And in fact, though this topic is getting air this week (it's currently being debated at the Washington Post's On Faith panel discussion), these courses are already being taught. The argument for religious literacy in the last 2 years has become the central mechanism for returning religion-based courses to the public school curriculum.  To understand the culture and history of the world, you have to understand the religious texts at the center of everything from Shakespeare to Martin Luther King, Jr.

For those interested, there are 2 primary curricula vying for use in public schools.

The National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools  (caution: for aesthetic reasons unknown to me, annoying triumphant music heralds the loading of their homepage) is pushing a popular approach that would use the Bible itself as the textbook.

Any Bible curriculum that does not allow students to read it for themselves and draw their own conclusions insults the intelligence of the students and short changes them from getting a well-rounded education. In the final analysis, refusal to allow students to use their own Bibles in a Bible class is the ultimate in arrogance and arbitrary censorship. Let the students read and study the Bible itself, not what some expert says about it; it is the right thing to do.

The Bible Literacy Project issues a text entitled The Bible and its Influence that counts some church-state separationists like Charles Haynes of the First Amendment Center and Marc Stern of the American Jewish Congress among its supporters. It traces the narrative of the Bible and highlights its various allusions through cultural artifacts and historical developments.

I'm not here to say the value of religious literacy is a bad argument. But I would say this: it's not so simple. It's one thing to teach that Genesis is the first book of the Bible and contains the story of the snake and the forbidden tree. It's quite another to find a non-controversial way to answer virtually any serious question a student may have about that story. Multiply that concern by every story and character in the Bible.

Still, to read Prothero's comments you would think there's never been a simpler, less complicated exercise. In fact these are delicate issues and fine lines fraught with the danger of religious controversy and turmoil for a community.

Avoiding that brand of conflict might leave religious literacy  education necessarily superficial, and that may not be such a bad thing from a church-state perspective. Worth asking though: from a religious perspective, is it a good idea? Just because we can teach about religion legally, does that mean we should? We can learn to reference biblical allusions in great literature and speeches, but do we want to introduce our most sacred, personal, traditional beliefs in a way most suitable for a round of Trivial Pursuit?  These are honest questions.

One thing is for certain: the teaching of religious beliefs and values is best done in homes and churches, synagogues and mosques. Whether the all-important constitutional distinction between teaching about religion on the one hand and teaching religion on the other is a simple one to execute in a real-life classroom is another thing altogether.