to the level of national policy. The Sunni-Shia distinction that some post-invasion Iraq planners reportedly struggled to explain is not an obscure footnote; it is, as Unit 6 will show in full, a seventh-century succession dispute over who should have led the Muslim community after the Prophet's death, and its consequences run through thirteen centuries of Islamic history into the governing coalitions, sectarian tensions, and civil conflicts of the present Middle East. A policymaker who cannot state the origin and shape of that dispute is operating with the same category of gap that killed Balbir Singh Sodhi, only exercised at a scale that shapes the fates of nations rather than a single gas station in Mesa, Arizona.
Cross-Curricular Connection: Ethics, Moral Relativism vs. Universal Rights, examines how the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was actually negotiated across representatives of very different religious and philosophical traditions, who managed to agree on shared human-rights language while disagreeing sharply on the metaphysical foundations underneath it. That negotiation is a real-world instance of exactly the Prothero/Armstrong tension this unit introduces: convergence on practical conclusions alongside genuine, unresolved difference in the reasoning that grounds them.
Course Method, Stated Plainly
Every unit that follows this one will apply the same four commitments, stated here so you can hold every unit that follows to the same standard. First, every tradition will be described in terms its own thoughtful adherents would recognize as fair — internal logic honored before any external analysis is layered on top. Second, when a tradition is examined critically, the criticism will come from scholars working within that tradition or expert in its history, never imported from a rival tradition's polemics against it. Third, this course will never adjudicate whose truth claims are correct: you will read "Jews hold," "Christians teach," "Muslims practice, Sunni and Shia alike," and never "the truth is" — that phrasing is a discipline, not an accident, and it applies as much to secularism and nonbelief, which Unit 3 treats with the same seriousness, as it does to any theistic tradition. Fourth, every tradition unit will name at least two live debates happening within that tradition today, because a monolithic account — Christianity, Islam, or Judaism spoken of as though every adherent agrees on everything — is not a simplification. It is the specific literacy failure this course exists to repair.
Religious literacy, then, is your instrument for the rest of this course: not a belief, not a tolerance, but a discipline of accurate description, applied evenly, to traditions whose adherents you will come to understand — without this course ever asking you, or permitting itself, to decide which of them is right. Hold that discipline loosely enough to apply it generously, and tightly enough to apply it consistently: the same evenhandedness this unit asks of you toward Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and every tradition this course studies afterward is also asked of you toward secularism, atheism, and nonbelief, which Unit 3 studies with the identical rigor and the identical refusal to adjudicate. Literacy, applied unevenly, is not literacy at all — it is simply preference wearing literacy's vocabulary.
Think About
Return to the definition of 'religious literacy' you wrote at the start of this unit. Revise it now, in light of Moore's framework, the Schempp holding, and the Prothero/Armstrong tension. What did your original definition get right? What did it collapse together that this unit pulled apart?
Key Debates: Engaging the Scholarship
Does the Prothero/Armstrong disagreement admit of a resolution, or is it a permanent feature of the field? Some scholars argue the disagreement is ultimately empirical and could, in principle, be settled by more careful comparative work — a sufficiently rigorous survey of traditions' actual ethical content might show the convergence is either deeper or shallower than either scholar currently claims. Others argue the disagreement is not empirical at all but a difference in what each scholar considers the more important level of description — doctrine and cosmology (Prothero's emphasis) versus lived ethical practice (Armstrong's emphasis) — and that no amount of additional data resolves a disagreement about which level matters more, because that is a question of value and purpose, not fact. This course sides with neither resolution and instead treats the tension as a standing tool: both questions are worth asking of every tradition you study.
Is Schempp's devotional/academic line as clean in practice as it is in principle? The Supreme Court's distinction between devotional religious exercise and objective academic study of religion is doctrinally clear, but school districts, textbook publishers, and courts have disagreed since 1963 about where, exactly, a given lesson plan or textbook passage falls — does describing a tradition's prayer practices in loving, detailed, "adherents would recognize this" language (as Moore's method and this course's guardrail require) risk sliding toward devotional tone, even without any accompanying instruction to believe or practice? Defenders of the Moore method argue that detail and empathy in description are not the same as advocacy, and that flattened, clinical description is itself a literacy failure (it produces the same "food festival" caricature Prothero criticizes). Critics worry the line is easier to state than to hold consistently across every unit, every tradition, every teacher. This course's founder guardrail — checked unit by unit — is the mechanism built to keep that line honest in practice, not just in theory.
Is religious literacy achievable by someone with strong personal religious or secular commitments of their own, or does literacy require a kind of neutral, uncommitted vantage point that few people actually occupy? Moore's own framework assumes literacy is a skill any person, regardless of their own beliefs, can develop and apply evenly. Critics of religious-studies pedagogy have periodically raised the concern that a devout adherent of one tradition, or a committed secularist, may find it harder in practice to describe a rival tradition (or their own tradition's internal critics) with full fairness, even while sincerely trying. Moore's response, and this course's operating assumption, is that literacy is a disciplined method — description before evaluation, adherents' own terms before external critique, named internal debate rather than monolith — that can be practiced and checked regardless of the practitioner's personal commitments, the same way a journalist's commitment to accurate quotation does not require the journalist to have no opinions of their own.
Assessment Suggestions
- Literacy failure case file: Students research one additional documented religious-literacy failure (a hate-crime misidentification, a policy blunder, a media misreporting incident) not covered in this unit, and write a short brief identifying: what category error occurred, what accurate information would have prevented it, and what real-world cost resulted.
- Constitutional close reading: Students annotate the First Amendment's religion clauses line by line, identifying where the Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause could come into tension in a hypothetical scenario (a public school moment of silence; a workplace religious accommodation request), and explain how Schempp's devotional/academic distinction would or would not resolve the hypothetical.
- Prothero vs. Armstrong position paper: Students choose a specific ethical teaching that appears in multiple traditions (the Golden Rule, a version of the Ten Commandments' prohibition on killing or theft, a teaching on charity) and write a short paper applying both Prothero's difference-emphasis question and Armstrong's convergence-emphasis question to the same material, without resolving which scholar is more correct.
- Revised definition essay: Using the "return to your definition" ThinkAbout prompt as a starting point, students write a 400-500 word essay tracing how their working definition of religious literacy changed across the unit, citing at least three specific concepts (Moore's tolerance/devotion/literacy distinction, the Schempp holding, James's functional definition) that reshaped it.
Vocabulary
- Religious Literacy: An analytic and civic competency — accurate understanding of traditions' history, texts, internal diversity, and social dimensions — distinct from both religious tolerance (an attitude) and personal devotion (a practice).
- Sacred: In Durkheim's functional sense, things set apart and treated with reverence or prohibition by a community, in contrast to the ordinary, everyday profane.
- Profane: The ordinary, unconsecrated realm of everyday life, defined in contrast to the sacred within Durkheim's functional framework.
- Monotheism: Belief in a single God, the organizing theological commitment shared (with very different content) by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, among other traditions.
Recommended Resources
Books
- Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (2010) — the difference thesis in full, tradition by tradition.
- Karen Armstrong, The Case for God (2009) — the compassion thesis and Armstrong's broader argument about the history and limits of theological language.
- William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) — the original lectures introducing the functional, experience-centered approach to defining religion.
- Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912; Karen E. Fields translation, 1995, is the standard modern English edition) — the founding functionalist-sociological account of religion.
Courses and Primary Sources
- Diane L. Moore, HarvardX World Religions Through Their Scriptures series (edX) — the religious-literacy method this course draws its voice and framework from throughout.
- Abington School District v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963) — full opinion available through the Library of Congress and Supreme Court archive databases; read Justice Clark's majority opinion for the devotional/academic distinction in the Court's own words.
- Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Duke University Press, 2007) — a critical-theory analysis of post-9/11 racialization, including the patterned misreading of the turbaned Sikh body this unit describes.
- Sikh Coalition, "Fifteen Years Since the Murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi" and related organizational reports — documentation of the ongoing pattern of bias-motivated incidents against Sikh Americans since 2001.
