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 often read at weddings. The nature of sin, the meaning of unmerited suffering, and the foundational importance of love are great things for high school students to be discussing.
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 or the impossibility of a rich man entering the kingdom of heaven make Jesus sound like a leftwing radical? Given the rightwing’s assault on social welfare programs, I’d love to see a class dive into the Prodigal Son story. Jesus, like the best teachers, challenges even the most entrenched of assumptions.
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’ public high school refused to teach evolution because of her literal reading of Genesis, a shallow interpretation that robs the story of its richness. There will be language arts teachers who use the Biblical readings to proselytize. But most teachers I have encountered respect the works they teach, refusing to subordinate them to narrow political agendas. In any event, Olear appears to believe that the material is so substantive that it will frustrate such efforts.
Incidentally, the list of required readings is 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 and Martin Luther King’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” (whose title itself is a Biblical allusion).
The only real lightweights on the list are Ayn Rand’s “What Is Capitalism?” and Margaret Thatcher’s eulogy for Ronald Reagan, but maybe they were included to give the Board political cover for including King.
The Bible readings, of course, are getting all the publicity. But as it appears that many Christians these days are not really reading their Bible 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 how, in my first job, my teaching of Genesis as part of Morehouse College’s Humanities sequence startled one of my students, an 18-year-old preacher. I pointed out that there are two accounts of creation, not one. Those who compiled the Torah had the wisdom or the humility to include both rather than choose one. Amazing revelations await those who engage in close reading.
