Last month, fundamentalists on the Texas Board of Education mandated Bible readings in public schools starting in 2030. Using civil authority to abet their proselytizing reveals a lack of faith in the strength of their message. The readings they chose reveal their agenda.
When disgraced former Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters tried to force Sunday school into our public schools, his injunctions for teaching the Bible were vague. The folks south of the Red were specific as to what they wanted taught when.
And we shouldn’t be surprised if their reading list pops up other places.
As I cover this anti-education crusade, I will cite the New English Bible. The board uses several conservative translations. One can suppose the time lag to 2030 will allow someone’s cousin ample time to collect the readings into one handy volume.
First graders will read about Noah’s Ark – probably not to demonstrate how God so botched his creation of disobedient humans that he chose to murder most of them – along with innumerable innocent animals.
Second graders will witness Hebrew exceptionalism as little David slays Goliath. This theme gets reinforced in the fifth grade with two readings from Exodus: God commanding Moses through a burning bush to lead the Hebrews out of Egypt and the Hebrews safe passage through the Red Sea before “Pharaoh’s army got drownded.”
Such divine deliverance for helpless humans is a theme of the reading list. Third graders get to read about faithful Dan’l in the lions’ den while seventh graders study the creed of the 23rd Psalm.
Relying on God to fix problems eliminates individual responsibility when faced with worldly injustice. “God’s will” becomes an endorsement of the status quo. Knowing one’s place was a constant theme of Medieval writers, especially as the Renaissance and Reformation empowered people to seek to know more and rise about feudal castes.
That could be addressed in an English II [sophomore] reading on the Middle Ages, which includes one chapter on “The Big Idea: Christian Salvation” and another on “Kingship, Lordship and Government.”
Dependence upon divine deliverance gets turbocharged treatment for eighth graders, who will be reading the third chapter of Lamentations, which opens “I am the man who has known afflictions” before launching into a litany of woes and oppression. This leads to the plea:
“Remember, O remember, and stoop down to me … The Lord, I say, is all that I have, therefore I will wait for him patiently. The Lord is good to those who look for him, … it is good to wait in patience and sigh for deliverance.”
After many such verses of such subservient sycophancy, the lamenter gets to the point:
“Lord, pay them back what they deserve. Show them how hard thy heart can be, how little concern thou hast for them. Pursue them in anger and exterminate them from beneath thy heavens, O Lord.”
This is pure puerile preaching, trying to indoctrinate students into a specific religious world view and its beliefs.
Lamentations, too, has a Hebrew-centric bias – here reduced to those from Judah as those from the Kingdom of Israel have become “lost tribes.” Disobedience has led the lamenter and his people to defeat and desolation. They are so special that the actions of other nations revolve around punishing or rewarding them, though we are left uninformed of how the undocumented histories of India, China and the Americas affected them.
Waiting for the Lord’s blessing is also emphasized for seventh graders detailed to read the Beatitudes [Matthew 5:1-12], which open the Sermon on the Mount, a relentless demand for obedience – the one tenet on which all religions agree.
Whether the study of the prodigal son for freshmen will concentrate on forgiveness or parental favoritism [“deal with it”] will depend upon the teacher.
Sophomores will have the unenviable task of trying to figure out if Job is a satire, as many scholars claim, or just the most immoral book in the Bible – with Job’s family being treated as expendable pawns in a game between God and Satan. [Twentieth century Jewish philosopher Martin Buber isolated the fulcrum of all ethics in the title of his I and Thou, which maintains that people should be treated as subjects, not objects.]
Seniors will read the definition of love from First Corinthians, chapter three. Wonderful exposition though mention of the transitory nature of “tongues of ecstasy” makes me think the kids might prefer what the Song of Songs says about love – treated as a play in the New English Bible.
The section from Corinthians also contains the famous injunction about outgrowing “childish things,” which could suggest discarding fairy tales and myths such as Santa Claus, who rewards good little children and punishes bad ones.
The propaganda pushing Christianity into public schools claims the Bible was an instrumental influence on the founders. The emphasis of these readings on obedience, human helplessness and waiting for God’s deliverance bears little resemblance to the initiative and bravery of our forefathers – many of whose deism was condemned as atheism at the time. They challenged the powers that be and broke the status quo.
Unfortunately, the tragedy of maintaining that Jewish “chosen-ness” has ever and still exists can be seen in the ethnic cleansing taking place in Gaza and the West Bank. Many fundamentalists welcome such devastation as a sign of “end times,” which they hope will lead to their rapture, the rest of humanity be damned. Literally!
The Texas Board of Education has chosen readings that serve solely to promote fundamentalists’ conception of Christianity. We recognize them “by the fruits they bear.”
