I’m a little envious when my friends start swapping stories about their Catholic schooling. There are common, particularly Catholic experiences shared among students at parochial schools whether they grow up in New Jersey, St. Louis, or Seattle. I’ll hear about exactly how beholden to textual criticism the high-school theology teachers were, or how many church documents had to be read for class, or how few. Such experiences have to do with curriculum, not just with culture. I can reminisce with my Evangelical peers over the music or novels or popular theology that loomed large over the subculture when I was in middle school (in this case: Jars of Clay, Left Behind, and I Kissed Dating Goodbye), but it’s much rarer that we talk about learning the creeds or confessions. I don’t know whether to attribute this to the confessional diversity within evangelicalism, to the relative recency of models of Evangelical schooling, or to the fact that I went to a public high school and missed out on a theology class at that level.
The great wave of Presbyterian pedagogy, which gathered strength from Scotland and Ulster and spilled down the Great Wagon Road from Philadelphia to the Virginia backcountry where my ancestors settled, had lost force out by the time it got to me. In Sunday School, I had to memorize portions of the Shorter Catechism, but I got off easy compared to earlier generations. Lifelong recall of the Reformed confessions is one of the characteristics Robertson Davies assigns to elderly Canadian schoolteacher Dunstan Ramsey in the Deptford novels: “The words of the Westminster Confession, painstakingly learned by heart as a necessity of Presbyterian boyhood, still seemed, after many wanderings, to have have the ring of indisputable authority.” Here’s how James Leyburn describes colonial American Presbyterian culture in The Scotch-Irish: A Social History:
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