Introduction

[ images, right: two editions of Time will go out next week. One for Americans, another for everybody else in the World]Only Americans will get the dubious privilege of reading "Why We Should teach The Bible In Public Schools" ; Next week people everywhere around the world except in North America will behold an April 2, 2007 edition of Time Magazine issue very different from what Americans will see. In Asian, European, and South Pacific markets next week's Time will feature a cover story image of a menacingly glaring, black turbaned and bearded man alongside a cover story title "Talibanistan".

Time seems to feel Americans deserve something else though, and so Time's domestic US April 2, 2007 edition will feature a cover story entitled "Why We Should Teach The Bible In Public School". Dave Van Biema, Time's senior religion correspondent, has constructed a narrative that sounds mild, reasonable, and evenhanded but advances an agenda, probably inadvertently, that is none of those things. "Why We Should Teach The Bible In Public School" displays a startling lack of awareness of issues underlying the controversy and a creepy oblivion to the existence of a substantial minority of Americans who have good reason to be less than thrilled by Bible classes in school.

"Why we should teach the Bible in Public Schools" may well be a good faith effort, by Dave Van Biema and Time Magazine, to negotiate the controversy over Bible classes in public schools, but even assuming good faith Time's cover story nonetheless carries Christian nationalist themes and advances what is probably the key narrative that's driving the Christian right as a political movement, the bigoted myth of the culture war between the Christian right and the "secular left" or "secular liberals" in which only right wing Americans are held to have valid religious beliefs or, indeed, any religious beliefs at all.

Time Magazine, and Van Biema, appear to endorse that key Christian right frame, rooted in a narrative of an alleged war between good and evil and acted out on Earth as a battle between (right wing) Christians and Godless atheists ("secularists"). The Christian right narrative Time and Van Biema seem to endorse is bigoted because it asserts that liberal Christians are not true Christians and don't actually even merit mention as such and so are, in effect, really atheists, and just as importantly, because the Christian right narrative simply "disappears" all Americans with religious beliefs who are not Christians, as if they simply don't exist. Van Biema refers to "secular liberals" and the "secular left", but his presentation of the controversy over Bible classes in public schools acknowledges neither the 45 million-odd Americans represented the National Council Of Churches (NCC) nor the millions of Americans with non-Christian religious beliefs.

American media has long displayed a preference for amplifying the voice of the Christian right and ignoring the spokespeople of the American Christian center and left, and a media blackout on a recent peace delegation of US religious groups, including the NCC and representing upwards of 50 million Americans, to Iran was only the most recent expression of a pervasive blackout: on its return the Peace delegation held a Washington Press Club press conference to almost total media silence, as if the close to 1/5 of Americans represented by the delegation simply did not exist. In other words, Time's "religious cleansing" of the mainstream to left segment of American Christianity is not anomalous but has been, until very recently with an upsurge in media awareness that an American religious left might actually exist, standard practice.

"Why We Should Teach The Bible In Public Schools" might seem, to readers unfamiliar with the deeper background, to be evenhanded. It is not, and the playing field, as illustrated above, skews wildly in favor of the religious right and in Van Biema's story huge chunks of the American electorate aren't on the playing field at all and don't seem to actually exist. In reality they do exist, they've just been cut out of the narrative, or simply forgotten. Which is worse ? Intentional omission requires, first, notice of that which is omitted. But if Dave Van Biema has simply forgotten that religious minorities, non-Christians, really do live in America and actually are American citizens, or that a sizable fraction of American Christianity is not on the religious right, then we may be well down the road to Christian nationalism.

Missing The Point

Dave Van Biema, Time's senior religion correspondent, comes down against the two existing national Bible class curriculum that are currently being used most widely in the hundreds of American school districts and suggests approaches that are clearly less partisan than those two curriculum but Van Biema seems not to grasp what the basic controversy is about. Here's Van Biema and Time's final assessment of Bible classes in public schools:

The study doesn't have to be mandatory. In a national school system overscheduled with basic skills, other topics such as history and literature deserve core status more than Scripture--provided that these classes address it themselves, where appropriate. But if an elective is offered, it should be twinned mandatorily with a world religions course, even if that would mean just a semester of each. Within that period students could be expected to read and discuss Genesis, the Gospel of Matthew, a few Moses-on-the-mountain passages and two of Paul's letters. No one should take the course but juniors and seniors. The Bible's harmful as well as helpful uses must be addressed, which could be done by acknowledging that religious conservatives see the problems as stemming from the abuse of the holy text, while others think the text itself may be the culprit. [emphasis mine]

I've highlighted a sentence in the passage above to highlight Dave Van Biema's assertion that while Bible classes should not take precedence over and displace history and literature, "scripture" [Christian scripture that is] should nonetheless be a fundamental component of history and literature classes in high school. That claim is, if anything, even more radical than proposals put forth by avowed partisans on the Christian right because, per Van Biema's arguments on the centrality of the Bible to American and Western civilization and the US historical experience, the Bible should be integrated into just about all high school classes except hard sciences and mathematics. This is an example of the partisan bias that runs through Van Biema's article, which presents a simulacrum of objectivity but in the end supports positions advanced by the American Christian right.

There's an even more central confusion packed into that passage, above, from Time's article:

The Bible's "helpful or harmful uses" actually are not the main point of the controversy over Bible classes in schools, which actually centers around whether Bible classes, no matter how well constructed and "non-partisan" nonetheless would serve to advance a de facto national religion, whether Bible classes taught even under a non-partisan curriculum would be used, in many public high schools, to advance partisan religious agendas, whether such classes would be fair to American minority groups holding non-Christian religious and political beliefs, and -for that matter- which of the many versions of the Bible would be used as the source text for such courses.

The very title of "Why We Should Teach The Bible in Public Schools" advances the fundamentalist myth of "The One Bible" but there is no single authoritative Bible. As Jonathan Hutson explains, in Come the Theocracy, Whose Bible Will Rule?, there are many versions of the Bible, each held up by a myriad of competing Christian factions as the authoritative, "true" version. So how would we choose from among those versions ?

This is not hair-splitting. The push for Bible classes in American public schools comes mostly heavily from the American Christian right which, as a political movement, is heavily dominated by the belief that the Bible is the revealed, divinely inspired source of all truth and it is more than likely that if Bible classes in public schools become widespread they will be used, however "nonpartisan" the official course curriculum used are, to push that view of the Bible as the source of all truth, even scientific truth.

But, as widely respected historian of the Bible Bart Ehrman has documented, ( WHYY interview with Ehrman ) fundamentalist claims on the existence of a single, authoritative and inerrant Bible melt away under scrutiny. As a recent Washington Post story on Ehrman, who began out a fundamentalist, described Ehrman's journey into Biblical deconstruction:

The Bible simply wasn't error-free. The mistakes grew exponentially as he traced translations through the centuries. There are some 5,700 ancient Greek manuscripts that are the basis of the modern versions of the New Testament, and scholars have uncovered more than 200,000 differences in those texts.

"Put it this way: There are more variances among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament," Ehrman summarizes.

Most of these are inconsequential errors in grammar or metaphor. But others are profound. The last 12 verses of the Gospel of Mark appear to have been added to the text years later -- and these are the only verses in that book that show Christ reappearing after his death.

Another critical passage is in 1 John, which explicitly sets out the Holy Trinity (the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit). It is a cornerstone of Christian theology, and this is the only place where it is spelled out in the entire Bible -- but it appears to have been added to the text centuries later, by an unknown scribe.

For a man who believed the Bible was the inspired Word of God, Ehrman sought the true originals to shore up his faith. The problem: There are no original manuscripts of the Gospels, of any of the New Testament.

As I've said, I'm taking no position on the question of Bible classes in public schools here, and good arguments for teaching religious and philosophical, if not specifically Christian, literacy have been made from many point of the US political spectrum. But if Bible classes are taught in American public schools, whose Bible will those classes use ? And will such classes teach Bart Ehrman's findings, that Biblical scripture has been heavily altered by humans over the past several thousand years to the point that, in some cases, the intent of the original authors of Biblical scripture may have become warped almost beyond recognition ? Should high school classes teach that ? Would they ?

The Bible Comes To Texas

The narrative of "Why We Should Teach The Bible In Public School" begins in a classroom in a Texas high school where a Bible class is being taught. One of the things readers might notice is that the Bible class Dave Van Biema describes seems to amount to a simplified Sunday-school class approach to teaching the Bible itself. Jennifer Kendrick's high school Bible class does not seem to teach about the Bible, it appears to teach the Bible. If Van Biema notices that, he does not mention it in his Time story and Kendrick's Bible class gets presented in a clearly favorable light in spite of the fact that based on Van Biema's description Jennifer Kendrick's high school class seems to have been converted into an auxiliary (maybe Baptist) church.

Dave Van Biema seems to find that uninteresting, or maybe he just doesn't notice the transformation, and there is a wider context in Texas that might have been appropriate for mention ; Texas over the last two decades has been a cauldron of innovation in methods for assaulting church-state separation. Texas gave America "faith based" prisons, for example, and pioneered "abstinence only until marriage" sex ed.  An upcoming bill in the Texas State Legislature would require all high schools in Texas to provide elective Bible classes based on a nakedly partisan Bible class curriculum that contains a Christian right revisionist, fake that is, historical view claiming that America was founded as a "Christian nation".
What's notable too, though you won't find this in Time's article, is who is pushing that Texas Bill : Texas state legislator Warren Chisum, who last hit the national radar screen when he circulated a memo, in the Texas legislature, that claimed Evolution was actually a religion because, claimed the memo, it is based in Jewish Kabbalism. Chisum's memo also referenced a website that claimed Copernicus was wrong and that the Sun revolves around the Earth.

But, you won't find any of that in "Why We Should Teach The Bible In Public Schools".    

Van Biema's tale opens in the New Braunfels High School in Oakwood, Texas as  teacher Jennifer Kendrick works her students along through the Gospel of Matthew. Kendrick's curriculum is loosely based on the more neutral of the two big national scope Bible course curriculae, "The Bible and It's Influence" that has been endorsed by a broad spectrum of religious scholars from across the religious spectrum and is credited my many as relatively nonpartisan. Kendricks considers the curriculum slanted though, telling Van Biema the curriculum "will bring up Catholicism and mention Gandhi, but you can tell it's written as if I am a Protestant Christian teaching Protestant Christians".

Van Biema sums up his quite favorable impression of Jennifer Kendricks' high school Bible class:

"I could find little to object to here and much to admire. Here was a conservative teacher going way beyond The Bible and Its Influence, but not in a predictable direction. She name-checked the Crusades, avoided faith declarations and treated the Bible as a living document to be pored over rather than blindly accepted. She even managed to fit in other faiths" [emphasis mine]

In what manner did Kendricks graciously squeeze in mention other religious beliefs (Van Biema calls them 'faiths') ? The following probably is not an example of what Van Biema is referring to :

"Explaining why Jesus' famous sermon took place on a mount, she reminds the students that Matthew was writing for Jews, and a mount is where Moses received the Ten Commandments. "So, supposedly," she says, "Jesus is the new covenant, the new law, for the Jewish people."

It's impossible to quite tell from the context how to read this, and it might be quite innocuous, but I have to wonder if there are any Jewish students in Kendricks class. Regardless, there's a vast gulf between Dave Van Biema's relatively warm and cuddly version of Bible classes in Texas public schools and political realities in Texas that may soon have a bearing on Bible classes in the Lone Star State.

As I've written up in a separate story, a bill coming up for a vote in the Texas State House would mandate that Texas high schools offer elective Bible courses and teach from a curriculum demonstrated to be baldly, religiously partisan and which promotes a falsified version of American history. Texas State Rep. Warren Chisum's Hou