Do you tell the young people in your life to follow The Golden Rule? Have you been urged to “turn the other cheek” instead of harming someone who has harmed you? Or maybe Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” is your favorite song, but you’re not sure where that hard line about “the valley of the shadow of death” comes from.
These familiar ideas and expressions share something in common: They all come from the Bible. Along with Greek mythology and Shakespeare, the Bible is the most important source for understanding literature in the English language. Teaching students essential excerpts from the Bible so that they may be well-read is not “sermonizing” any more than reading Greek mythology encourages paganism. (The jury is still out on whether teaching Shakespeare creates theater kids.)
As part of HB 1605, the Texas Education Agency was charged with compiling a list of texts to recommend to the State Board of Education as required reading to all Texas public school students. TEA rightfully recognized that the Bible shaped America’s literary and moral fabric, and included a handful of passages from both the Old and New Testament in its recommendation.
The recommended reading list, which has yet to receive amendments or approval by the SBOE, includes just eight passages from the Bible in Kinder through eighth grade. That is about one biblical passage out of 20-30 selections per grade. English I-IV, with its greater emphasis on themes, incorporates only five additional highly relevant passages. Reading around one fairly short excerpt per grade hardly seems like proselytization, unless your objective is to explicitly marginalize Christian and Hebrew influences.
Moreover, these passages appear side by side with other moral stories such as Aesop’s Fables and biographies of famous Americans, contradicting the argument that there is a special Christian emphasis to the reading list. If reading these passages is “sermonizing,” then it is hard to argue that any story with moral perspective is not an imposition.
One example for the necessity of knowledge of the Bible is Robert Frost’s poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” which contains a line relating to the Garden of Eden. If a student does not know what the Garden of Eden is or understand its significance, that will leave a hole in that student’s analysis of the poem. Similarly, ignorance of the Bible will leave massive gaps in understanding almost every aspect of American history and culture.
Organizations like the Texas Freedom Network (a left-wing outfit dedicated to keeping Christianity out of schools and porn in libraries) insist that this is a violation of the Establishment Clause, which prohibits the government from “establishing” a religion (inaccurately truncated into the nonsensical phrase “separation of church and state”). Despite their arguments, the courts have ruled that religious texts may be taught in schools as works of historical and literary significance, as even the Houston Chronicle grudgingly admits.
The majority opinion in Abington School District v. Schempp states, “Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment.”
The Department of Education and even the ACLU report the same.
To anyone who cares about giving their child a complete education, having familiarity with significant portions of the Bible is a no-brainer. The Bible is essential to understanding America’s history and the values of its great thinkers. To jettison study of the Bible is to declare this understanding expendable.
But maybe that was the goal all along.
