Google.doctor, heal thyself!

In my lecture course, "After Religion," I usually have students contribute to a google.doc each class. This is a holdover from when we were meeting online, a silent acknowledgment that many of them are online on their phones or laptops even during lecture - and a way to make the class visible to itself as a learning community. (It's also always fun to watch a google.doc growing; I add to the fun of it by providing starting points for contributors in a bunch of different colors.) Many more students are comfortable contributing in this written form than speaking up, and so we get a wider range of views, valuable for discussion - and for me, as I prepare the next class. 

So today I started with last week's google.doc, whose prompt was Is the United States a secular society? Why? The responses were overhwhelmingly in the negative, but I was able to pull out five often overlapping but distinct claims for discussion, and frame a new question for reflection. This appoach takes a bit of time (I'm silly about formatting powerpoint slides in aesthetically pleasing ways) but it keeps students engaged. They see their own and their classmates' words on the screen (I highlightsome but include all), feel seen and heard, appreciate that their thinking on the issue matters.

It doesn't always work. Sometimes the question is posed poorly, and sometimes students just don't want to play ball. Something like this happened last time I taught this course. In the secularism week I'd asked them Is God dead? If so, why do some people think not? If not, why do some people think so? This generated some interesting responses, but most rejected the question. None really engaged the Nietzschean claim, which is not so much a question about 'God' but about a master narrative. So the following week - corresponding to this week - I tried again, getting wordier still: Is there a direction/ purpose to human history? If so, are some places/times/nations especially important? If not, why would some people think so? This was an effort to get them to consider the religious framing of white nationalism, but, as I shared with you at the time, while lots of other thoughtful things came out, it flopped as a way to get them to say whether history has a larger shape. What would that even mean?

I dutifully wrote out representative responses for the next class (the same ones I'd earlier culled for this blog...), but congratulated the class on foiling me. Perhaps this was a bad question, the need for a meta-narrative something we've happily outgrown. Still, I was a little sorry we hadn't admitted that, no, there's no story, i.e., God is dead. Try again next year? So this year, in conversation with the TAs, I replaced the wordy "Is God dead?..." question with the question about secularism. And for this class, I went big and point-blank. The prompt baldly asked: Where are we going? 

The responses were gratifyingly serious. I wasn't asking them, as the the earlier iteration's had, to critique other people's views, but asking them their thoughts. (I prefaced it with a reminder that their private views were nobody's business unless they cared to share them, while enjoining them to define the "we" as broadly as they wished.) 

But now I find myself in a quandary. What do I do with all these thoughts? Worrying my way through it I've come up with two quite different ways of representing what I read. The one above shows the students' measured responses but it doesn't convey what it feels like to actually read them. For that I tried something less staid... 

It's the intensity of these responses, some hopeful but most fearful we're "going nowhere," soon to reap what we've sown in climatic doom, which leaves me in a quandary. I don't see how I can fold these responses nicely into the class as it's planned and continue merrily on my way. The next segment is on the "world religions" and their travails, but there's no expression of interest or hope in them here. The view of history I've elicited is disenchanted. If this is where we're going to, who cares about the world religions, however construed? Band-aids and pain-killers at best. The implicit promise of world religions discourse - that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in any one philosophy - seems idle when the horizon is already closed.

What is my responsibility toward these students? (Too late for the assiduously academic religious studies scruples, which keep personal conviction safely parked outside the classroom; I guess I've really evolved beyond them...!) I'm struggling to find a way to articulate my dilemma. It's like I've planned a splendid vegetarian meal only to find out my guests are meat-eaters, or is it the opposite? I have to continue with the class as planned - a syllabus is a sort of contract, after all. But it can't be as though we this didn't happen. It's not that I didn't expect such views (I may share them...), but the google.doc setup makes public what is otherwise out of sight, grounding the community of our inquiry resolutely in us, here, now. 

Where are we going? What has religious studies to offer now?