If public school curricula can present “religion” as an aspect of various cultures (whatever those cultures may be), then religion could and would be one of any number of themes addressed in, say, 6th-grade social studies.

Thus, when studying ancient Egypt, students would read about the Egyptian gods and about the pious practices traditional in ancient Egyptian culture. El and Marduk walk on once the class does ancient Mesopotamia; Zeus, Apollo and the rest, when it gets to ancient Greece, and so on.

The problem, of course, comes not when looking at exotic others from a distant past, but when studying figures and movements identified with modern communities today: Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed; Judaism, Christianity, Islam.

Here the problem is two-fold. First, the study of religion is analytic, not apologetic, which means that academic perspectives on these figures and communities would and should contrast (not to say conflict) with the believing communities’ perspectives on their own foundational figures.

And second, if a teacher conducted the class by presenting a non-academic view (but rather the tradition’s view of its divine origin in an act of revelation), that would violate the separation of church and state, one of the cornerstones of public education and of American government.

Let me give an example from what I know best: teaching about the origins of Christianity in a liberal arts university setting. Jesus died around the year 30 CE, but the gospels were probably written forty to seventy years after that, between 70 and 100 CE. The gospels were written in Greek and rely upon a Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures; Jesus lived in an Aramaic context, and his biblical tradition would have been either Hebrew or Aramaic.

The gospels disagree with each other on issues of fact. Famously, Mark, and therefore Matthew and Luke, present Jesus as dying after the Passover meal; John has Jesus die before the Passover meal.

Further, defining Christian doctrines do not appear in the earliest sources. For example, in NT texts, Jesus’ brothers are named and his sisters are mentioned, which can cause problems for Catholic students who hold to a doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary. Protestant students who hold only to the virgin birth, but not to Mary’s perpetual virginity, are unruffled.

Jesus is “divine” in NT texts, but he is not presented as God’s equal, as the fourth-century Nicene Creed will conceive him. Paul says that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,” 1 Corinthians 15:50, and that the resurrection body will be “spiritual” rather than fleshly; the gospel of Luke is at pains to emphasize that the Risen Jesus is flesh-and-blood, Luke 24:38-43. And so on (and on).

Christian college students can be surprised and distressed by their initial encounters with the academic study of Christianity. It takes them a while to be able to process the normal presuppositions and principles of such study without traumatizing themselves religiously.

When I teach my comparative course on Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Jewish and Muslim students are frequently no less alarmed during their first pass at critical history.

A “Protestant” reading of the New Testament will differ from a “Catholic” reading; Unitarians read differently from Southern Baptists, and so on. Sunni Muslims look on their tradition in ways that differ from that of Shiite Muslims. Orthodox Jewish students would be offended by historical assertions that would leave Reform Jewish students utterly undisturbed. In short, the entire enterprise quickly becomes very charged.

I do not see how younger students, in secondary school or in high school, could manage. Public school teachers already have more than enough on their plates. And religiously conservative parents might be vividly upset if their children come home with ideas about the religious tradition that differ from those of the family’s community.

For all these reasons, with regret, I have to say that I think that teaching critical and comparative religion courses in public schools would not be a good idea.

As for mandating such courses for colleges and universities: Why? As the student develops his or her major, it would become clear whether he or she would benefit from such a course. Many more students working toward degrees in international relations, for example, now come through my classroom than did twenty years ago, because current politics are now so religiously charged.

But I see no reason to have religious studies as a universal requirement for an undergraduate degree.