1. While I am talking about the advantage which is sometimes taken of people in school, I want to read something from Harry Emerson Fosdick. He is a man that I wouldn’t ordinarily quote or refer to. He is a liberal. There are a thousand things on which I disagree with him, but he has said something in a recent article which I think is worth passing on. I might not even agree with everything in this quotation, but you’ll see the point.
He says: “I am a liberal; I am not pleading for sectarianism or conventional orthodoxy or anything of that sort. What I want most of all is that Roman Catholics, Jews, and Protestants should prepare together some book or books by means of which the best elements in the spiritual heritage of our race can be presented in our schools, objectively and without offense, as a matter of information.” Whether or not that is possible might be open to debate. But listen to what he says next.
“Meanwhile,” it’s this meanwhile that I am interested in, “Meanwhile, however, I am fed up with a familiar type of course in some of our institutions, where religion may not be taught but where, by innuendo and clever sniping, irreligion is taught. The Jewish prophets, Christ, and the creative seers of our spiritual tradition might as well never have existed, while Freud, for example, not simply as the great pioneer in psychiatry but as an atheistic materialist, is presented at length as though he were infallible.”
2. If I were to go into some of our public schools and teach the truth on church unity and the meaning of baptism, I would be considered intolerant, narrow minded and out of order in using the public schools to teach religion. But when a man gets up and teaches that the Bible is not true, he is teaching religion, even though it is a false religion. He is teaching a religion just the same as the man who says that the Bible is true.
That reminds me of one college professor who asked his class at the beginning of the course how many of them believed that God existed. Several students raised their hands. He said, “I predict that by the time this course is finished there won’t be any here who believe in God.” He was teaching religion—false religion. He was opposing the truth. He was taking advantage of a state school in which to do it.