On Teaching the bible in public school

This past June Louisiana enacted a law mandating posting the Ten Commandments in schools accepting public funds. Shortly after, and not to be outdone, Oklahoma’s public school leadership upped the ante and issued a requirement that the bible and the Ten Commandments be incorporated into state curriculum. Writing as a former evangelical with a seminary degree, an agnostic atheist, and a current public school teacher in St. Paul, MN, I say, “Sign me up to teach the bible,” as I believe those pushing for these policies are asking for more than they suspect.

Similar to the debate over the past decade with teaching intelligent design, if public school teachers were to take on this challenge, students will often come home with more questions than their parents or pastors may be able to answer. These teachers would not be the kind of religious school instructors who must often teach the specific, unquestioned ideology their institutions require. In short, the bible will be taught critically, as any subject in a public academy should be in order to further the kind of inquiry an open academic context should foster. And these teachers may or may not be religious; may or may not be Jewish, Muslim, Christian, or Atheist.

I can see the outlines of my curriculum shaping up even now. Some questions we may ask and explore in class might be:

-       What is the nature of myth and how was the Israelite story of Noah’s Flood (and others) influenced by the Sumerian and Old Babylonian myths of, for example, The Epic of Gilgamesh, written hundreds if not thousands of years before the Hebrew Bible’s account?

-       What does it say about the nature and personality of the Hebrew and Christian God, in Exodus 32, verse 14, where it reads in the Revised Standard Version that the Lord “repented of the evil which he thought to do to his people”? How can a good God repent of evil? And why do some versions, like the New International Version, soften the language used in the text to make the Lord sound less mean?

-       Why are there two different accounts of the birth of Jesus in two different gospels, whose details often contradict each other?

-       What does it say about the character of the Christian God that he’d demand a human sacrifice for finite sin on the threat of an eternal punishment?

-       How can we compare the Judeo-Christian bible with the Koran?

-       Why are some early Christian gospels left out of our official bible?

-       How is it possible that illiterate fishermen who never spoke Greek could write complex gospels?

-       How do biblical scholars and historians understand the bible and how does this differ from the various religious groups who claim to know its absolute and theological meanings, even as their interpretations often contradict each other?

These only represent a fraction of the challenging questions a teacher with the necessary qualifications beyond casual bible reading and Sunday School may take to the history and texts of the bible.

I was educated in conservative, evangelical Christian schools from kindergarten through high school, and into college. I finished with a seminary degree in systematic theology while I was also getting my masters degree in teaching English literature. I continue to study the bible with awe and interest. Therefore, I know the arguments that can be arrayed in reply to my questions above, even if I no longer believe them. But to think critically, to give our students the necessary skills to read closely and prepare for life and career beyond high school, a serious study of the bible, as with any text, must be sharp and analytical. In this case, as important as the bible is to our religious history and cultural understanding in the West, this text demands the most honest academic scrutiny available.  

Can you picture Thomas or Jackie saying at the dinner table, “Today we learned that it is very probable, according to the best scholarship available, that many of the sayings attributed to Jesus in the gospels were probably added by scribes a hundred or two hundred years after the gospels were even written.” That sound you hear is many conservative parents dropping their forks and dashing to the phone to call their pastors for some answers.

And this, I do not believe, is what the institutional leaders and concerned bible believing parents in Louisiana and Oklahoma have in mind. Sign me up!