| Anchored in reviews of the literature on teaching about religion in public schools, media portrayals of education, and media portrayals of religion, this study poses the following question: How is teaching about religion in public schools portrayed in the media? The author identifies four "camps" through the literature: the clarifiers, who seek to communicate that teaching about religions is legal and desirable; the returners, who seek to return prayer and Bible reading to public schools; the fideists, who claim that Scripture is sacred and should only be taught by believers for the purpose of spreading faith; and the secularists, who believe that a focus on religion will inevitably lead to sectarianism. Based on a sample of 251 news articles, 73 opinion articles, and 91 Internet blog posts published between January 1, 1980, and June 1, 2010, the author conducts a discourse analysis of six articles/posts from the sample and interviews 12 writers of articles/posts from the dataset. The author identifies and analyzes the following topics: (a) Bible-based courses (43%), (b) religion-focused social studies standards (37%), and (c) teaching about world religions (15%). Applying a theoretical framework developed by Walter R. Fisher's conception of the narrative paradigm and complemented by Walter J. Ong's notion of the fictionalized audience, interview analyses reveal three types of narratives writers invoke: experience stories, which detail events that occurred either to them personally or to someone they know; imagined situations, which concern writers' ideas about what they believe could or should happen in various circumstances; and narratives of the way things are, which provide snapshots of how the writers think about society. Major findings of this study include: (a) what people believe teaching about religion should look like in schools is related to their narrative rationality; (b) references to the culture war are evident in most media about this topic in that writers either rally the troops or attempt to convene a parley; and (c) moving forward, the challenge for advocates is to determine when and how religious studies content can and should be integrated into the education cycle.. |
