Sunday
Although a non-believer, Greg Olear, my favorite blogger, has unexpectedly endorsed the Texas Board of Education’s recent decision requiring high school students to read selected Biblical passages.
To be sure, he qualifies his endorsement, observing that there are
plenty of reasons not to like the BOE decision. Is the Board trying to foist Christianity upon unsuspecting students in Texas? That may well be an ulterior motive. Is this a power grab, a brazen attempt to weld Church and State together? This being Texas, probably yes. Is it fair to mandate passages from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, but not the Quran, or other religious texts? I’ll let Annie Laurie Gaylor, president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, take that question: “Texas is telling millions of children that one religion deserves the government’s seal of approval, while everyone else is an afterthought,” she told the Houston Chronicle. “That’s government-sponsored religious favoritism—and the First Amendment strictly forbids it.”
Olear responds that these are “arguments about politics, not about education—and certainly not about literature.” In a good English course, he writes,
what you’re supposed to do is read texts and then discuss them. It isn’t about right and wrong, per se; it’s about nuance and interpretation and, above all, the development of critical thinking…
Olear points out the rich complexities that can be found in the required Biblical excerpts, which consist of the Garden of Eden story, the Book of Job, and the passage from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians that is always showing up in wedding ceremonies. Discussing the nature of sin, the meaning of unmerited suffering, and the foundational importance of love are great things for high school students to be exploring.
It’s worth noting what the Board of Education leaves out, which is anything from Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. Was it worried that the Sermon on the Mount or the Parable of the Good Samaritan would make Jesus sound like a leftwing radical? How about his point about the difficulty of a rich man entering the kingdom of heaven?
Olear makes the point that the literature we encounter in English classes is much richer if we know our Bible, and this has certainly been my experience. To cite one example that startled me, when I was teaching Beowulf, I was amazed that many of my students didn’t know the story of Cain, who the poet tells us is the ancestor of Grendel and his mother. So yes, I’m all for students being introduced to the Bible.
That is, as long as it does not shape their science, history, or political science classes. A biology teacher at my kids’ high school refused to teach evolution because of her literal reading of Genesis, a shallow interpretation that robs the story of its richness. I suppose there are language arts teachers who might use the Biblical readings to proselytize, but there are others who could use it to explore existential questions.
Incidentally, the list of required readings is actually quite good. It includes Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Pride and Prejudice, The Scarlet Letter, The Inferno, and Fahrenheit 451, along with some great poems (“Prufrock,” “If,” “The Raven,” “Hope is the thing with feathers,” Paul Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask”); short stories ( Trollope’s “The Parson’s Daughter of Oxney Coine” (!), Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil”); and some essays, including Thucydides’s account of Pericles’s funeral oration.
The only real lightweights on the list are Ayn Rand (“What Is Capitalism”) and Margaret Thatcher (her eulogy for Ronald Reagan), but maybe they were included so the Board could also include Martin Luther King’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.”
The Bible readings, of course, are getting all the publicity. But as it appears that many Christians these days are not really reading their Bibles but just imagining that it confirms their own reactionary agendas, maybe it’s good that students will have a chance to examine it closely.
Further note: I remember when I was teaching Genesis as part of Morehouse College’s Humanities sequence (my first job) and startling one of my students, an 18-year-old preacher, when I pointed out that there are two creation stories, not one. Those who compiled the Torah had the wisdom to include both rather than choose one over the other. Amazing revelations await those who pay close attention to the text.
