What Could Go Wrong?

    In case you missed it, educators in Oklahoma and Louisiana and a few other states have called for the teaching of the Bible in public classrooms. While this should surprise no one, it should also not surprise anyone that many people have gone nuts. And just so we're clear, while I'm not going nuts, I do have reservations. In the end, my reservations are probably not enough to dissuade me from being in favor of having the Bible taught, in some fashion, in public schools. And if you're interested, let me tell you why.

    The Bible, whether or not you are a believer, is not only one of the foundations of Western Civilization, but it is also (or at least various parts of it) great literature. But here's the rub, as it were; those parts of the Bible that are not great literature are the ones that many teachers may focus on. However, let's start with what the Bible is, and is not, shall we? First of all, contrary to what many Christians believe, it is not a history book, in the sense that The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire is a history book. James Michener's Chesapeake is a novel that has a lot of actual history in it. That doesn't make it a history book. It's a novel with history in it. The Bible is much like this. It's got history in it. The Court Reporter who did his best to catalogue the career of King David in the books of Second Samuel and First Kings was much like this. We have no secondary sources other than this guy’s writings, but let's give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that most of what he wrote was relatively accurate, and wasn't rewritten or "edited" centuries down the road. Now the Bible is full of these stories that one can argue have their historical truths; whether it's the story of the Babylonians enslaving Jews or Paul's writings to the churches in the Belated (or New) Testament. These are, arguably (and probably) historical accounts. Again, doesn't make the Bible, in toto, a history book. So, where does that leave us?

    It leaves us with the conundrum that brings believers, and a non-believing gnostic like myself, into temperature rising, soul-crushing, and friendship and family threatening, arguments. The best example is the story of creation starting in the Book of Genesis and ending with the death of Moses in Deuteronomy. As I've mentioned in this space before, I (and others) believe that this is a beautiful work of fiction not unlike the works of William Shakespeare and Dante Alighieri. The characters of Yahweh, Adam, Eve, the Serpent, Noah, Tamar, Jacob, Esau, Abraham, Rachel, Moses, et al., are wonderful, and full of life; fictions created by the Yahwist who wrote during the time right after King Solomon during the reign of his idiot son, Rehoboam. I believe she was writing (yes, "She") for her friends and relatives a story of her people. I don't believe there was anything theological about it. But as time went on, her story was added to and subtracted from and bastardized by later Hebrew leaders who had trouble with her human, all too human Yahweh. Anyway, in a nutshell, that's my fiction. I can't prove it. But then again, my believing friends can't prove their fiction that all these characters were real, and that there actually is a supreme being who rules the world and the entire universe. They can pound their fists all they want and respond to my questions with "God Said It, I Believe It, And That Settles It," or "Because the Bible says so," but that's not really an intelligent conversation, you know what I mean? I would argue that normative religion, be it Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, or Islam, is nothing more than really bad interpretation. So...there's my Gnostic sermon. Hey, you didn't go through a pay-wall, so what do you care? Now, the important question is, "Where does that leave us with regard to the Bible and public schools?" 

    For years, the Bible has been taught in public high schools as part of comparative religion courses. I actually had one of those classes in high school. I thought it was great. We studied Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, etc. And if that is where the Bible stayed, I probably wouldn't be writing this piece. But the idea of the Bible being taught separately in all of its religious and theological splendor was, and is, just so anathema to me when it comes to my staunch support of the doctrine of "separation of church and state" that I figured, "What the hell...I'll write about it," in a somewhat cathartic way. But...and there's always a "But." 

    You see, the more I thought about it, and tried to see the other side of the argument, I reminded myself that much of our literary greatness can be traced back to the Hebrew Bible. Part of what makes youngsters and adults better readers and thinkers is background knowledge, or what E.D. Hirsch (the great educational theorist and literary critic) calls "cultural literacy". To Hirsch, a little learning isn't a dangerous thing. It's a stepping stone to more and more learning. When faced with a passage on a reading test, a student with a little familiarity of the subject matter performs better than does a student with no familiarity, even though they might rank equally on general reading skills. I've become convinced that a Bible-less curriculum sustains gaps in their knowledge that will hurt them when they go to college; or even if they don't go to college and want to become deep readers...be still my heart! The language of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and Henry David Thoreau all have their foundations in the Hebrew Bible. And that's just the great American writers! Where would Geoffrey Chaucer or William Shakespeare or Dante Alighieri be without their anxiety of influence which led to their "agon", or competition, with The Yahwist? And certainly Abraham Lincoln couldn't write for very long without drawing on Biblical imagery and cadences. 

    Look, the last thing I want to see is some holier-than-thou high school teacher sitting behind a desk talking about the 'Fall of Man' and 'Original Sin', or how Noah's ark has been found on Mount Ararat. First of all, I'll argue that "Creation and Fall" were one and the same event, and "Original Sin" is nothing more than bad biblical interpretation to keep so-called learned preachers of the Word (be they Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, or Islam) in power, and lastly, NO...they didn't find Noah's ark on Mount Ararat. What I hope to read about is how teachers recognize that the Bible is, in many ways, a powerful and beautiful work of high literature, full of wisdom, irony, and metaphor. All of which, it seems to me, are lacking in today's students. 

    So, if you're interested in students learning about a so-called "Fall" or a "Crucifixion" make them attend your weekly religious service. That would be the appropriate place for those topics. While they're in school, we need to keep reminding them that this is not a theocracy. And while I know that it is difficult to scrape off thousands of years of indoctrination as to what the Bible is, let us try to return to what maybe, it was originally intended as; which is a beautiful, metaphorical story of our beginnings, and an even more beautiful story of a fictional, all-too-human god, dealing with fallible men and women, who are no less fictional, but at the same time just like Shakespeare's characters (Hamlet, Lear, Othello, and Macbeth), full of more life than many of us, all of whom deserve much more than being thought of as Yahweh's pawns. That's great literature, and that's what it demands of us.

write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com