Friday, January 11: Blogger Stacy Harp is having a contest to give away an Archaeological Study Bible. Check it out.
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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?
