Fishing for Truth

In today's New York Times, Stanley Fish says (subscription required) that teaching religion or teaching the Bible, without endorsing the truth claims of either, is pure foolishness. The Bible, religious doctrines, theological texts . . . everything we generally do teach in generally secular ways is just so much cartoonish trivia unless the truth claims of this material and these traditions are valid. It's "like studying the justice system and bracketing the question of justice" he fairly spits at Steve Prothero's bracketing of religious truth in the neutral zone of the religious studies classroom. Fish has gotten pretty good in his old age at fighting straw men. In this case few of us are really such aesthetes as to study religious texts without both recognizing and engaging seriously with the truth issues gleaned from these texts by any number of theologically, politically, philosophically-interested readers. But isn't it also intellectual sleight-of-hand to insist that the religious traditions and texts we study are themselves always committed to, or clearly endorse, Fish's simplistic standard: Truth? When did fundamentalist literalism, to put it polemically, become the arbiter of meaning across entire traditions, or in such complex and conflicted anthologies as the Bible? This kind of Fishy thinking, along with some territorial anxieties, led the faculty senate at my institution to vote against the creation of a religious studies certificate program a few years ago. It's disheartening to realize that the students in my classes, many of them religious people, are much more responsive to complex treatments of complex issues than the professors (like Fish) tasked with deciding upon their educational options.