Teaching Religion, 1955
by Eden Consenstein And Leslie Ribovich
In 1955 Life magazine ran a year-long series on the “The World’s Great Religions.” At the time Life was among the most popular magazines in the United States, boasting approximately five million paying readers per issue. Starting with Hinduism, Life ran an issue dedicated to each of five “great religions” every month. In keeping with Life’s signature emphasis on photojournalism, each “Great Religions” issue (on Hinduism, Buddhism, “Religion in the Land of Confucius,” Islam, Judaism and Christianity) offered vivid color photographs of sacred sites, commanding architecture, and elaborate rituals underway. After the June issue on Judaism, the series took a six month pause to time the Christianity issue with Christmas. Each “Great Religion” article (with the exception of the final piece on Christianity) closed with the same italicized statement, “Discussion outlines for each article in the GREAT RELIGIONS series can be obtained at 10¢ each, or 15 copies for $1, from the TIME-LIFE Education Department, 9 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY.”
Here, we dig-up and examine these “Discussion outlines,” reflecting on how to approach instructional materials about religion, created outside traditional domains of doctrinal authority. The discussion outlines all followed a similar format. Each outline began with a series of terms to identify. The names of holidays, scriptures, important figures, and ritual objects sat in one column with their definitions listed in a parallel one, inviting students to connect words like “Koran” to “The revealed scripture of Islam.” A series of questions requiring longer answers, like, “What is the Jewish dietary law, what are some of its prescriptions?” followed. Questions that centered terms and concepts emic to each tradition were interspersed with those that prompted students to compare ostensibly foreign traditions to Christianity. The discussion outline on Hinduism asked students to name the Hindu deity that “most closely resembles the savior of Christianity,” and the discussion outline on Chinese religions asked, “Do the Chinese think in terms of a personal god as, for example, Christians do?” Some of the outlines’ comparative work was more subtle, as in the Islam outline’s use of terms like “priesthood” and “sacrament.” Although the Life magazine “Great Religions” series included an issue on Christianity, the Time-Life Education Department did not create an associated discussion outline. As many of the questions in the outlines suggest, students were assumed to have an existing knowledge of Christianity.
What interest did the producers of Life magazine have in making and circulating classroom discussion outlines? What can they tell us about how midcentury students learned about religious difference? We approach the questions from different but overlapping backgrounds. Eden Consenstein is currently working on a dissertation about religion at Time Incorporated, the media corporation that produced Life magazine. Leslie Ribovich writes about religion, race, and public education, with a current book project on New York City schools. Both projects are set in mid-twentieth-century New York City. The Board of Education headquarters, blocks from the Brooklyn Bridge, were just 7.5 miles away from the TIME-LIFE Education Department. Both projects bring us into the archives of institutions without explicit religious affiliations that nonetheless commented on, scrutinized, and even theorized, “religion.”
The sources we study help us to see how big bureaucracies (corporate in Eden’s case, state in Leslie’s) maintained power by situating themselves as experts. By working together, we saw that the practice of self-authorization was common across the institutions we study, and often came at a cost to the religious and racial minorities who navigated them. Tomoko Masuzawa critiques “world religions” for furthering Euro-Christian dominance by creating religious “others.” Building on her insights, we examine how state and corporate bureaucracies produce, circulate and naturalize the framework she critiqued. Our sources are programmatic memos, guides—the stuff of twentieth-century education. How has collaborative analysis shaped our understanding of these sources?
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Life magazine’s “Great Religions” discussion outlines currently sit in Box 435 of Time Inc.’s enormous archive, crammed in amongst reams of corporate budgets and day-to-day office memoranda. Hours of sifting yielded only one document about the discussion outlines. A memo dated November 9, 1955, after all but the Christianity issue had been released, reported that more that 12,000 of each discussion outline was sold to teachers nationwide, making the small project comfortably profitable. It was further estimated that about 13,500 distinct outlines were circulating through classrooms, reaching as many as 50,000 students. I was disappointed to find that beyond these figures there are no documents explaining who wrote the discussion outlines, how the questions were selected and formulated, or justifying their organization and formatting. There’s no feedback from students or teachers, no way of decisively knowing if or how the discussion outlines made their way into lesson plans.
Returning to the outlines themselves, I noticed that italicized text at the beginning of each one prompted students to locate answers to questions within the magazines. The outlines that Time Inc. produced drew students into Life, Time Inc.’s most popular product. What would students have seen when they turned to the magazines? Like the study outlines’ leading comparative questions, the “The Great Religions,” series set Christianity apart. The Christianity issue was double the length of a usual issue, its cover was a glistening gold, and it opened with a double page spread bearing the Apostle’s Creed in ornate calligraphy. Students learning from Life magazine entered a visual world where Christianity was clearly preferred and set apart. A visual feature common to all the “Great Religions” issues (and Life magazine in general) was profuse advertising. To locate a fact about the origins of Buddhism, students had to leaf past advertisements for Bigelow Carpets, Johnson’s Baby Shampoo, and Rath Black Hawk Meats.
Advertising was Life magazine’s central source of income. The majority of the documents in Box 435 track corporate revenues via advertising sales. Careful scrutiny of these records reveals that topics-based “special features,” like the “World’s Great Religions,” were assumed to be very lucrative. Extensive market research conducted in the postwar years determined that informational features (on “Western Culture,” natural sciences, and entire continents) made Life uniquely appealing to educated, high-earning readers. This empowered Time Inc. to charge advertisers high rates, promising access to an audience with spending capacity. The inexpensive production of educational materials, like the “Great Religions” discussion outlines, buttressed Time Inc.’s efforts to establish Life as more erudite than competing mass magazines, and relatedly, fashioned the corporation as expert on all manner of complex subject areas.
Special series intended to solidify Life’s popularity with educated, middle and upper-middle class readers often came at the cost of the marginalized subjects they represented. Letters in response to the “Great Religions” series (found in a thin file obliquely labeled “Comment”) contain protests from a number of Jewish organizations. Rabbi William T. Rosenblum of Temple Israel in New York City, for example, worried that Life’s Judaism issue perpetuated dangerously antisemitic stereotypes amongst their “vast army” of readers. Several files over, financial reports from a 1956 “special series” on segregation reveal that Time Inc. sent regular checks to a Black family they photographed after they were harassed by white neighbors. While executives sent paltry sums to the Causey family of Shady Grove, Alabama, they promised advertising clients the eyes of high-earning readers. These dynamics are made opaque by the dense corporate archives, which were only very recently made accessible to researchers. Combing through production budgets, advertising schedules and market research reports yielded insight into how Time Inc. benefitted from situating Life magazine as an expert in religion, and who was harmed by the production of corporate expertise.
— Eden Consenstein
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A classroom, 1955. Students flip through Life to identify who Guan Yin is. Next to the stack of magazines, the “Great Religions” discussion outlines perch on students’ desks, ready to be filled in with the “right” answer. What have students learned from the outlines’ pedagogical project, and how?
This scene is why the outlines remind me of sources I have spent years with—New York City (NYC) public school curriculum outlines, textbooks, correspondence, and policy. Such sources cultivate bureaucratic imaginings of educational encounters. They seem innocent. Yet, the image above reminds us that a corporation directs the pedagogy, as the state directs the pedagogy of sources I study. It raises questions I face about administrators writing curriculum—who is an expert? What is at stake when a corporation or superintendent’s office centers itself as authoritative on religion?
The discussion outlines’ self-referential structure mirrored the structure of the NYC Superintendent William Jansen’s office, which consistently listed Jansen’s own flagrantly racist 1930s textbooks on school reading lists. Jansen had previously suspended and dismissed teachers suspected of Communist sympathies, but refused to fire a teacher who told students “Negroes were happy before they knew about racial discrimination.” For decades, Black New Yorkers demanded that the school board remove offensive textbooks. They called particular attention to Jansen’s, presumably because his textbooks reinforced racist ideas through an educational leader’s presumed expertise. Life’s outlines could contrast with textbooks like Jansen’s, as they performed respect. Yet, depicting diversity can also cause harm. Recall: outlines existed for every tradition except Christianity. Like Life’s double-length Christianity issue, Jansen and Nellie Allen’s geography textbooks for grades five to eight contained six textbooks on America and Europe and two on “Distant Lands.”
The outlines’ framework assimilated “the other” into Euro-American Christianity to perpetuate Jansen’s (and the state’s) views of Euro-American Christian dominance at a time of increased legal scrutiny over religion in public schools. Participating in a nationwide educational trend, the Jansen-led Board of Superintendents wrote a moral and spiritual values statement amidst both the textbook controversies and “separation of church and state” concerns about school prayer, Bible-reading, and aid for religious instruction. Finalized in 1956, the statement elided “love of neighbor” and the “Golden Rule.” It claimed “Other great religious systems give expression to the same ideal.” With quotations attributed to Buddhism, Confucianism, and Hinduism, it seems as if the Superintendents read Life’s “Great Religions” series. The school statement and Life likened Confucius’s saying, “What you do not like when done to yourself, do not do to others” to the Golden Rule. Yet, these quotations differ; one is affirmative, one, negative. Life and the statement referred back to their own interpretation of Christian teachings to legitimate other traditions.
M. Jacqui Alexander writes “Pedagogic projects are not simple mechanistic projects for they derive from theoretical claims about the world and assumptions about how history is made, in other words, pedagogy and theory are mutually related.” The outlines present themselves as teaching “about” religion, but they also taught religion by defining it against Christianity, which the outlines were also defining. Section headings signal that Time Inc. framed the outlines as factual: “Some facts about Buddhism”; “Words of Islam.” Eight years before the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed teaching about religion, an aside in Abington v. Schempp, and concurrent with the rise of religious studies programs in public higher education, Time Inc. taught “about” religion. Yet, by organizing distinct traditions, histories, and geographies as “religions,” Time, Inc. “invented World Religions” through othering. The invention reveals the corporation’s pedagogy. The outlines mirror a “piggybank” pedagogy—where the teacher as colonizer inserts information into students. The for-profit corporation self-authorized knowledge production and dissemination, positioning itself as teacher, expert, key source, and “champion” of diversity. How do we teach and learn otherwise?
— Leslie Ribovich
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At first, Life’s “World’s Great Religions” discussion outlines seemed inscrutable. However, when we looked at them alongside William Jansen’s role as NYC Superintendent of Schools, we saw similarities in how both state and corporate bureaucracies produced their own expertise. When we brought our case studies together, we saw dynamics that were less evident than when we were working alone. Through the process of writing and researching together, we were reminded that academic work is never solitary. The process of collaboration required us to look outside our own authority. The language of “my” sources and “your” sources started to feel inaccurate.
Eden Consenstein is a PhD candidate in Religion in the Americas at Princeton University. She is currently completing her dissertation, "Religion at Time Inc.: From the Beginning of Time to the End of Life," with support from the Mellon/ ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship.
Leslie Ribovich is Assistant Professor of Religion at Transylvania University, a liberal arts college in Lexington, KY. She is a Young Scholar in American Religion for 2020-2022. Her current book project is Without a Prayer: Race and the Transformation of Religion in American Public Education.