Religious Skepticism: A Reservation Regarding the American Academy of Religion's Guidelines

Abstract

Recently the American Academy of Religion (AAR) published “Guidelines for Teaching About Religion in K–12 Public Schools in the United States” (Guidelines) as a resource for educators. Among the AAR's expressed goals is the “exposing [of] students to a diversity of religious views, but not imposing any particular view.” The author is afraid, however, that the AAR may not succeed in this endeavor because it explicitly and implicitly favors, in the Guidelines, a particular view on religion: religious skepticism.