My Evangelical Homeschool Mother Taught Me the Five Pillars of Islam

In the past few weeks, I’ve been following this story:

BRISTOL, Tenn. — A Bristol group is staging a silent protest in front of Vance Middle School Friday morning for what they believe to be the teaching of Islam to seventh-grade students.

“The protest will be a silent Christian protest with signs and a banner, we hope to have at least 100 people show up,” Emily Kausch, who’s planning to attend, wrote in an email to the Bristol Herald Courier.

The organizer is parent Patty Kinkead, who said she is “sort of the representative for Tennessee Against Common Core in this area.” She said she removed her fourth-grade son from the Bristol Tennessee school system because of Common Core.

“My son did go to Bristol Tennessee Schools last year and then I pulled him out to home-school him,” Kinkead said Wednesday. “I’m involved with Tennessee Against Common Core. I want to actively educate people about what Common Core is and some of the parts of Common Core that are most offensive. One of the most offensive parts is the Islam content that is with Common Core.”

It seems a group of parents in Tennessee are protesting the inclusion of Islam in the state’s seventh grade social studies standards. In fact, some activists urged students to intentionally get an F in the class. And, as you see above, some activists are arguing that parents should homeschool because of curriculum like this. And so, in our highly polarized world, I have something to say.

I was grew up in an evangelical homeschool family, and my mother taught me the five pillars of Islam. It was actually part of our history curriculum, which began with the creation of Adam and Eve and continued up through the present. Not only was I taught about the spread of Islam (and having taken college classes in this area later, I can say that what I was taught was accurate), but I was also required to memorize and recite the five pillars of Islam. I was expected to learn, well, basically exactly what it sounds like the seventh graders in the article mentioned above were required to learn.

Don’t get me wrong, my parents were very evangelical and very conservative. They were the types who read the Bible every morning and led a regular Bible study group in addition to attending church. But they also didn’t think that teaching us about other religions would contaminate or indoctrinate us. In fact, I think they believed that better understanding different people and cultures would help us better spread the gospel in our communities. As a result, I received a pretty decent education on the history and doctrine of Islam.

We as a society so often focus on the extreme and outrageous. That’s not a problem, necessarily, and there are a lot of good reasons for going after the extreme. The root of the problem in this case is islamaphobia, which is very real and needs to be combatted. And yet I think it’s important to remember that there’s also middle ground. For every parent protesting public school students learning about Islam as part of their social studies curriculum, there is very likely an evangelical mother like mine teaching her children the five pillars of Islam as part of their history curriculum.

This isn’t to say that there isn’t Christian homeschooling curriculum that covers the history of Islam in inaccurate ways. There is. But Christian homeschool curriculum, and Christian homeschoolers, and evangelical parents—none of these things are not monoliths. Sometimes there’s just enough nuance and give to provide children with an accurate understanding of the history and basic doctrine of Islam.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention how helpful I have found the information about Islam that I learned as an evangelical homeschool girl. Whether relating to the Middle Eastern international students we sponsored while in high school or following events in the Middle East and beyond in the years since, having a basic understanding of the history and doctrine of Islam has served me well and given me a better understanding of the people and the world around me.

And that, quite simply, is why Tennessee’s state standards require seventh graders to learn about Islam in the first place.