Contrary to what recent evangelical rhetoric would have you believe, the world is not becoming less religious; it is becoming increasingly religious every day.
This month, two states pushed forward wildly divergent ideas about God and how the topic of religion should be taught in public schools, because no matter how hard we try, it seems that religion in schools has become all but unavoidable.
Texas, known for its brash cowboy ways, is rolling out a state-mandated reading list of roughly 200 curated biblical passages to be taught from kindergarten through graduation. In short, state-mandated religion in schools.
Connecticut is also putting religion in its schools, just not Christianity. This month, the state quietly passed a provision buried in an education omnibus bill that directed its Department of Education to build instructional resources on Arab and Islamic studies. Unlike Texas, these lessons will be optional, but districts will be encouraged to use them. Topics cover the history, culture, and contributions of Islam.
As you might expect, American Christians have decided, more or less instinctively, that Texas is a victory and Connecticut is a threat.
Go figure.
For me, the opposite is true.
I’m with Connecticut and opposed to Texas.
And I believe Jesus would agree.
And I would argue that the most diehard conservative Christian fundamentalists should also be against Texas’ move, not because of the Bible verses that Texas chose, but because of what Texas cut out.
Texas isn’t teaching biblical literacy. Texas has decided to teach a carefully curated, watered-down (but toxic) civic religion that flatters the people who curated the texts but is ultimately counterproductive to the goals of Christianity.
Connecticut, on the other hand, is doing the exact thing that Jesus told a lawyer to go and do.
According to The Texas Tribune:
Six-year-olds in Texas classrooms will learn about Noah’s ark, David and Goliath, and Daniel in the lion’s den. For Daniel, they will be using a picture book from Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network.
Fourth graders will be taught Luke 14, where Jesus says the proud will be humbled.
Fifth graders will learn about Moses and the burning bush.
Sixth graders will be taught “do not be anxious.”
Seventh graders get the Beatitudes.
High schoolers will work through Genesis 2 (creation), 1 Corinthians 13 (love), Ecclesiastes 3 (there is a time for everything), Psalm 23 (the Shepherd’s Psalm), the Prodigal Son, and more than a dozen chapters from Job… oh my!
For the most part, these are the passages you’d put on a canvas print at Hobby Lobby.
Love is patient.
The Lord is my shepherd.
Consider the birds.
To everything there is a season.
Meh.
Not one selection on the list would make a comfortable person uncomfortable… which, dare I say, is the real point of the Bible.
But what do I know?
Oddly absent from the list, though, is the real heart and core of Christianity. It somewhat surprises me that this list doesn’t bother Christian conservatives.
There are no verses that speak of Jesus as God or mention his divinity.
So they aren’t really teaching Christianity at all… or even religion.
Texas Christians did what Thomas Jefferson did.
They took a pair of scissors and cut out all of the icky parts. They deleted the tough passages.
For all of the whining about “libs” picking and choosing what they want from the Bible, it seems that here the conservatives are doing the same.
What is left are lessons in morality.
Over the years I have discovered that one can often learn more from what isn’t said than from what is.
Within everything reported to be in the Texas Bible teaching list, I cannot find:
Genesis 22. Abraham raises a knife to kill his son. The founding trauma of three faiths. Cut.
Genesis 19. Lot offers his daughters to a mob, then his daughters rape him. Cut.
Judges 19. A woman is handed to a crowd, assaulted to death, and dismembered into twelve pieces to start a war. Cut.
Numbers 31, Deuteronomy 20, Joshua 6–11, 1 Samuel 15. Herem (total annihilation) warfare. Every man, woman, child, and animal murdered... commanded by God. Cut, cut, cut, cut.
2 Samuel 11–13. David rapes Bathsheba, kills her husband, and later David’s son rapes David’s daughter Tamar. Cut. … But David and Goliath made it into the first grade!
1 Samuel 18. Two hundred foreskins as a bride price. Cut… obviously.
Leviticus 18 and 20. The verses American Christians constantly weaponize against gay kids. (When did they suddenly become shy?) Cut.
Leviticus 19:33–34. “The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself.” Cut… unsurprisingly.
Luke 1:46–55. Mary sings that God pulls rulers off thrones and sends the rich away empty. Cut.
Luke 4. Jesus’s first sermon: “Good news to the poor! Freedom for prisoners!” Cut.
Matthew 25. “I was a foreigner and you did not welcome me.” Cut.
Amos 5. “You trample on the poor.” Cut.
James 5. “Wail, you rich, your gold is rotting.” Cut.
Acts 2 and 4. The first church practiced socialism/communism, holding everything in common, and no one was in need. Cut.
Ephesians 6, Colossians 3, 1 Timothy 2, Philemon. “Slaves obey your masters.” “Women be silent.” The texts American Christians used for three centuries to hold human beings in bondage and half the church in silence. Cut.
Revelation 18. A superpower drunk on wealth and trafficking in human bodies. Very cut.
Now look at the two lists side by side and notice something about what was kept and what was cut.
The Texas curriculum did not cut hard passages. Texas cut two specific categories: texts that indict the powerful, and texts that embarrass the pious. All of these deleted passages are wildly inconvenient to a story where America is good, the Bible is nice, and God is on America’s side.
While they did keep Job, they are missing the point by teaching it as “Satan tests a faithful man.” The actual argument of Job—that the friends’ tidy theology of reward and punishment is wrong, and that God (who is the actual villain in the text) says so out loud in chapter 42—cannot survive a curriculum designed by people who need religion to be black and white.
They also kept Exodus, but only as a burning-bush inspirational message. They cut out the topic of slavery and liberation, and every serious historian knows that the parts they cut out of the Exodus story were the parts that armed the American Revolution against a tyrannical government and Black liberation against slavery. It is impossible to teach Exodus honestly in Texas without teaching the Trail of Tears... so they won’t teach that part at all.
A curriculum that has to hide most of its source material isn’t teaching the Bible at all.
If Texas wanted biblical literacy,
I’d be first in line.
Genuinely.
I want kids to know why Melville named a character Ishmael and why Martin Luther King said “let justice roll down.” (That’s in Amos, btw).
True biblical literacy means teaching the whole terrifying library, or nothing.
Biblical illiteracy makes people easier to manipulate, usually by preachers, but now by politicians who saw how effective it was for preachers.
Biblical literacy means a seventeen-year-old should be reading Judges 19 and asking a teacher, out loud, “why is this in here?” and “what does this have to do with me?”
But the curriculum doesn’t want students actually wrestling with tough texts, or even how the Bible confronts our present age. It is actively preventing those questions by white-washing the Bible.
This isn’t putting the Bible in schools.
While we’re here, the Ten Commandments plaques now hanging in Texas classrooms are also a lie.
Go read Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 in full.
The command about images is a paragraph long, with a jealous God doling out suffering to the third and fourth generation for infractions.
The Sabbath command is a labor regulation that protects servants and immigrant workers.
And the tenth commandment lists a neighbor’s wife between his house and his ox… as property (a fact about the ancient world worth a real conversation with teenagers today).
The Texas Ten Commandments don’t say any of that.
The posters give you a numbered list of American manners, not of ancient Jewish law … or even anything resembling biblical truth.
Texas conservatives aren’t putting God’s Word on the wall; they are putting a dishonest summary of God’s Word on the wall, because the real thing is an indictment against them.
The argument for the Texas curriculum seems to be this:
Religion is central to human existence.
Students can’t understand Western civilization or literature without religion.
Academic study of religion isn’t indoctrination.
All true.
But that logic should apply to other religions as well, not just Christianity.
A Pepperdine professor put it well in Christianity Today: “Christians can study the Quran or Bhagavad Gita as scholastics without becoming believers of those gods.”
But Christians in Texas don’t seem to be interested in academic study of the Bible by students; they seem to be interested in behavioral change, i.e., making students live according to (American) Christian values.
But at what cost?
Do Christians really want to open the door to the inclusion of religious texts in schools… or just their (gutted) religious text?
Do Christians really want two hundred Quranic selections being taught in K through 12th grade? Do they want instruction in Surah Al-Fatihah in the second grade? Would they support a unit on the Hijra in fifth grade? How would they feel about Ramadan in a state textbook, taught with warmth, by a teacher who calls it beautiful? (and honestly, it is beautiful…)
It’s time that Christians do some serious self-reflection, because what they said they wanted was neutral teaching about the centrality of religion in the West … but what they really meant was that they only wanted teaching about their religion, and their religious texts (and even then, only the good and easy parts).
That is quite different.
We don’t have to guess how this (one religion vs. many religions) plays out in Texas, because we already have a recent example of it.
Four days before the CT article was published, Texas’ governor threatened to pull grant funding from the Dallas and Houston airports over the installation of Islamic washing facilities. Yes, the governor of Texas got into a fight over … sinks. A state that says it wants religion in every public school is refusing simple accommodation of a different religion.
Go figure.
Texas isn’t interested in religious liberty.
Texas just wants to give Christianity a home-team advantage.
But isn’t Connecticut doing the same thing with Islam? Aren’t they giving preferential treatment as well?
Connecticut’s House Republican leader thinks so, saying the state shouldn’t advance any religion and “went too far in including Islamic studies.”
Also, the Connecticut Catholic Conference called it a clear First Amendment violation, comparable to hanging the Ten Commandments on a wall.
Interesting comparison.
Despite how it might seem on the surface, Connecticut and Texas are doing very different things.
Connecticut is not mandating that schools teach religion.
The provision directs the state to make materials available and encourage districts to utilize them. CAIR-Connecticut’s chairman said that nobody expects every school to teach Islam next year, but that if a district wants to, the state will have something ready.
The state education department compared the Islamic resources to materials they already provide to classrooms for Holocaust education, Native American studies, and Asian American and Pacific Islander studies.
For all of these specialized studies, the content is history, culture, and civilization rather than the indoctrination of religious texts.
For Islam in particular, Connecticut hopes that teaching about the history and culture of Islam will help Connecticut’s children know more about their Muslim neighbors (because the alternative is that they learn something false about them… usually from Christians).
So let’s compare the two, honestly:
A lawyer once asked Jesus who counted as his neighbor. He was looking for loopholes.
Jesus answered with a story in which the religious professionals walk past a bleeding man, leaving him for dead. The hero of the story is a Samaritan, a member of a heretical ethnic group that Jesus’ audience had been taught to despise.
Then Jesus told the lawyer, "Go and do likewise."
I am sure many Christians have many reasons to reject a curriculum whose explicit purpose is to help children see a despised religious minority as fully human.
But the priest and the Levite probably had good reasons to refuse to help the bleeding man on the side of the road.
Jesus’ point was as clear then as I think it would be now:
The Connecticut curriculum is the one that Christians should be defending, and the Texas curriculum is the one Christians should be rejecting.
Here’s why:
Texas assumes the Bible needs to be sanitized to be safe for children and adolescents. That is a low view of Scripture. Connecticut, on the other hand, makes no claim on Scripture at all.
Texas is selectively choosing moralizing content from the Bible that avoids the Bible’s primary messages, especially in regard to the poor, oppressed, and marginalized.
Connecticut is simply asking children to understand their neighbors better. No version of the gospel has that as the villain.
Here is what I believe is really going on:
The push for religion in public schools (Texas and elsewhere) is not a hunger for God.
It is a hunger for establishment.
It is a hunger for the reassuring feeling of being the default religion. It is a hunger for the culture around you to bend toward your shape. It is a hunger for your grandchildren to grow up in a country where your faith is the only faith, rather than one option among many. It is a hunger to subvert other religions, lest you be subverted by them first.
In short, that “hunger” isn’t Christianity.
It is Christian Nationalism.
Christian Nationalism is not Christianity.
A state that can decide which two hundred Bible verses your children read is a state that has decided which God your children meet.
Right now, the God that children will meet in Texas public schools does not defend immigrants, does not indict the rich, does not hand a woman (Mary) a revolutionary song, and (perhaps most tellingly) does not claim to be God.
Texas put two hundred Bible verses in front of its children and made sure none of those verses would ask anything of the adults in charge, nor would they question the nation in any way.
Connecticut, on the other hand, offered its children a chance to know a Muslim kid’s grandmother as a human being.
One of those is a true Christian curriculum.
Go and do likewise.
Kevin Young writes at the intersection of faith and culture, from a progressive perspective. If you found this helpful or insightful, please share or become a paid subscriber.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.