Maybe Rick Santorum Was Right

I recently finished reading Jon Krakauer's Under The Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, which in part tells the story of the murder of a woman and her toddler child by two of the brothers of her husband because they believed it was a deed sanctioned by God.

I started reading Under The Banner of Heaven a few days after Republican presidential candidate and self-appointed busy body of all things sexual Rick Santorum called colleges "indoctrination mills" and claimed in an interview with Glenn Beck that “62 percent of kids who go into college with a faith commitment leave without it.”

Where Under The Banner of Heaven ties into this is near the end of the book.  One of the persons Krakauer introduces the reader to is an apostate from the Mormon Fundamentalist Church named DeLoy Bateman.

Bateman tells Krakauer what led him to eventually leave his church and abandon his faith.

"Even as a young boy," he says, "I remember wondering about contradictions between what the religion taught and scientific truth.   But Uncle Roy told us that the way to handle that was just to avoid asking certain kinds of questions.  So I trained myself to ignore the contradictions.  I got good at not letting myself think about them."

When he turned 18, Bateman attended Southern Utah State College, because his church wanted him to become a teacher.

Bateman says, "I loved college.  Looking back, I suppose it was the beginning of the end for me.  I stayed in the religion for another twenty years, but going to college in Cedar City was when I had my eyes opened.  That's where I took my first geology course.  Afterward I came home and told Uncle Roy, 'There's a professor over there trying to tell us the earth is four and a half billion years old, but the religion says its only six thousand years old.  How can that be?'  Which shows you why education is such a problem for the Work.  You take someone like me, who was always as stalwart as can be, and then you ship him off to get an education and the guy goes and apostasizes on you.  Happens over and over again.  And every time it does, it makes the leaders more inclined to keep people from learning."  (Bolding mine).

You see some of that with Rick Santorum, who constantly likes to point out that he homeschools his kids.  After all, he doesn't want his children to be exposed to somebody else's agenda, and Heavens forbid, be indoctrinated into becoming a liberal!

One of the things I have noticed about right wing conservatives is the way they frame their language.  They begin with the premise that their beliefs are normative and correct.  Therefore, anyone who advocates for positions that run contrary to their own have "an agenda."  Anything taught to their children that runs counter to their beliefs is an attempt to "indoctrinate" them.  These people are either being disingenuous or willfully obtuse when they refuse to recognize that they too have an agenda and trying to teach their children strictly in accordance with their own beliefs involves indoctrinating them.  After all, to believe in the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation ultimately involves telling a child, "This is what the Church teaches.  You just have to have faith and believe it."

I don't know if anyone has explicitly asked Santorum this, but I would like to see him be asked, "What is the difference between telling a child that a Communion wafer becomes the flesh of Jesus Christ when it enters one's mouth and telling a child that human activities are releasing large quantities of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, which traps heat and warms the planet?  After all, one cannot physically test the communion wafer to detect changes in its properties when it enters the mouth of a believing Catholic, but one can measure the increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the rise in temperature and the shrinking of glaciers and Arctic sea ice." 

Rick Santorum may consider it a terrible tragedy if an 18 year old Catholic enters college believing in the doctrine of transubstantiation and leaves college at 21 believing it to be nothing but medieval superstitious nonsense, but it shouldn't be a reason to oppose expanding opportunity for Americans to  attend college.