Okaying the Bible
A cultural milestone of sorts has been passed recently. The cover story in the April 2, 2007 edition of Time Magazine is titled “Why We Should Teach the Bible in Public School.”
There are several reasons why this is significant. First, a national publication of centrist-to-liberal politics has endorsed a project hitherto associated with the agenda of conservative Christians, albeit for a different set of reasons from theirs. Second, this is the first evidence that the center of American public opinion is looking beyond Left-Right culture wars towards a possible consensus on issues often at the center of those wars. Third, there is a recognition that American cultural literacy, held to be in a state of decline for years, can’t really be recovered in any meaningful way while ignoring the core documents of Western civilization that posit a belief in the transcendent.
The notion that Time should applaud study of the Bible within the public school system clashes with definite stereotypes of mainstream American journalism. Americans who are conservative Christians—or part of the Religious Right, to use another term—have long looked upon publications like Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times as propagandists for the assault upon religion in America by American secularists. Skepticism, not to say open hostility, towards personalities and policies dear to the Religious Right has indeed been a hallmark of these publications in recent years. But the Time article, written by David van Biema, Time’s senior religion writer, indicates that the largely secular mainstream media is far from being in lockstep in opposing America’s religious heritage. It also encouragingly reveals that thoughtful, intelligent people at the heart of American culture and society may be coming up with their own suggestions for finding a compromise between the opposing camps in the culture wars. In that vision of a compromise neither the new American theocracy feared by some liberals will prevail nor the secular dictatorship dreaded by some conservatives.
Promising, because it supersedes culture-war conflict in American society, is the awareness that American public schools are demonstrably failing to produce well-rounded, well-informed, and intelligent high school graduates. In study after study, American students at the secondary level have fallen far behind their contemporaries in other parts of the world. A best seller in 1986, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, by E. D. Hirsch Jr. was controversial among some American educationists because it posited a traditional, even culturally and politically conservative interpretation of American history and culture. But its essential premise, that the ability of students to make cogent intellectual judgments on academic and general topics is at least partly dependent on their degree of background knowledge of the subject, has never been seriously challenged. Hirsch’s book argued that all responsible adult Americans needed to know certain facts about American life to make mature decisions. To comprehend modern reality in the US, Hirsch argued, there are basic facts—historical, geographic, political, cultural—that ought to be in mental arsenal of every adult American.
In no arena of thought is this need more obvious than the one in which the values that currently govern decision-making in American national life have taken their shape. It is a fact without contention that the Bible has done more to influence thought, culture, and language in the West than any other single book. In the Time story, author van Biema poses the question of how one should compare Shakespeare and the Bible as required books at high school level. His response: “Beauty of language: Shakespeare, by a nose. Depth of subject matter: toss-up. Breadth of subject matter: the Bible. Numbers published, translated etc.: the Bible. Number of people martyred for: the Bible. Number of wars attributed to: the Bible.” One quickly grasps van Biema’s point. Regardless of whether one accepts it as divinely inspired, let alone inerrant, or just a particular text of a few particular cultures, the Bible stands front and central as a landmark of the cultural and historical geography of the West, and indeed to some extent of the entire modern world.
The Time cover story, of course, quickly addresses the concerns of many Americans that by inserting the Bible into the curriculum of public schools, the wall of separation of church and state is being breached. That wall was built high enough almost to exclude religion from modern American education by the Engel v. Vitale Supreme Court decision of 1963 making it illegal for American public schools to endorse prayer or any specific religious practice. Christian prayer, which had often been forced down the throats of children of parents who were either unbelievers or adherents of different faiths, was banished from classroom, assembly hall, and corridor public address systems. But in the 1970s and subsequent decades, the anti-religious pendulum in public schools seemed to have swung even further against religious expression. Children were sent home for reading their Bible on school buses, or for saying grace privately in school cafeterias. Marxist, and even Wiccan religious hobby clubs were permitted in schools while Bible study or Christian fellowship groups were not. In some schools, principals even banned use of the word “Christmas.”
Christian conservatives were understandably outraged at what they considered the virtual outlawing of religious expression in America’s school system. Yet it was a Democratic Administration, often viewed as unsympathetic to the agenda of the Religious Right, that formulated the most reasonable and intelligent clarification for the treatment of religion in American schools so far. The Department of Education under President Clinton in 1998 issued guidelines entitled “Religious Expression in Public Schools,” which were eminently sensible and sensitive, moreover, to the concerns of both ardent religionists and ardent secularists. Students, the guidelines said, should be allowed to pray privately in school cafeterias, to pray at the school flag-pole outside of school hours, read Bibles on the school bus, even read invocations at commencement exercises. In return for these concessions to religious-freedom advocates, the guidelines specified that teachers could not show Bibles on their desks, express in the classroom preference for any religion over another, lead prayer, or instruct students to pray. Similarly, school athletics coaches were prohibited from leading prayer with their student teams. This compromise position failed to please some secular organizations—the ACLU is contesting the constitutional legality of the concept of a moment of private prayer or meditation—even as it failed to please advocates of the notion that America is a “Christian nation.” What it accomplished, however, was to free up high schools across the nation to expose their students to the richness, beauty, and wisdom of the Bible, and the Bible’s influence upon the world, without endorsing any particular interpretation of it. A teacher of the Bible at the New Braunfels High School in Texas, Jennifer Kendrick, is quoted in the Time cover story as presenting the Beatitudes of Matthew’s Gospel in terms of a match-up between the “blesseds” and their “rewards” according to the text. What is interesting is that Kendrick is herself a conservative Christian, but her style of teaching on the content of the Beatitudes makes it impossible to discern.
As the Time story suggests, this self-consciously neutral style of teaching about a literary classic that for many people is at the same time the answer to all of life’s problems, is highly promising. Kendrick, the teacher, believes things privately about the Bible that she is not allowed to say in her class. But it is a sure sign of national sanity that a teacher can provide instruction of a topic without, generally, arousing fears of possible religious indoctrination of students on the one hand or indifference to their religious viewpoint on the other. The cover-story notes that the number of schools providing Bible literacy courses nationwide is still relatively small. It’s likely, however, that after the magazine’s reportage, the number will significantly increase.
All this, surely, is a good thing. Americans comprise a complex, varied, but quintessentially tolerant society. To be able to study an extremely important historical document while preserving for all students the space to come to their own philosophical conclusions about it is, surely, a sign of a mature civilization. In the history of the West, it is appropriate that the Bible should serve as the bench-test of this balance.
Dr. Aikman is a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum and a former Senior Correspondent for Time.
Columns, David Aikman, Public Square, Religious Liberty, Tue 17 Apr 2007
