If the Bible is taught in schools, students must learn good and bad
I’ve had a sneaking suspicion since college that Americans don’t know much about the Bible. One day, I was sitting in an English seminar on William S. Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch.” The novel is an absolute bacchanalia of drugs, violence and sex, so I was surprised to see Burroughs write about throwing pearls before swine. Good pastor’s kid that I am, I raised my hand and asked the professor why the author was quoting Jesus.
“He’s not,” he said.
I was cowed, but I pushed on. “Pearls before swine. I’m pretty sure that’s the Bible.”
The professor replied dismissively, “Not that I’m aware of,” and moved on.
He was wrong. Pearls before swine is a famous image from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. But my professor wasn’t alone in his ignorance. Only about half of Americans know that Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount, according to a 2019 religious knowledge survey from the Pew Research Center.
And that’s just part of the story. According to an earlier version of the survey, nearly 50% of Americans think the Golden Rule is one of the Ten Commandments. (It’s not.) Less than half can name the four Gospels. And pretty much no one knows who Esther is. This is all pretty surprising in a country many consider to be the most Christian nation in the history of the world.
I couldn’t help thinking of my Burroughs professor and those Pew surveys recently when Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters mandated that all public schools in the state begin teaching the Bible.
Just about everyone agrees that Walters’s decree is unconstitutional — a flagrant breach of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which forbids the state from supporting or sponsoring one religion. I do, too, but I don’t necessarily disagree with the superintendent’s rationale.
In defending the order, Walters argues that students need basic biblical literacy to recognize the full significance of crucial moments in American history, citing as examples the Declaration of Independence, the creation of the Constitution and the Civil Rights Movement.
He’s right; familiarity with Judeo Christian scripture adds depth and nuance to our understanding of these important
Familiarity with Judeo-Christian scripture adds depth and nuance to our understanding of important events. But ... students also need to know the Bible if they are to understand some of our country’s most ghastly sins.
events. But he’s also cherrypicking sunnier moments to fit his argument. Because students also need to know the Bible if they are to understand some of our country’s most ghastly sins.
Take as an early example the genocide of Indigenous people. To justify the submission — and often the eradication — of Native Americans throughout the continent, European colonizers often likened their victims to the Canaanites, the inhabitants of the Promised Land before the arrival of the Israelites. In the books of Deuteronomy, Joshua and Judges, God urges his chosen people to wipe out whomever they find there, offering divine sanction to merciless slaughter. And if the Native Americans were modernday Canaanites, their destruction was also permitted.
Or take as another example the proslavery sermons of antebellum preachers. Some of the most fervent defenses of the institution came from the pulpits of the American South, and Confederate clergymen frequently fell back on the Bible to justify slavery throughout the 19th century. One of their favorite scriptural passages (of many) was St. Paul’s exhortation in the book of Ephesians that slaves obey their “masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ.”
But such uses (or misuses) of the Bible are not restricted to previous centuries. Indeed, some supporters of Donald Trump regularly use the Bible to explain their support of the former president
despite — or perhaps even because of — his most noxious sins, from business fraud to perjury to sexual assault. The logic goes like this: For them, Trump is like Cyrus, the Persian king who allowed the Israelites to return home after the Babylonian exile. Crucially for this analogy, Cyrus was not an Israelite — not a member of God’s chosen people. He was, rather, a “vessel,” an unexpected tool God used to carry out his plan. The message for some Christians then is simple: God can use anyone, from a heathen Persian monarch to an unscrupulous New York businessman, to do His will.
And, of course, these are just a few such examples of the harm scripture has done in America throughout its history. The Bible is a sword that cuts both ways, and it can be used for great good and real evil. And though I suspect Superintendent Walters doesn’t want Oklahoma students to know all that, it might be good if they did.