Now, potentially, Texan for "school."
Evangelical fundamentalists - those rogues who consider it their personal duty to shove Christianity in your face by any means necessary - have just found an effective loophole to get a Bible in front of your kids on the state’s dime. Seriously, you close off one avenue of attack, and these people find another & adapt. Like the Borg. The Jesus Borg.
The news comes from Texas, whose public high schools will now be required to offer an elective course on the Bible, geared towards the document’s “historical and literary value.” I’m the biggest Texas apologist there is - I love and miss the state - but this is too far.
It started in North Texas, where schools took advantage of the option, legit under the Texas Constitution, to teach a Bible elective under those parameters:
I’m fine with an optional, district-by-district Bible elective, as described in the video. Grassroots control is great, and carries fewer of the fears of the top-down establishment of state religion. Granting options is one thing. But requiring every district to read from a Christian document - like it or not - is another, and sends a vastly different message.
Read & watch the only report I could find on the issue, curiously from Milwaukee (Mil-wha? Her?). Then, it’s time to switch into law mode.
Constitutionally, the “mandatory elective” scheme presents a problem… but only to those willing to look closely, which today’s Supreme Court cannot be trusted to do. While a class focused on the historical & literary value of the Bible seems unproblematic in theory, the class, in practice, would function as an invitation for evangelizing, and the law ought not divorce the constitutionality of a scheme from its likely effects on the ground. A Bible elective would effectively give a forum to a million would-be Freshwaters. Especially when Texans (in the Milwaukee report) describe the mandatory elective as an issue of “religious freedom,” we have cause for concern.
Further, a mandatory elective scheme requires the state to disburse money, even to those who don’t want it, in support of a sectarian document. Former NYU Law faculty member Noah Feldman (come back Noah!) has argued1 that the content-sensitive disbursal of money to select religious groups ought to, alone, render any plausibly religious policy presumptively unconstitutional. These flaws suggest that the elective scheme - by fostering excessive entanglement of church & state, and abandoning state neutrality towards religion - fails to satisfy the Lemon v. Kurtzman legal standard for separation of church & state. But with a 4-4 Court, and a swing vote (Kennedy) who’s known to give the benefit of the doubt to religion, such fair-minded administration of justice cannot be expected. It looks to me like Texas has found a loophole that’ll work.
That doesn’t mean that we should be happy about it. Especially given the parade of horribles this new loophole invites into the classroom. The Milwaukee report lingers on the picture of a biology textbook: just so. This could be a way to teach creationism to kids on the sly - as science, just not in science class - which, as Chris Comer ought to be able to tell us, Texas officials have been lusting to do.2
[potentially bpsdb]
- Noah Feldman, Divided by God: America’s Church-State Problem — and What We Should Do About It, 2005 [↩]
- Those links are to independent reports - “The Pandas Thumb,” as always, has comprehensive coverage of Chris Comer here, and coverage of Texas’ descent into pseudoscience here [↩]
Stumble It!
4 responses so far ↓
1 Gotchaye // Aug 11, 2008 at 1:19 am
Wouldn’t the district-by-district approach be more likely to end in evangelism than one overseen by the state?
It’s actually always bothered me tremendously that schools don’t spend any time on the Bible - if there were any way to make sure that the evangelism could be kept to a reasonable level, I’d very much support making the Bible a significant part of the high school English curriculum.
2 Ames // Aug 11, 2008 at 9:15 am
I think teaching it in English class would be less problematic. My high school - Collin’s too (out there, Collin?) - taught the Bible as part of an English class. But I trust evangelism to be less of a concern in a class that starts there, and ends with Wuthering Heights, more than I trust it to be minimized in a class dedicated to the Book.
3 Progressive Conservative // Aug 11, 2008 at 10:56 am
I took a humanities class in college called ‘The New Testament as Literature’. I found it interesting though I don’t understand the wisdom of going that deep at the high school level.
4 Cephus // Aug 12, 2008 at 12:50 pm
The real goal here isn’t just to get the Bible taught, but they’re assuming that Christians in the class and their parents are going to be pushing hard to get the Bible taught as fact by browbeating teachers who, presumably, already have some religious beliefs of their own as well.
Years ago when my wife was taking a class on mythology and literature, there was a fundamentalist in the class that complained long and loud every time the Bible wasn’t treated like a 100% true history book, to the point of derailing the class almost every day. When it finally became clear that the professor wasn’t going to cave in, the student complained to the administration and tried to get the professor fired for lying about the Bible in class. We’re still trying to figure out why fundies ever get into the cultural anthropology department.
These fundamentalists just want a foot in the door, then they can go to work widening the opening. They start with something that looks relatively innocuous because they know that their grass-root campaign is just waiting in the wings to strike.
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