Trying Not to “Shove Religion Down Their Throats”

Abstract

This article attempts two tasks. First, to clarify how the claim that colleges and universities may "shove religion down students' throats" has a historical background. Second, to indicate how pedagogical strategies-like service learning, discussions, paper revisions, and "Just in Time Teaching" exercises-can be used in ways that both effectively teach theology and address the claim of students that classes in theology are coercive.In the science-fiction novel Feed, Titus, like all of his friends, has a feed. Think Internet, Facebook, Amazon, and Google, all wrapped up into one and directly wired into cortical synapses. School had been taken over by corporations because, as Titus explains, no one was going to pay for the public schools anymore and they were all like filled with guns and drugs and English teachers who were really pimps and stuff, some of the big media congloms got together and gave all this money and bought the schools so that all of them could have computers and pizza for lunch and stuff, which they gave for free, and now we do stuff in classes about how to work technology and how to find bargains and what's the best way to get a job and how to decorate our bedroom. (Anderson 2002, 110) When Titus is asked if he can read, he says, "I can read. A little. I kind of protested it in School TM . On the grounds that the silent 'E' is stupid" (Anderson 2002, 65).While I tend to agree with his claim about silent "e," my interest in Titus' perception is that it is similar to some undergraduates in required theology classes who complain about having "religion shoved down their throat": the material is irrational-Titus says "stupid" and students that theology is just an opinion-that it is not practical-not like "how to work technology and how to find bargains" or enabling people to find jobs-and that it is not chosen-Titus protests reading Religious Education