Symposium: Religious Education and the
Liberal State
By: David M. Smolin
This symposium is premised on the belief that questions
surrounding religion and education in this country can best be
answered by straightforward engagement with the views on education
espoused by our various faith communities, and that these views are
presented at their most authentic through the lens offered by the
understanding and experience of the community’s own members. The
symposium centers on the work of James Dwyer, whose skepticism
toward a reflexive embrace of parental rights has opened up new
fronts in the debate over religion and education.
David Smolin sets out the requirements and objectives of a sound
education from the perspective of evangelical Christianity.
One obvious source of tension with modern liberalism is
evangelicalism’s covenantal approach to child-raising, under which
parents and their chosen agents are charged by God with teaching
children self-mastery through the enforcement of fixed moral and
ethical norms. Smolin sees the viability of this approach
threatened by Dwyer’s call for the state to ensure each child’s
moral autonomy. He finds Dwyer’s secularist framework to be more
than inhospitable to the evangelical vision; he takes it as a call
for cultural genocide.