You don’t need to panic about Bibles in public schools

The Texas Board of Education’s Friday approval of an optional elementary curriculum that includes passages and stories from the Bible will likely be contested in court. This kind of thing often leads to lawsuits, and critics have already charged that the curriculum in question promotes Christianity instead of, as it promises, introducing students to a range of religions in a nonsectarian way.

But if the curriculum does pass constitutional muster, recent history suggests its opponents should take heart: The reality of public-school Bible curricula is typically quite mundane. Bible curricula in public schools aren’t new, and they aren’t a step toward theocracy. In fact, they aren’t even a step toward church.

That’s not to say these proposals never go out of bounds, as happened with this year’s most prominent story on the subject, a debacle in Oklahoma. Over the summer, the state’s top education official sent a memo requiring a Bible in every public classroom and mandating the Bible be incorporated as “an instructional support” to provide historical context in appropriate upper-grade classes like “history, civilization, ethics, comparative religion, or the like.”

The instructional part sounds reasonable enough. As a basic concept, at least, it comports with long-standing establishment clause jurisprudence, which holds that the Bible may be “presented objectively as part of a secular program of education” (Abington Twp. v. Schempp, 1963).

But it soon came out that the Bible-in-every-classroom plan was not only expensive but apparently corrupt: Extremely few versions of the Bible fit Oklahoma’s original purchase specifications — but one of them was the Donald Trump-endorsed “God Bless the USA” Bible, available for the ridiculous price of $60.

That’s indefensible and not my interest here, nor do I have any desire to chip away at the establishment clause. But when these curricula and laws are actually written to comply with the First Amendment, they do much less than advocates hope — or critics fear.

Take Georgia, for example. The state approved optional Bible electives for public schools in 2019, though it had already approved optional Bible electives for public schools in 2006. Perhaps Georgia legislators felt the need to reiterate their approval 13 years in because, as my Christianity Today colleague Daniel Silliman reported in 2019, hardly any Georgia schools had bothered with Bible classes.

“Georgia Department of Education statistics show that in the 2018–2019 school year, 163 of the state’s 181 school districts did not offer Bible classes,” Silliman found. In 2018, “only 740 of over a half-million high school students in Georgia enrolled” in a Bible class, and nearly half of those 740 were in off-campus classes that receive no public funding and require parental permission to attend.

Bible classes haven’t proliferated, Silliman concluded, because schools usually “prioritize the core curricula evaluated on state tests and don’t have the staffing — or high enough levels of student interest — to teach Bible electives.” What classes do take place, a teacher said, are “just like a literature class.”

The Texas situation isn’t exactly analogous, but Texan teachers have to deal with standardized testing, too. And poking around the curriculum, which is available online, suggests it’s hardly a devotional text. (Plenty of units don’t mention the Bible at all.)

One presentation of the golden rule, for instance, lists a Bible verse with similar guidance from Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Sikhism. Another introduces the biblical King Solomon alongside royal figures including Cinderella, King Midas and Old King Cole. Or, in a kindergarten art and reading lesson where a passage from Genesis is shared as context for a Renaissance painting, the teacher is told to liken the painter to “Aztec artists inspired by religious stories.”

It’s not clear to me, as the mother of twin kindergarteners, that this is the best way to improve kindergarteners’ reading skills. It is clear to me, as a Christian, that this is not how we discuss and share our faith in church or evangelism efforts. If this is somehow supposed to get people to church, I don’t think it’s going to work.

But as an educational objective, giving students basic familiarity with the Bible is eminently defensible. Its long historical influence on the literature, law and language of the Western and the Western-colonized world (which is to say, almost all of the world) is undeniable, and students should be able to recognize that influence when they encounter it.

Many great “works reflect a profound knowledge of Scripture,” as the author Marilynne Robinson has explained in The New York Times, so much so that they cannot be fully appreciated without possessing some of that same knowledge. The Bible is part of our “literary heritage,” as Robinson observed, whether our increasingly irreligious society likes it or not. Schools that leave their students ignorant of the single most important influence on the English language are doing a disservice to the next generation of thinkers, readers and writers of every religion and none at all.

That’s certainly true at the level of high school literature, but I think there’s a reasonable — if debatable — case for starting younger. Elementary schoolers are old enough to learn about (and practice) the golden rule. They can benefit from understanding biblically inspired idioms like “richer than Solomon,” “my cup runneth over” or “the patience of Job.” They’ll be better prepared to learn history like the Scopes Monkey Trial if they already understand the gist of that era’s debate over the origin of life.

That’s not exactly the stuff of a big tent revival, and the mere presence of Bibles in public schools does not portend the end of the rightful separation of church and state. If this Texas reading curriculum is what reverses dechurching in America, it will only be through divine intervention.