Why teach about religion in public schools? What educational value can such courses potentially have for students?

In For the Civic Good, Walter Feinberg and Richard A. Layton offer an argument for the contribution of Bible and world religion electives. The authors argue that such courses can, if taught properly, promote an essential aim of public education: the construction of a civic public, where strangers engage with one another in building a common future. The humanities serve to awaken students to the significance of interpretive and analytic skills, and religion and Bible courses have the potential to add a reflective element to these skills. In so doing, students awaken to the fact of their own interpretive framework and how it influences their understanding of texts and practices. The argument of the book is developed by reports on the authors’ field research, a two-year period in which they observed religion courses taught in various public high schools throughout the country, from the “Bible Belt” to the suburban parkway. They document the problems in teaching religion courses in an educationally appropriate way, but also illustrate the argument for a humanities-based approach to religion by providing real classroom models of religion courses that advance the skills critical to the development of a civic public.

Many of us assume that Christian day schools foster a strict and conservative environment that is very different from the rest of the United States. Christian educators themselves foster this view when they say that following biblical strictures requires that they not always conform to this world. Melinda Wagner goes beyond this stereotype to portray the way these schools foster American popular culture and "professional education culture" as well as "Christian culture." In her participant observation study of a variety of Christian schools (sponsored by fundamentalist, evangelical, new charismatic, Holiness, and Pentecostal Christians), Wagner describes and interprets how such compromises are made.

In American culture, children are taught to meet challenges, to compete, and are rewarded for individual achievement. Conservative Christians label this individualism as "secular humanism," and find it antithetical to their view of the self. Instead, these Christians seek a culture of love, compassion, orderliness, non-competitiveness, and separation from the material trappings of this world.

But in reality, Wager finds that the schools mix Christian values with the values of American culture. She discovers that even in Christian schools students compete fiercely and are recognized for individual achievements. Christian schools incorporate norms and strategies from mainstream American education. Alternative Christian schools are not as alternative as they could be; they are walking the Christian walk the American way.

The Christian schools serve as a case study of the process of culture building. Conservative Christians are trying to revitalize their culture. Yet all along the way, they quite consciously compromise.