Friday, January 11: Blogger Stacy Harp is having a contest to give away an Archaeological Study Bible. Check it out.
———————————————————–
I don’t know how to tag this post. Lunacy? Comedy? Faith? Judiciary? A group of Christian parents in South Iron School District near St. Louis, Missouri, sued to stop the Gideons from distributing Bibles in classrooms. Why would Christians want to get in bed with the ACLU? Yuck.
According to an ACLU lawyer, the parents “believe religious beliefs should be taught in the home, not school.”
Once upon a homogenous time in America, that statement would have been utter nonsense. In a town where everyone was “Christian,” whether or not they actually were saved or even attended church, Christianity was more than a faith. It was a way of life. (On a grander scale, it’s the foundation of Western Civilization.) While parents understood it was their job to raise their children in the faith and teach them good morals and values, these morals and values were reiterated in the classroom.
Imagine this scenario: a child is boasting in class about his A+ paper and making fun of a classmate who received a C+, and the teacher gently reminds him of the pastor’s sermon on humility the previous Sunday. I’m sure this has happened countless times in various ways in the history of public schools in small towns across America. I should know. I grew up in one of those towns.
Whenever I read “banning the Bible in school” stories like this one, I’m always reminded of Mrs. Trumble, the Bible study teacher who visited my fifth grade elementary school classroom. I think it was once a week. It’s been so long ago, I can’t be sure. Anyway, there we sat, black and white kids together, listening to Mrs. Trumble’s Bible lesson for the week and watching her pace the classroom in her low-heeled shoes. It was part of the curriculum, part of our education, part of our lives.
These days, that would be considered unconstitutional. I’ve written before about how the so-called separation between church and state doctrine came to be; I won’t reinvent the microchip here. See Incompatible Kerry’s Immaculate Deception and State-Sponsored School Prayer and the Constitution.
Bottom line: the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses restrict the government from establishing a national religion and from interfering with the people’s right to practice their religion. It was not intended to allow government to ban religious books from the public sphere.
But let’s look at this a different way. Although a majority of Americans would identify themselves as Christians (as opposed to Muslims), the country isn’t religiously homogenous anymore. How would you feel about Muslims distributing Korans in public school classrooms? If a Muslim teacher visited your kid’s classroom every week to give a Koran lesson, what would you do? I wouldn’t like it. I’d probably file suit. Does that make me a hypocrite? 
Perhaps that’s why these Christian parents in South Iron School District sued, to pre-empt such scenarios, to get rid of all religious books in classrooms before Muslims and others demand to distribute their literature.
America’s not a Norman Rockwell painting anymore, is it? Was it ever?
{ 1 trackback }
{ 26 comments }
Not to sound like a troll, but I don’t think that it ever was. I think it was more of a case of being ‘closeted’, e.g. people didn’t like it but didn’t feel that they could (or should) speak out against it.
Nothing trollish about your comment, JW.
Well, let’s just hope they don’t go after hotel rooms next.
I treasure my Gideons Bibles in hotel rooms. In fact, one time, I was assigned a room, where the Gideons Bible was missing, and I immediately requested a room change. I thought it was bad luck not to have it there.
It’s one of the first things I look for the minute I enter the room!
I think the US used to be more locally homogeneous, even if it varied a lot regionally. Even leaving out Muslims, a Bible study class might very easily create tensions among Baptist, Lutheran and Catholic parents about proper interpretation and which translation to use. I suspect that nowadays you’re more likely to find all three in the same town than in the past.
While I’d have a problem with Bible or Koran study classes, I see no reason for a school to ever turn down free books, so long as they’re used as optional supplemental reading.
While I wouldn’t sue over the Gideons distributing Bibles, I do worry that Muslims or other groups would want the same opportunities. I’d rather remove all than allow all, if I have to choose.
The problem with distributing Scriptures in public schools is multifaceted. Which Bible version? After it’s distributed, what then? Will someone advise from it, and if so, who? It’s tough enough to find churches accurately handling the Word of God. With the public school being a growing access point of those who hate God to reach children, I can’t say as I like the idea either.
Key to it all: freedom. If the kid WANTS to bring a Bible, let him. If the teacher wants to mention a Scripture lesson, let him. The distribution of Bibles by the Public School administration though, couldn’t end well.
It IS the parent’s job to raise their kids with an accurate faith in God and understanding of His Word. These truths are no longer bolstered in the public arena, and when placed in the hands of the public, can only be bungled.
The distribution of Bibles by the Public School administration though, couldn’t end well.
Agreed, but the question here is more like “is a free Bible from the Gideons worse than none at all?” Maybe if you have a serious objection to their translation you may say “yes.”
To me the biggest problem is the risk that taking free Bibles might obligate one to also accept free copies of the Koran, Dianetics, Das Kapital, or other books containing noxious ideologies.
My first impulse is to say I see no harm in having such around as long as you tell the students they’re poisonous. But then I think maybe it’s too risky to have such poisons around small children, even with adult supervision. Plus there’s the question of whether the teachers will even be allowed to tell the children it’s poison….
Maybe it really is best to get religion out of the public schools, just so they can’t screw it up!
I’m with Just Will, America was never a Norman Rockwell painting. Rockwell knew how to portray the best in us, but that’s all it was. Just from talking to my grandparents, parents, and extended family, I can discern that my picturesque Southern home town has had its share of demons in the past, even though it’s always been largely homogenous and “Christian.” Not to sound cynical, but things kind of stay the same, there’s just more and more of the sameness.
Always good to hope and reach for the best, though, and that’s why I’m a Christian.
Perhaps that’s why these Christian parents in South Iron School District sued, to pre-empt such scenarios, to get rid of all religious books in classrooms before Muslims and others demand to distribute their literature.
I don’t think it will work, though. Given the growing multicultural fascism in public schools, mandatory teaching of non-Christian religions (under the guise of “tolerance”) is probably only a matter of time.
As a high school student (back in the 1970s) my World History class textbook presented the Resurrection of Jesus as a fable invented by his followers for political reasons. Another class used Asimov’s secular-oriented Asimov’s Guide to the Bible as its sole textbook. The problem is not “religious ideas” in the classroom, it is that certain non-PC ideas are banned.
Maybe Rockwell says a little about what we wanted to believe about ourselves as Americans at the time he was painting. When I look at some later art and literature and think about what we want to believe about ourselves now, it’s often disheartening.
I remember occasional Bible story lessons in my elementary school in the 1960s. They were kind of generic, more ‘type’ stories–so that we would know what a David and Goliath type story was or what a Good Samaritan was. Western literature references those type stories and children who don’t know the types can’t fully appreciate the literature that references it. I remember some of my college classmates didn’t have this background. But I was pretty old before I began to routinely meet adults who were reared in the South who didn’t get this kind of instruction.
Does the article tell us where these folks attend church or what denomination they are affiliated with? Sounds like some typical anti-fundy Unitarians or some group who has “christian” in their title and the media automatically brushes them as being genuinely Christian but with a “different perspective” on how to practice their beliefs.
Fred
The link under the text
“sued to stop the Gideons from distributing Bibles in classrooms.”
Is dead.
Fixed. Thanks! – Admin
The foundational issue here is this: why is the government running schools in the first place? Free, universal public education did not exist until well into the 19th century. Prior to that children were taught either at home or in church-affiliated schools.
Christians who send their children into the arms of the State should hardly be surprised when these things happen.
What this story really tells us is that we need a voucher system. Then everyone will be able to choose a school that meets their own particular priorities. People who want religious training can have it. Those who are offended will have a way to avoid it.
Strangely enough, I had a dream just last night that Buddhists had built a temple in a local city park, and I was (in the dream and out) incensed that they could build a temple on public land, but that if Christians distributed tracts or held a prayer meeting there, we’d be in trouble.
The history of the United States, clear back to a number of the original colonies (most notably Plymouth, but also Maryland and Pennsylvania come to mind) is religious freedom. We haven’t always practiced it; we discriminated against Jews, for instance, but it has been our ideal. I believe it has now become “freedom from religion”, pushed by people and groups who are opposed to God and religion and want to get rid of it or at least marginalize it.
Having said all that, I want to move to more recent historical sociology. Perhaps we never had a “Norman Rockwell setting”, but I can tell you from personal experience (somewhat similar to yours, La Shawn) that we used to allow religion in schools and our society, and both school and society were much better than today, much less: drugs, crime, hate (with notable exceptions, e.g. racism), broken families, welfare, to name a few.
At age 14, I ran my father’s gas station by myself 5-10 PM. I wasn’t in a bulletproof booth, either. (In fact, the cash register was out in the open and required no key or password.) Try that today! (We also pumped gas for all customers–served the customers–find that today!)
In school (where in those pre-Murray v. Board of Education days, we prayed and pledged allegiance to the Flag every morning), the most difficult behavior problems had to do with talking in class, passing notes, or chewing gum. There were a few occasional truants. Even the roughest kids wouldn’t have dreamed of talking back to the principal (I’m talking high school here, but in recent years I’ve seen elementary students read the riot act to the principal [who was, btw, an ex-football player]!).
Do I think that the changing view of the place of religion in the public sphere has had an effect on our American way of life? Is Bin Laden a Muslim?
This is only a comment on La Shawn’s post, so I’ve tried to keep it short (this is short?), but I’ve climbed on the soapbox at Dooz-O-Sphere.
Only quibble:
“Christianity was more than a faith. It was a way of life. (On a grander scale, it’s the foundation of Western Civilization.”
Well, actually it was the Greeks and Romans – both pagans. But, Chritianity was a core element from the Middle Ages until the early 20th century.
That’s one of the reasons children do not know how to act…There are no clear boundaries…And the answer isn’t always doping them up…Children need direction, stimulation, rewards and punishment….Remove the Bible, stop playing tag, and everyone’s a winner…Then we wonder why our children cannot cope in society? That’s not reality!
BWDB http://thecwexperience.wordpress.com
“Well, actually it was the Greeks and Romans – both pagans. But, Chritianity was a core element from the Middle Ages until the early 20th century.”
Well, actually, Francois, Christianity moved into “Western” (Greco-Roman) civilization starting at least by about 40 AD. By about 80 AD, there came considerable official opposition. Despite this, Christianity survived to become the State religion under Caesar Constantine about 300 AD. (Please excuse any wrong dates; I’m too lazy to look them up. They’re pretty close, anyway.) So Christianity was a major influence in Europe/the West well before the Middle Ages, in point of fact.
People often like to downplay the concept of a “Norman Rockwell America”. But clearly, while people have always sinned, and been in sin, things have changed drastically.
You need only look at what can be found by the young on the internet and know that evil has become more intense, and with a wider reach. It’s harder now to shield against that.
Yes in the past there was racism and a certain amount of repression and conformity. But that always exists in one guise or another. (The conformity of not being gay has been replaced by a conformity about not speaking out against homosexuality). But now things are darker, and it’s easier to indulge the darkness.
Let’s take porn. I am sure in the 1950’s and earlier, people found ways, via Sears catolog, or literature to indulge the desire for some erotica. And if you wanted to see something on screen though, you had to go to the theatre. So you pretty much didn’t. Eventually there was Playboy and you might get to see a little flick at a bachelor party or something.
I remember in my town in NYC, and on a pleasant street, out there in Queens, there was one theatre with a really bad reputation. You never saw anyway walking in and out of there though. It was in walking distance of our junior high and on a rather beautiful street actually. We would pass by, wide eyed, wondering if pervs might appear.
Then along came the VCR and it all changed. What happened? It became easy to indugle with less stigma. So thousands of people who would not have exposed themselves to pornography in the past were now able to easily engage the curiosity.
The internet and Mp3 devices and Youtube and Youporn today only make that easier. Which is why you have a generation of young people (flip through Myspace for a while) who present themselves in guises that used to be associated with porn actresses. It’s also why a huge number of young people now (mainly the females) indulge in bisexuality. They have been conditioned by their young male friends to titilate in that fashion. And it’s considered normative behavior.
So, yea if you dropped the internet down in the 1950’s, your grandfather and mine might have been the horny toads that we are. But they didn’t have that, so some impulses remained untapped.
Today nothing is unchecked, and that is disturbing. We may not have been Rockwell then, but we are much farther from any possible Rockwell now.
Finn,Dooz, et al spot on.
I’m completely baffled. Please inform me: these are a) humans and b) serious?
Really? Double Really?
Here’s a quote from the Supreme Court on the subject:
“Why may not the Bible, and especially the New Testament…be read and taught as divine revelation in the school–its general precepts expounded…and its glorious principles of morality inculcated? …Where can the purest principles of morality be learned so clearly or so perfectly as from the New Testament?”
Sure, it is from 1844, but that should answer the question as to whether times have changed somewhat!
The “Norman Rockwell America” traditionally meant religious harassment in public school for Catholic kids. That’s exactly why a parochial school in every parish, multiple diocesan high schools in each area, and even Catholic universities and colleges, were such a must.
More separation of church and state is pretty much the only reason why Catholic, Christian parents can feel at all comfortable sending their kids to public school, without fear that their children will be preyed upon. This (combined with other changes inside the Catholic Church in America) is exactly why the parochial school system has gone into decay in most parishes.
The more schools cease to be neutral ground, and become positively godless, the more Catholic parents homeschool, or find a parochial school that’s not in decay.
Where can the purest principles of morality be learned so clearly or so perfectly as from the New Testament?”
You can substitute “New Testament” with any number of books and make sense of it, such as
Where can the purest principles of morality be learned so clearly or so perfectly as from the Harry Potter and Philosophers Stone?”
Religious instruction is not needed in public school. Let the parents take responsibility for this, it is really their job.
#20: Finn, I think the change came morally; the technology merely enabled it. Let’s look at a parallel that’s easier to prove:
Guns have been all around us since forever. In fact, getting a gun now is way harder than it was even a half-century ago. There were even times and places where a student might carry a gun to school and it was neither unusual nor undesirable. But when in history was there ever a school massacre such as Columbine before recent times? “It’s the culture, Stupid!” (Finn, don’t write–it’s an expression, not personal. [Always gotta think like a lawyer nowadays.])
As far as the availability, we can see the same degree of change even without the technology. We didn’t see the amount of female flesh on TV even a few years ago, let alone in the 1950s. (I was musing just yesterday as I saw an ad for a TV show on a bus, that I couldn’t have seen that much in “men’s magazines” when I was a teen.)
So I don’t see how technology can take the blame; it’s all in how it’s used. Yes, you’re right that some of the technology makes “indulgence” easier and more anonymous, but the desire needs to be there.
An observation on a slightly different note: There are those who blame “Calvinism” for the oppression of women. Well, “Calvinism” has lost influence in our culture; are women treated less as sex objects now?
#23: Maureen, maybe my experience was different, but while we were aware pretty much who (in our small town) was Catholic and who was Protestant, it was hardly Northern Ireland. We all associated in school; our circle of friends, our activities, were all “integrated” (though we didn’t see it that way; we just saw individuals).
My wife’s experience was somewhat different. Same for friends and activities, except that hers was nearly the only Protestant family on the street, and most of the neighbor kids went to Catholic school. (They were Catholic and went to Catholic school, so she figured she was a Public.)
I agree that changes in the Catholic Church since Vatican II have made a lot of difference, and I’m all for this difference.
BTW, the same principle applies to the present issue as to all issues of group versus group: If we’d only look at each other as persons, so many problems would be solved!
i need bible for effective evangelism.
Comments on this entry are closed.