On Civic Education

“But the correct approach isn’t to decree, once and for all, what does or doesn’t count as religion; it’s to ask how a plural democracy can accommodate competing visions of the good. Ours is a nation of technocratic managerialists and natural-law traditionalists, Baptists and Buddhists, nationalists and cosmopolitans. The task is to live together across these divides. Religion, whatever else it may be, is one dimension of that challenge. What students need — in Texas and everywhere else — is not a government-issued decalogue but a civic education sturdy enough to meet that challenge.”

Kwame Appiah, “Students in Texas Need Something, But It’s Not the Ten Commandments” - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/04/opinion/texas-separation-church-state.html. Appiah provides a helpful summary of conceptual challenges when considering religion in democratic societies. Scholars, not unlike judges, do not share a common definition. There are a variety of contexts in which they try to make sense of competing interests. As he rightly concludes, the problem is not that we don’t have a single definition, which could be applied to all cases. Rather we lack sufficiently “sturdy” “civic education.” Much more could be said at this point and presumably his forthcoming book does just that.

For instance, as I’ve written about elsewhere, this might include pedagogical practices that train students to understand diverse religions inclusive of their own, apply the term in different contexts where relevant, and respond equitably to each other as human beings with common human rights. All roads in such civic education don’t lead to Mecca, Rome, Jerusalem or any other more general religious focal point like ultimate reality. Rather, it is marked by the bare minimums required to prepare students to deliberate meaningfully in diverse democracies. The underlying problem is the coercive force with which one religious view is imposed to the exclusion of others. This paradox of tolerance is not complicated. It’s captured in a no parking sign, which aims to create pathways for other people to freely enter and exit an educational space.

Of course, in that sense, the article’s title seems to mislead. Civic education of this sort would include studying the variety of ways the Ten Commandments are presented in different traditions. Or maybe, the title relies on the premise that most students don’t need the Ten Commandments posted on their classroom’s wall because they are readily available to anyone who searches Wikipedia.