I think children are the worse off if they’re so religiously illiterate that they don’t understand the motivations and thinking behind much of Western art and culture through the centuries. They don’t have to be indoctrinated or manipulated to understand the basic ideas behind the major religions and how that has influenced culture, or to understand, say, the original purpose of cathedrals or why they have a particular architecture or how the church motivated the multi-generational projects that constructed them.
I have to admit that, even being steeped in the dogma of a particular Protestant sect as a child, I was fairly ignorant about much of this. I found religious art to be weird, and I had been told the mainline denominations were dead, full of people practicing empty ritual and worshipping idols.
But there’s where the problem would come in, trying to teach comparative religion. If I had come home asking uncomfortable questions about, IDK, the Salem witch trials or the Inquisition or something, at some point my parents probably would have wondered what I was being exposed to or what alien ideas were being inserted into my noggin. It would simply not be worth the hassle for public schools to take on this task in this country.
The only glancing blow my elementary education got in this area was that we were assigned to read the text of Jonathan Edward’s famous sermon, *Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God". Edwards was a fairly batshit sawdust-trail style red-faced preacher of the early colonial era, more batshit than we were but at least the sermon was still about sin and hell and the need for salvation. THAT they could get away with. I literally don’t recall anything else I was exposed to of a remotely religious nature in my public school education.
