Newspaper Article - The Bible and Public Education

Here's my December newspaper article - published yesterday in The Republic:

A recent Thursday evening found me in the local school auditorium listening to the 5^th and 6^th grade choir’s Christmas program.  I thoroughly appreciated the program, but not because I could make out my two oldest children’s voices among the 50 or 60 on stage. (I couldn’t.)  And it wasn’t because it helped “put me in the Christmas spirit”. (It didn’t.  I’m a Grinch.)

Rather, my appreciation was for how “behind the times” we are.  In this age of hyper sensitivity and political correctness, when a field trip to watch a production of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” is taboo because of its references to the biblical account of the birth of Jesus, it was refreshing to know that students in Columbus, Indiana were still allowed to learn and perform songs like “Silent Night”.

Contrary to what you might expect, I applaud the existence of the school Christmas concert not as a Christian who is paranoid about the “War on Christmas”.  (In fact, I would not be the least bit offended if the school put up a “holiday” tree or if these two weeks off were called the “winter break”. )

Nor do I applaud it as a parent necessarily.  It’s not the school’s job to “keep Christ in Christmas” for my kids.  (That role belongs solely to my wife and me, if we so choose.)

No, I applaud the concert mainly as an educator - because it gives me just the slightest hope that our culture’s oft misguided sensitivity and fear of provoking controversy have not yet completely eliminated every reference to the Bible from our local public schools. 

During my years at Hauser, I always hoped to teach an elective course called “The Bible as Literature”, but the schedule never allowed. Whenever I discussed the possibility with students, two questions consistently came back at me: “Can you teach that in a public school?” and “What in the world would it be about?”

There was a time in our not too distant past when both questions would have elicited only laughter and incredulity.

A year ago, Marilynne Robinson wrote in The New York Times, “The Bible is the model for and subject of more art and thought than those of us who live within its influence, consciously or unconsciously, will ever know.”  The point is, regardless of whether one reads the Bible as divine inspiration or as mythology, one definitely should be familiar with it.  The Bible remains the world’s widest selling book and a key foundation for much of Western art, literature, ethics and law. Those unfamiliar with what is written there miss out on every biblical allusion present in the books, movies, and debates that surround us every day and an important dimension of meaning is lost.

I have watched episodes of The Simpsons where a good deal of the humor would be lost on the biblically illiterate.  And when our teens aren’t educated enough to “get” a cartoon, a change is due. 

I suggest we need to go even further behind the times.