National Post Says: Read Your Bibles, Everyone
This essay is cross-posted at Rev. Dave’s Bible Study, Sixth Estate’s adjunct blog on religion.
Let’s suppose that an NGO was about to distribute a booklet in your child’s grade 5 class. The book contains admonitions that gay people should be stoned to death, that teenage girls who have sex with their boyfriends should be burned to death, and that while engaging in genocidal warfare against the next town over, you should feel free to abduct any attractive girls you find and make them your sex slaves. In fact, this booklet advocates that people be murdered for several dozen offences, ranging from masturbation to witchcraft to disrespecting one’s parents. Are you disturbed that this book is being distributed in your child’s class? Would it make you feel any more comfortable if the school sent home a permission form first, saying that if you wanted to, you could ask them not to give your child this book?
If you answered yes to the first question, or no to the second, then you are the sort of “dinner party ruining atheist” that National Post columnist Jonathan Kay thinks should just shut up and read the Bible like a good little Christian lad. If not, then you may feel some sympathy for PEI father Michael Arsenault, who is upset that his province allows the Gideons to distribute Bibles in elementary school classrooms.
Kay dismisses Arsenault as a typical leftist bigot in sheep’s clothing, and insists that everyone should read the Bible for the following reasons. First, it is the “literary cornerstone of the West.” Second, because if you can stand to read the old-fashioned King James Bible, you’ll realize that hundreds of aphorisms we use today — from “fly in the ointment” to “my brother’s keeper” were being used centuries ago, too, and occur in the Bible.
As it happens, I agree with these reasons. That’s why I’m reading the Bible and commenting on it, over at Rev Dave’s Bible Study. After about one month of blogging, I’m halfway through the first book of Genesis, and we’ve already sped through the following important stories: God ordering human sacrifice to “test” his followers, God helping his followers win slaves as profits from the sex trade (thus neatly killing two moral birds with one stone), God annihilating cities, God ordering the genital mutilation of infants, God scattering humanity because he did not want them to live in peace, God massacring almost the entire population of the planet, and God kicking humans out of the Garden of Eden because he was afraid they might live forever.
Now, it doesn’t terribly surprise me that midway through his diatribe about the importance of reading the Bible, Mr. Kay cheerfully and freely acknowledges that he hasn’t actually read it himself. It does surprise me a little more that he claims not to be a Christian. His children, he says, are much too young to be exposed to the horrifying legal codes and the manic calls for genocide liberally sprinkled through the opening books of the Bible. But Grade 5 students, he says, are definitely old enough, as he puts it, to “appreciate the source material.”
I have no problem saying that people should read the Bible. Saying that public school classrooms should become sites for the evangelical distribution of religious literature, however, is where I draw the line. I imagine that many conservatives, perhaps even the good Mr. Kay, would be loudly and rabidly agreeing with me if, instead of the Christian Bible, the Gideons were handing out the Koran. There is one circumstance in which I will accept the distribution of Bibles in elementary schools: if it is done the same way that these same schools hand out Greek myths. Hand out the Bible, tell students it is the primitive ramblings of an ancient people who thought we were living on a flat Earth overseen by a capricious and vengeful deity, and I will withdraw my objections to this very silly exercise.
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Skinny Dipper
I see no curriculum value in students receiving the Gideon Bible during instructional time. First, according to the Fleisch-Kindcaid, the Bible (KJV) is written at a grade-ten level. Also, I wouldn’t know how the students could use the Gideon Bible. I suppose once could use it for grade-five Social-Studies in Ontario where the students learn about ancient civilizations. Even then, it would be a stretch to discover the organization of a society based on the Bible.
Could the Gideon Bible be given out at lunch time or after school? If the school staff members are not used and if the Bibles are distributed in a place where students have the option of entering or not, then I have no problem.
Some Muslim students use empty classrooms and gymnasiums for prayers. Scouts and Guides use school gyms in the evenings for activities. Some church groups use the gyms for Sunday church services. Heck, even the NDP uses high school stage auditoriums for federal leadership debates.
One must be careful in letting students receive information and other goodies from outside sources which may include Gideon Bibles, Dairy Farmers loot bags, or even stuff from Scholastic which may distribute books and paraphenalia that have well-known cartoon characters.
Sixth Estate
Thanks for your comments. I’ll take them in order.
First off — this KJV nonsense is BS to placate the intelligentsia. If you want students to understand the Bible (and again, I think that’s a good idea, just not one that should be pushed on youngsters in public schools), a more modern translation would be much better suited to the task. The KJV is loved by Christian fundamentalists and by the literary crowd.
The Bible is too diverse, and many of its texts too historically unreliable, to present much in the way of source material for an Ancient Civ unit. Plus there would be no way to please anybody. Teach it as myth, or teach it as fact, and either way somebody will be incensed.
I have no particular trouble with students receiving anything from outside sources, whether it’s Scholastic or for that matter Gideon. (I’m not sure where the cartoon characters comment comes in.) Or with people using classrooms and gyms for any particular purpose, so long as it’s legal and appropriate to a school setting. But, contrary to what Kay says here, the purpose of the Gideons is not to give students a richer understanding of the Western literary tradition. It is to convince people to become evangelical Christians. So I do not see why instructional time is used on behalf of the Gideons.
Of course, as things stand now, the Gideons are a charity and so we are subsidizing these Bibles through our taxes in any case.
Jymn
It’s the ‘should’ part that bothers me. Yes, perhaps reading the bible is a good idea and might be educational. Is it a necessity to understanding life and spiritual matters? Not necessarily.
Alison S
Way back in the 1950′s, the Gideons distributed the New Testament to our entire class, a large portion of whom were Jewish students. I remember a level of discomfort in the class, but to my knowledge, there were no serious repercussions. The Jewish parents would have had every right to be outraged.
By only giving out the NT, one of your arguments regarding the blood-thirsty OT was moot. While the Bible certainly should be part of an individual’s eduction, the larger issue is whether or not children should be evangelized at school. Saying that it would be OK to hand out the bibles outside of class time ignores peer pressure. In my view, the Gideons should have no access to the schools. Those students whose parents want them to have a religious upbringing will have made sure they already have their Bibles.
Sixth Estate
Alison — I wonder whether the NT is still the only part handed out. If so, it certainly defeats part of my argument, though it also shows up Kay as a greater ignoramus than I suspected. (Since he, the professional journalist, is describing the Bible being handed out as a whole, I naturally followed his lead. My bad there. I should have known better, since he says he hasn’t read the Bible anyways.)
I’m still hesitating on the distinction between class time and non-class time, but I see your point.
Sir Francis
Frankly, committed (dare I say “evangelical”) atheists should be advocating the mandatory instruction of the Bible (and I mean all of them)–as well as of church history and ecclesiological and doctrinal development–from Kindergarten. Curricular domestication and routinization are extremely effective passion-killers; just think of how committed most 17-year-olds are to Shakespeare and algebra. Making Sex Ed a more explicit, protracted, and frequently tested component of the curriculum would probably halve Ontario’s rate of teenage pregnancy.
To borrow liberally from Oscar Wilde, yes, it’s regrettable that our schools are exposing children to dangerous ideas; fortunately, though, education appears to have no effect on our students whatever.
Sixth Estate
Francis — One of the proposals of philosopher and (if I may borrow your term) evangelical atheist Dan Dennett is that students should have a mandatory high school class in world religion. I think his reasoning, which parallels yours, is that it would be an awful lot harder to see any one religious tradition as unique God-given truth once you’ve been forced to struggle through years of comparative religion.
Of course, there are many demands on students’ time and only a limited number of curriculum slots to go around. And do YOU trust all ten provincial education departments to come up with an appropriate curriculum on the subject?