Getting It Right On Bible Courses In Schools

If a recent decision of the State Board of Education in Texas is any indication, there are a lot of ways not to get this right. After approving "broad guidelines" for an elective course on the Bible in high schools, the Board apparently then found itself flummoxed by the Texas Legislature's initial mandate that left unspecified whether all school districts will or will not be required to offer the course in the first place. Both bodies are leaving this question for the State's Attorney General to answer. In the meantime, the Board of Education is delaying proposing specific curriculum requirements and content standards for the recommended course until the A.G. answers it.

Where might we begin sorting through a mess like this? With a state legislature's malfeasance in passing yet another law with easily spotted bugs in it? With an Attorney General forced to muck around with issues that properly should have been decided by educators, not educational administrators and not school bureaucrats, in the first place? With a School Board bogged down because of an unwillingness to take fully into account what freedom of religion does and does not imply for the teaching of religion in our schools? For now, I'll settle for a few thoughts on the latter.

My first thought is that it is a good thing for high school students to have an opportunity to study the Bible's impact on history, literature, and culture, in a separate course devoted to just this subject. My second is that it is not a good thing to offer a Bible course in any context that even remotely resembles a devotional or a proselytizing one, particularly of the sort revered by Bible-massaging evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants who believe to the depths of their souls that its pages "containeth all things necessary for salvation," and that only they, of all the sacred scriptures of all the world's religions, does this. My third thought is that Bible courses that incorporate my first thought are likely to be good courses, and that Bible courses that do not incorporate my second thought are not.

And so it bothers me some that the Texas Board of Education has not yet seen fit to be very explicit about what sort of Bible course it will be that their kids and grandkids will be letting themselves in for. One of the most popular around the country these days, put together by a National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, has already been analyzed and found wanting by a number of religious studies scholars whom I know and respect, and if I may be bold to say so, my own reaction to its voluminous materials is even more negative than some of theirs. Those for whom this course appears to be lacking in solid scholarship can make a good case for looking elsewhere.

Devotional, proselytizing approaches to Bible study may be acceptable in churches (even though I think they still make for largely irrelevant Christian education), but they have no place in public education, lower, higher, or anywhere in between. And until the Texas Board comes out and says this in no uncertain terms, I hope that school districts will find a way to hold back all the God fearing, frothing at the mouth, washed in the blood Christians in their communities who can't wait to have at all the impressionable young infidels in their midst. The intention of the Texas Legislature in 2007 seems clearly to have been in the direction of asking for a course that focuses on the contributions the Bible has made to human culture, not a course that indoctrinates. It might have helped had the potential contribution been defined bi-modally, that is, in the direction of emphasizing just as strongly the contributions that culture has made to the formation and the transmission of the Bible. But at the very least, the Legislature has made possible a rigorous study of the Bible in secondary schools, in contrast with an inappropriate invasion of them by religious zealots who should be focusing more on their day jobs. Hopefully, the Board of Education will quickly head off any prospect of the latter.

In the final analysis, though, what the world needs now is not just a spreading of Scriptural Christianity across the land(s), but also a new openness to how the Lord and Giver of Life is already embodied in human nature generally and is manifest wherever men and women devote themselves sacrifically to seeking and finding what is truly Holy. Hey, legislators and school board members: how about a little more attention to the religious experience and the religions of all humankind, and not just Christians'?