A Christian Perspective on Teaching the Bible in Schools

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All my life men and women of faith have awed me with their wisdom, their compassion and their heroism, and I've been blessed when they've prayed for me.

 

Before journalism, I spent more than two decades working for national denominations and faith-based civil rights and community organizations. I've been fortunate to have worked with, worked for and to have been befriended by theologians, seminarians, preachers and denominational and lay leaders in churches. When I was child, I had the faith of a child. But I've lived long enough now to have experienced God's grace and mercy in my life and to have witnessed the same in the lives of others.

I am, simply put, unabashedly and unashamedly Christian.

But for all this, I still don't believe that the Bible should be taught in taxpayer-funded schools.

The United States is not a theocracy, and though some keeping saying that schools are problematic because God has been taken out, a very basic premise of Christian faith is that God is never absent and, in fact, God does some of his best work in places where angels and many pious Christians, with their judgmental selves, fear to tread.

Christians who support Bible-teaching in America's public high schools should be worried that some are so eager to build momentum for such classes that they suggest all the faith can be sucked out of the Bible so that it can be taught merely as literature, social studies, geography or history, not really much different than any other textbook. Though the Bible certainly has all those elements, it is first, last and always a sacred book of faith -- though some have said it would be OK to teach it in the public schools on the condition that it be treated only as mythology.

I'm writing this because there's a bill making its way through the Kentucky Senate that would mandate the state Board of Education to establish guidelines for an elective course in Bible literacy. According to the proposal, the course "shall follow applicable law and all federal and state guidelines in maintaining religious neutrality and accommodating the diverse religious views, traditions and perspectives of students in the school. A course under this section shall not endorse, favor, or promote, or disfavor or show hostility toward any particular religion or nonreligious faith or religious perspective."

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Source: Betty Winston Baye, Delaware Online

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