What should public schoolchildren learn about the Bible?

(RNS) — “Name the four Gospels — in the order that they appear in the Christian Bible.”

Complete the following phrase: “You are saved by the blood of _________.”

Complete the following sentence: “No one comes to the Father except through _________.”

Those questions could appear on exams in public schools in Texas. This past Friday (Nov. 22), Texas’ State Board of Education voted 8-7 to approve a new public school curriculum — Bluebonnet Learning — that incorporates Christian lessons from the Bible, for students as young as kindergarten age.

From JTA:

“The first round of the curriculum that we saw honestly had a lot of offensive content in it, and was proselytizing, and did not represent Jewish people well,” said Lisa Epstein, the director of San Antonio’s Jewish Community Relations Council.

Now those critics say most of their specific suggestions have been accepted but they remain concerned.

“Looking at the revision, we still feel that the curriculum is not balanced and it introduces a lot of Christian concepts at a very young age, like resurrection and the blood of Christ and the Messiah, when kids are just really too young to understand and they don’t really have a grasp yet completely of their own religion,” she added. Epstein, who testified at a hearing on the proposal in Austin on Monday, has a child in high school and two others who graduated from Texas public schools.

It is bad enough that the curriculum is not balanced — that it is tilted toward a blatant evangelical theology that would even give many Christians pause.

It is also, in the words of a biblical scholar, “biblically illiterate.” In many places it is simply, factually wrong.

Do I believe there should be a place for the Bible in secular education?

Yes. It is part of cultural literacy. Young people should know certain things about the Bible.

Almost 20 years ago, Bruce Feiler defended the idea of teaching about the Bible:

By helping to design an academic course in the Bible, moderates can show that the Bible is not composed entirely of talking points for the religious right. In fact, on a wide range of topics, including respecting the value of other faiths, shielding religion from politics, serving the poor and protecting the environment, the Bible offers powerful arguments in support of moderate and liberal causes.

But it is not the role of educators to teach young people to believe in the Bible.

Why should young people know about the Bible? Because it would open a window onto American history itself.

Let me just bring you back to August 1776. A month before, the Continental Congress had drafted the Declaration of Independence. One of that document’s architects, Benjamin Franklin, sat down, and he asked himself the same question any startup has to deal with – what will our logo be?

Franklin wanted the Great Seal of the United States to feature a scene of Moses standing at the shores of the Red Sea and the waters preparing to devour Pharaoh and his armies.

Of course, Franklin lost. But from where did Franklin get this idea?

Ben Franklin was born in Boston. He was of old Puritan stock. He was descended from people who believed that all along they had been living the biblical story. The Israeli historian Avihu Zakai has written: “For Puritan emigrants to America, the flight from England to New England symbolized in vivid and concrete terms their exodus from bondage in Egypt, or England, to the promised land of Canaan.”

Let’s go to Thanksgiving.

The Puritans had been a despised religious minority in England. John Winthrop compared the Puritans to the Jews – for they had been “despised, pointed at, hated of the world, made a byword, reviled, slandered, rebuked … “

And so, they made their exodus. Peter Bulkley, a prominent Puritan minister (and ancestor of Ralph Waldo Emerson), described it: “God hath dealt with us as with the people of Israel; we are brought out of a fat land into the wilderness.”

The Puritans saw the Plymouth Colony as their promised land. That is why so many places in New England bear biblical names: Salem, Massachusetts; Bethel, Connecticut; Canaan, Connecticut; New Canaan, Connecticut; Sharon, Massachusetts.

It was a pattern that migrated south to New York — which is why I grew up near Jericho, Long Island — and it got as far south as Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, which is really the Hebrew rechovot – and even farther south to Bethesda, Maryland.

Go beyond the Puritans, to the American Black experience. When gospel choirs sing “Go down, Moses, / Way down in Egypt’s land, / Tell old Pharaoh, / ‘Let my people go,’” they are seeing their own lives through a biblical lens.

When slaves escaped the cruelty of their masters — when they crossed the Ohio River – they imagined they were crossing the Red Sea.

When they escaped across the Mason-Dixon line, they imagined they were crossing the deserts of the Negev.

Skip ahead to the final day in the life of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. When he made his last public statement before his death, he said famously, “I have been to the mountaintop … ” That is a replay of the final day of the life of Moses. That is how he saw himself.

Are there some biblical texts our young people should know? I offer a small list of texts from the Jewish Bible that would animate their moral imaginations:

• “And God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness. They shall rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the cattle, the whole earth, and all the creeping things that creep on earth.’” (Genesis 1:26). The lesson: Every person deserves dignity, by virtue of the fact that they are made in the divine image. If you believe in God, then you must also respect human dignity. And, because human beings are given stewardship over God’s creation, it would imply that environmental consciousness, and concerns over climate, are part of the divine mandate.
• “Love your fellow as yourself … ” (Leviticus 19:18). The lesson: It’s not about love as an emotion. The biblical use of “love” means we live in a social contract with each other. It is the basis of civil society — that we are responsible for each other.
• “When strangers reside with you in your land, you shall not wrong them. The strangers who reside with you shall be to you as your citizens; you shall love each one as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt … “(Leviticus 19:33-34). The lesson: Taking care of the stranger — again, love as social contract — is the most oft-repeated law in the Torah, 36 times, according to one count. We must discern who the strangers are in our society and do our best to protect them.

Make no mistake about it: This new curriculum in Texas is a form of religious indoctrination. It is part of the Christian nationalist agenda, which the Trump administration supports.

Count me part of the opposition.