Santorum’s Arrested Development - An unquestioned faith is not faith but rote recitation

[ashling]

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/feb/29/rick-santorum-arrested-development/

Garry Wills

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Santorum seems to be thinking of colleges as resembling his own teaching experience. As a home schooler of his seven children, he had a monopoly on what they were taught at impressionable ages. He is thinking of himself when he says an educator “wants to remake you in his image.” Why else did he make it impossible for other minds, of elders or even of equals, to impinge on the minds of his children? (Perhaps he does not think of this as “remaking” the children’s minds but of “making” them, since they did not have anything to remake until he made them. In this case he is comparing himself not with a college teacher but with God.)

Of course, the idea that colleges are stealing people’s children from their parents’ God is an old belief on the right wing. William Buckley proclaimed it in his God and Man at Yale, published over half a century ago, in the 1950s surge of religiosity that some conservatives now look back on with nostalgia. Of course, as Catholics, Buckley and Santorum (and I) are heirs to a long tradition of trying to control what people think or read or see. When I was young, the list of movies we were forbidden to see was posted every Sunday in the vestibule of our church. The priests who taught me in high school sent me and my fellows out to drug stores to demand that “dirty” magazines like Esquire be removed from their stands. There was still an Index of Forbidden Books we are supposed not to read—including works by Milton, Rousseau, Voltaire, Sartre, Gide—without a priest’s permission.

These bans would have been disgustingly repressive if they had not been so laughably ineffectual. We should have known, what we were not told, that many of the most brilliant atheists of the Enlightenment were trained in Jesuit schools. For that matter, the time in my life when I most doubted the existence of God was when I was in a Jesuit seminary during the religious 1950s. This would be, by Santorum’s logic, a reason for urging no one to enter a seminary. For that matter, while we are at it, why not abolish seminaries? Or abolish the Jesuits (though that was tried and failed)?

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Minds grow by questioning things, and adolescence is a great period of questions. Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken learned to cross-examine the Bible all on their own, without any help at all from college. An unquestioned faith is not faith but rote recitation. The opposite of such questioning is not deep belief but arrested development.

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[Jim__]

1. Great read - especially the part about Santorum home schooling his children.

Also, I did not know that the study that showed that 62% of college students lose their religion showed that the number was higher for those who didn't go to college. That demolishes Santorum's original argument.

[snagglepuss]

2. +1