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The Great Westcliffe Bible War is over, at least for a
while. Last week, the school board voted 3-2 not to offer
an elective class in the Bible as literature.
The closeness of the school board vote, as well as the long and passionate discussions that have dominated recent public discourse in the Wet Mountain Valley, indicates that this isn't a simple issue.
My own sentiments are divided. On one hand, I'm close
to being an absolutist on the First Amendment to the
federal constitution, which states that Congress shall
make no law respecting an establishment of religion
...
Over the years, the federal courts have extended that
prohibition, so that it applies to state and local
government, as well as the U.S. Congress. The rationale
has generally been the 14th Amendment, which provides that
No state shall make or enforce any law which shall
abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the
United States ...
Presumably, one privilege of U.S. citizenship is that one cannot be compelled to support any given religion, and thus no state government, or agency of a state like a school board, can force a citizen to support a church or the like.
We should note that such extensions of the 14th
Amendment used to come under heavy criticism from
states-rights Republicans. Such talk has been muted of
late, since the U.S. Supreme Court used the
equal-protection clause of 14th Amendment to put a
Republican in White House on the grounds that different
election judges would interpret non-machine-readable
ballots in different ways, thereby depriving denying some
Florida voters the equal protection of the laws.
But it's safe to predict that this silence will end, and that there will be argument that the State of Colorado, not some federal judge, is the authority on the degree of separation between church and state.
Among other things, Article II, Section 4 of the
Colorado constitution provides that No person shall be
required to attend or support any ministry or place of
worship, religious sect or denomination against his
consent. Nor shall any preference be given by law to any
religious denomination or mode of worship.
This seems to be a clear prohibition against using public money to finance a class that focuses on a book that is a sacred text in some religions, but not others. (It also seems to forbid paying ministers to pray over our legislature, although most Coloradans would agree that if any body needs such supplications, the General Assembly is at the top of the list.)
But on the other hand, the Bible is an integral part of
American culture and literature. Just try to understand
Abraham Lincoln's House Divided
speech without a
biblical context, or for that matter, Bob Dylan's
Highway 61 Revisited.
One major justification for the American slavery of
Africans cannot be comprehended without knowing about
the curse of Ham
after Noah's flood. Our
conversations are sprinkled with phrases like the wisdom
of Solomon,
Sodom and Gomorrah,
the good
Samaritan
and the patience of Job.
There's a compelling argument that all high school graduates should be familiar with the Bible, just as they should be familiar with the Iliad and the Odyssey.
However, you can safely teach Homer as literature, since hardly anybody sacrifices bulls to Poseidon these days.
This does not hold for the Bible. For starters, there would be the problem of selecting the translation -- the majestic cadences of the King James, or the more comprehensible New International?
Then would come the difficulties with reading assignments -- how much of the lurid Song of Solomon to include, and just how much of a metaphor is it?
Discussing textual threads of the J, E, D and P narratives would be nearly impossible if there were students (and there almost certainly would be) who insisted that the entire Pentateuch was transcribed solely by Moses as he took dictation from God.
Those students and their parents would protest that
normal textual analysis was an effort by the Beast with
Seven Heads and Ten Horns to destroy their faith, and if
the teacher tried to accommodate their beliefs, then other
students and parents would complain that this
literature
class was attempting to inculcate certain
religious beliefs, in violation of the state and federal
constitutions.
In short, in modern America it would be impossible to
conduct a Bible as literature
class in a public
school. If it were treated only as literature,
fundamentalists would be up in arms, and if the class
respected their beliefs, then everybody else would be
rightfully protesting violations their constitutional
rights.
And that's unfortunate. Anyone who wants to understand American life and literature should know the Bible -- but there's no way that knowledge can be inculcated in a public school.
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