Over two years ago I formulated a policy on how to talk about religion in my western civ classes. I have been modifying it since then and have now decided to publish it at hatlie.de: http://hatlie.de/teaching/teaching-policyreligion.html.

My classes probably contain more about religion than most history classes, but it naturally depends on the course subject. I do a lot of religion in western and world civilization surveys and my course on the Renaissance and Reformation, but relatively little in the other courses. See http://hatlie.de/teaching/index.html for a list of course titles and links to course descriptions.

Of the 28 discussion units that make up the interactive component of my Western Civilization I (to 1650) class at the University of Maryland, about a third are explicitely about religiously-related themes:

• unit 2: origins of monotheism
• unit 3: first laws (a comparison of Exodus and the Hammurabi codex)
• unit 13: the suppression of Christianity
• unit 14: Christians as citizens ("Bible" readings are again required here.)
• unit 15: a reading from St. Augustine
• unit 17: papal power in the middle ages
• unit 19: the Crusades (although the emphasis here is not totally on religion)
• units 24-26: three units on different aspects of the Reformation

Several others are potentially about religion or have that as a component. Ironically perhaps, my unit on the Thirty Years War is a reading I chose to purposely de-emphasize the religious aspect.

Overall, I think religion should be taken seriously in the classroom, confronted head on, and not avoided. A clear line should be drawn, however, between conclusions reached by adherance to standards of historical evidence and those drawn by "faith." The former are what class is about.