Guest Post by Morbo
A new book, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know — and Doesn’t by Stephen Prothero argues that Americans are basically illiterate about the Bible. That’s not a surprise — but it ought to be. The United States, after all, is one of the most religious nations on the planet.
How is it that Americans can be so religious yet ignorant of the book they claim to venerate? We’ve all seen the surveys: Most people cannot name the four gospels and can’t say who delivered the Sermon on the Mount.
Prothero argues in his book that we should remedy this with Bible classes in public schools. He wants this done in a non-sectarian and legal way. That’s good, but I still think he’s misguided.
For starters, the problem is not biblical literary but cultural literacy across the board. Simply put, there is a lot Americans don’t know. Surveys have shown that most people can’t say when World War II was fought or even which nations opposed us. Other surveys have found people essentially clueless on basic scientific issues. (For more on this, see Morris Berman’s 2000 book The Twilight of American Culture.) Why single out the Bible when we have much remedial education to do?
When a person is unable to say whether a passage comes from the Bible or Shakespeare, it means he does not know the Bible very well. This is shame — but it’s also a shame that he doesn’t know Shakespeare.
Furthermore, I would argue that scientific illiteracy presents a much more dangerous threat. Unable to grasp even the basics of the scientific method, many people remain gullible and unable to make informed decisions about nutrition, health care, global climate change and many other issues. A person’s inability to recognize a biblical allusion in a work of literature is unfortunate, but it rarely affects public policy.
Finally, we must face a hard reality: There is no way these classes are going to happen without a lot of metaphorical bloodshed.
People tend to assume that what they believe about the Bible is true — even if absolutely no facts back that up. Public school Bible classes require teachers to present all interpretations of the Bible as equally valid — but not all are. No serious Bible scholar, for example, believes the gospels are contemporaneous accounts of the life of Jesus. Mark was written around 65 A.D. John may be as late as the 90s. Some scholars argue for somewhat earlier dates — putting Mark around the year 50, for example. No serious researcher believes these accounts were dashed off a few months after Christ died.
That’s just one example. Fundamentalists insist that Moses wrote the first five books of the Old Testament. This is rather hard to swallow, since Deuteronomy 34:5-9 describes the death of Moses.
Fundamentalists have a bad habit of using classes “about” the Bible to promote their particular — and unsupportable — views of what the Bible is and how it came into existence. A North Carolina organization, the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, has been promoting this con for years. The group claims its curriculum is merely objective information about the Bible. In fact, it was devised by TV preachers and reflects the fundamentalist line.
What are these classes going to be like in rural Alabama? If you were a member of the liberal United Church of Christ living there, would you feel OK about sending your child to such instruction?
Religion can be discussed across the curriculum when it’s appropriate. A course in European history needs to talk about the Crusades and the religious wars. A sociology class examining race relations should talk about the religious impulse that motivated many during the struggle for civil rights. An art appreciation course can talk about the great works of Christian art. Students in a poetry class can read Gerard Manley Hopkins without fear.
Cordoning off the Bible for special, allegedly objective, classes sounds nice in theory. In practice it will be nearly impossible to pull off in some parts of the country as the culture wars rage. I’m skeptical that it can be done, but if some schools want to try, two things must be done first: The courses should be made elective, not mandatory, and someone should be watching closely to make sure the teaching doesn’t lapse into preaching.