When I lecture about Islam, students often come up to me to ask, “Are you Muslim? Because you seem really passionate about this.”
When I lecture about Judaism, students often come up to me to ask, “Are you Jewish? Because you seem really passionate about this.”
When I lecture about Catholicism, students often come up to me to say, “I’m Catholic, too! It’s great to see a professor who shares my faith.”
When I lecture about Protestantism, students often say, “Wow, that’s so cool. Why don’t we have anybody who practices this great religion here? Is it a Ukrainian thing?”
I even manage to make the religious practices of the Aztecs sound super cool, and it’s not easy given that they included ripping hearts out of living people.
[Other religions are not hugely relevant to my courses on Hispanic civilization, so they don’t make it into the lectures.]
And when I talk about the great Western atheist tradition, I get even the most religious students to experience interest and admiration.
In the meanwhile, my own religious beliefs are left out of the lectures entirely because I manage to keep in mind that my job is to teach students about the world and not turn them into hostages of my inner life.
It would be great if more people remembered that their inner life is of no interest to anybody but their closest relatives (and even that, only if they are hugely lucky) and should not be stuck in people’s faces.
Clarissa's Blog 
I teach at a Christian school, and I teach a lot of texts that deal with Christianity on some level. I regularly have students ask me if I’m religious/spiritual because I’ve gone on about something passionately in a lecture. I am not religious. It’s hard to know what to say at times, because they want their faith to be affirmed by someone like me. I usually just ask them about their interests, and then they talk about their own faith, etc. People love to talk about themselves.
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You are so right. More often than not, people only ask questions as a lead in to say something about themselves. 🙂
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I like your approach. More teachers should use it.
I once had a religious studies teacher who was some sort of Christian priest. He started out the section on New Age practices with a documentary that linked them to the Nazis.
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Not to sound obsessive or anything, but last week on Russian TV there was this professor from a leading Russian university who informed the audience that the world was in the hands of a New Age cabal that was promoting gay marriage in order to ensure that white people didn’t procreate and went extinct. Obviously, the cabal ‘ s leader is Obama who hates white people.
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“When I lecture about terrorism, I have students come up to me and ask, ‘Are you a terrorist? You seem really obsessed about this …'”
Yes, I know, but this had to be done for comedic effect. 🙂
[also, avoid cutting the green wire at all costs] 🙂
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Pretty much, yes. 🙂
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