Religious schools and civic responsibility. The challenge for tolerance: Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod schools in the twenty-first century.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study is a Critical Enquiry into the tensions between civic and religious responsibilities of parochial schools in the United States, in particular Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod schools, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as these tensions relate to tolerance concerning two specific issues, homosexuality and gender equity. Critical Enquiry is a method of study that is both historical and philosophical and seeks to uncover any inconsistencies between the fundamental purpose of an institution and its policies and practices.
If schools in the United States are to promote American democratic ideals, and if civic and religious ideologies are to remain constitutionally separate, then how can religious schools carry out their civic responsibility when any civic law-of-the-land might conflict with religious doctrine? To pursue this question an analysis of the policies and practices of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod was conducted.
A brief history of public education in the United States is presented to be used as a comparison to the school history and practices of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod school system. Constitutional background on church and state issues is presented with the purpose of highlighting the tensions between the civic-secular and religious-sacred responsibilities of schools in the United States.
The virtue of tolerance is used to deconstruct the binary tensions created for the religious educator in teaching both democratic ideals and religious ideology. The issues of homosexuality and gender equity are used to illustrate the dilemma that religious educators face in this civic-secular and religious-sacred binary. The conclusion of this study is that religious educators must recognize there is a choice to be made and that tolerance as a virtue can be used to negotiate between the civic-secular and religious-sacred binary. The religious educator must make a philosophical decision that dictates action in the classroom.