Reading, writing and Revelation

The most common objection to such courses is that they are unconstitutional. But the Supreme Court has repeatedly given a constitutional stamp of approval to academic courses about religion. In 1963, Justice William Brennan wrote in Abington vs. Schempp that "the holding of the Court today plainly does not foreclose teaching about the Holy Scriptures." And in 1948, Justice Robert Jackson wrote in McCollum vs. Board of Education that "a course in English literature that omitted the Bible ... would be pretty barren."

But barren of the Bible is just what our public school curriculums are. According to a study by the Bible Literacy Project, which publishes a Bible textbook for secondary schools, only 8% of U.S. high school students have access to an elective Bible course. As a result, an entire generation of Americans is growing up almost entirely ignorant of the most influential book in world history, unable to understand the 1,300 biblical allusions in Shakespeare, the scriptural oratory of President Lincoln and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. or even the prominence of Ezekiel 25:17 (actually a mishmash of this verse and passages from Genesis, Psalms and other books) in the film "Pulp Fiction."

Some have argued against Bible courses in public schools on the theory that they would unconstitutionally "establish" Judeo-Christianity. For Scripture courses to be lawful, this argument goes, teachers must give equal time to all the world's scriptures, treating the Bible as one scripture among many. But the Bible is of sufficient importance in Western civilization to merit its own course. Treating it no differently from, say, the Zend-Avesta of the Zoroastrians or Scientology's Dianetics makes no educational sense.

What makes sense is one Bible course for every public high school student in the U.S. This is not a Christian proposal. It does not serve the political left or the political right. It serves our young people and our public life.