West Virginia Considering Bill to Require Bible History Elective for Schools

Another case of using coercion where only persuasion has any chance of being effective. When you “require” an elective on the history of the Bible, you’re mostly going to get a skeptical and damaging version of that history. Better to leave it alone and let people who care enough to get it right do the teaching — to people who care enough to want to learn.

We can’t turn back time to the day when school and church/religious instruction were intertwined. I’m weary of hearing about how we need to “get the Bible back in schools”. Hey-let’s get the Bible back in church first! It sounds to me like we want the world to do our work for us.

One of the purposes of the church is to build our families so they can effectively reach their neighbors and get involved in the community, showing compassion and meeting needs like real people.

We don’t need the Bible in schools to do God’s work, and the Holy Spirit isn’t sitting around biting his fingernails because kids aren’t reciting The Lord’s Prayer or saying the Pledge of Allegiance every morning.

I understand WV is having a major drug abuse crisis right now—statistically, it’s one of the unhealthiest states in the US, and overdose deaths are rampant in the OH-KY-WV area. I think people know instinctively that they need to reach out to God, but a Bible History class ain’t gonna’ get you there.

…..for when the graduates of your standard state teacher’s college get their hands on God’s Word. Judging by the caricatures of the Pilgrims and Puritans I learned in school, it won’t be pretty—pretty much a few sparkling diamonds in a sea of coal. As Susan says, let the church get it right first, and then we’ll see some good things.

There is a constitutional way to approach teaching the Bible, Richard Land said.

“It would seem to me the best solution in those areas where people want an elective course on religion and the Bible in the public-school curriculum would be to have an elective course taught by ‘released time,’ and let a Catholic, Protestant, Jewish or Muslim student be ‘released’ during that period to be instructed in his understanding of the Bible by a qualified, religious teacher from his faith perspective under a syllabus worked out jointly between representatives of that faith tradition and the public-school officials,” Land said…

http://www.bpnews.net/5505/land-florida-change-shows-problem-with-teach…

David R. Brumbelow

So for those who like this bill, how would you feel if it was an elective for teaching the Quran instead of the Bible? After all, the Constitution expressly does not give favored status to Christianity so if you do this for the Bible, what will your response be with Muslims ask for the same thing?

I agree with Aaron. I can absolutely guarantee the curriculum will be something like a watered-down version of Bart Ehrman. It will assume a naturalistic approach to Scripture. It will be along the lines of “comparative religion.” There will be no call for repentance and faith in Christ. The course will not be taught by Spirit-filled, regenerated teachers. In short - this will probably do much more harm than good. It is a complete waste of time.

People should stop trying to re-finish America with a fake Christian gloss. George Marsden called America’s veneer of civic Christian religion in the latter portion of the 19th century a “dime-store millennium.” There is no need to go back to that.

You are quite correct. And every Baptist who supports a Bible elective should lend his support to a Quran elective, too. If, that is, he believes in religious liberty and understands his ecclesiastical heritage.

On the one hand, it’s pretty clear that most public schools (and universities for that matter) do a horrible job teaching about religion. A good picture is that in Germany, where everybody gets religious instruction in school unless they specifically opt out, church attendance is abyssmal. I think God gave this to families and the church, primarily, for a reason.

But that said, in a world where millions/billions of lives are impacted by various ideologies—Marxism, Islam, Christianity, etc..—shouldn’t students have some grounding in them at the secondary level? Hard to avoid some big level of bias, but perhaps even some bias in investigating old texts like the Bible, Quran, or even Marx’s work would be good.

It might be helpful for some professional educators (Greg Long?) to weigh in on this.

Hamilton County, TN, has a Bible in the Schools program that began in 1922. It is not religious instruction but treats the Bible as History. A few years ago, I applied for a teaching position, a job I would have immensely enjoyed.

See their curriculum, and frequently asked questions.

This is a terrible idea IMO. It’s tempting to want something like this as a corrective to the state sponsored evolutionary religious instruction but who would want the government teaching their children about the Bible?

As a public high school teacher, I would echo many of the concerns here. On the whole, I’d be far more comfortable pushing a required “Bible-as-literature” elective instead; since analyzing literature necessarily involves the suspension of objections, at least until the text is understood on its own terms.
A good curriculum would be a must, though. I currently teach seniors using a high school Common Core textbook (Pearson) and while their brief section on the KJV (two psalms, “The Prodigal Son” and an exerpt from “The Sermon on the Mount”) is not as awful as one might expect, it doesn’t exactly push the students toward stellar exegesis either.