This ongoing ideological struggle is the basis of a new book, Faith Ed: Teaching about Religion in an Age of Intolerance, in which Linda K. Wertheimer, a veteran education writer and editor, examines the friction and sometimes outright confrontation over teaching religion in public schools. She recently shared some insights and observations with The Atlantic. The interview that follows has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Melinda D. Anderson: Your own experience with religion and schooling is a main thread that runs through the book. How does your own life story influence your analysis?

Linda K. Wertheimer: When I was 9, my family moved to Findlay, Ohio. There were no Jews in our tiny school except for me and my two older brothers. For the first time in my life, I felt different, and my school’s actions made my Jewishness stand out even more. My public school in the 1970s and 1980s promoted Christianity in numerous ways, including assemblies led by pastors around Christmas and Easter. My peers and I never learned about other religions in the classroom. My life story shapes the questions I ask in Faith Ed. Would it have made a difference if my school had tried to teach us about many religions instead of one? Can education soften the divisions over religion between schoolchildren?

Anderson: “Teach, not preach” was a common refrain as a guiding principle for how schools should introduce the teaching of religion. Talk about the inherent tension between teaching students about religion and the credible fear expressed by parents especially of proselytizing.

Wertheimer: Some parents feared that if their children learned about another religion, they might fall out of love with their own faith. Or if a child came from an atheist or agnostic family, maybe he or she might suddenly want to embrace a religion. However, I wouldn’t describe that fear as credible when referring to world-history courses that wrap in instruction about different religions. The courses I observed teach students basic information about three or more religions to help them understand the geography, history, politics, and culture of a country or region of the world. Teachers were not asking students to pray or perform religious rituals.

If anything, schools are in a better place than they were in the 1950s and 1960s, when it was commonplace for teachers to lead children in prayer and recite Bible verses as part of the morning routine. The 1963 court ruling prohibiting teacher-led prayer gradually led to bigger efforts to educate children about many religions. But there is a real fear of proselytizing when it comes to classes about the Bible as literature or history. Parents should be the most concerned about those types of courses. Those classes can be taught objectively, and in fact, I found such an example at Lumberton High School, the target of so much fuss over a teacher’s lessons on Islam.