As I mentioned previously, I’ve been attending a discussion group focused on teaching literature for some time. Last month it was my turn to choose our reading and I’ve picked Peter Kerry Powers’s excellent article “A Clash of Civilizations: Religious and Academic Discourse in the English Classroom,” from the 2008 issue of Profession. Powers makes some interesting points in regards to how we treat (or sometimes don’t treat) religious discourse in the classroom:

Religious discourses, beliefs, and practices should be understood more clearly as cultural formations out of which students think and act and through which they form a sense of themselves as human agents. However, in the normal course of academic business we perceive religious literacy as a private literacy (if that is not an oxymoron), an idiolect that belongs to the student’s private world rather than to the public conversation of the classroom. I have written elsewhere of how, until very recently, religion and literary studies—ethnic literary studies in particular—seemed to find no way of meshing, despite the overt religious content and form of a good deal of ethnic literature. Moreover, some of the basic professional tools used by professors of American literature—anthologies, literary histories, and the like—could well lead one to suspect that religion was not an as­pect of American culture at all, or at least that it ceased to be somewhere around the Civil War (1–19). Such assumptions drive our sense that while religion may once have been socially important, it is now a private matter best left to student ruminations in the dorm. (69)

Powers has a very good point here, especially in the absence of religious discourse as presented in American literature. Such an absence is in many way impossible in my own classroom, as I teach primarily on the long nineteenth-century in Britain. I’ve discussed elsewhere the complex crisis that informs Victorian literature, a crisis that is heavily intertwined with religious issues. The importance of religious discourse is essential to an understanding of the Romantics as well, no matter which side of the debate over Romantic religiosity you fall on. M.H. Abrams, for instance whose influential argument is that the Romantics are primarily secularizers of the sacred wrote in 1973:

Much of what distinguishes writers I call “Romantic” derives from the fact that they undertook, whatever their religious creed or lack of creed, to save traditional concepts, schemes, and values which had been based on the relation of the Creator to his creature and creation, but to reformulate them within the prevailing two-term system of subject and object, ego and non-ego, the human mind or consciousness and its transactions with nature. Despite this displacement  from a supernatural to a natural frame of reference, however the ancient problems, terminology, and ways of thinking about human nature and history survived. (Natural Supernaturalism, 13)

Twenty-five years later Robert Ryan wrote in his influential The Romantic Reformation

“During the Romantic period the religious identity of the British nation became once again a question in dispute as the result of intensified resistance by Dissenter to the Established Church’s hegemony, the crusade like character of the war against infidel France, and the millenarian consciousness that swept through all classes of society . . . the Romantic poets accepted the role of religion as a dynamic ideology behind social and political action.” (3-4)

I use these two paradigms in my classroom as a window, asking my students which of these they see reflected in the works we read. I”ve found this a useful way in which to engage with these concerns while also in a sense maintaining a certain critical distance. But there is a balancing act that needs to be maintained between that critical distance and a more intense and personal engagement with religious material. In the aforementioned paragraph Powers rightly points to the importance of seeing students religious positions as “cultural formations out of which students think and act and through which they form a sense of themselves as human agents.” Powers goes on to note that “we have yet to develop a pedagogical ethos that seeks to understand religious backgrounds with the same professional seriousness that we have learned to bring to the question of a student’s race, gender, or sexual orientation” (68). This I think is key, particularly when we think of student engagement with texts. If one of our prime goals as instructors is deep student engagement with literature, than it is important that we not cut off one of the prime avenues for that engagement, a students intimate connection with a work drawn from their experience of their faith. While that cannot be the be-all-end-all of our classroom practice, these are perspectives that can allow for a richer appreciation or (when managed productively) a useful contesting of a piece of literature.