Teaching Bible in the Public Schools

GOP Insight bloggs The ACLU says Bible study in public schools is unconstitutional; the Supreme Court says the Bible can be taught as literature without threatening the separation of church and state.

Basically this is the church/state argument: One side believes that the Constitution gives government the power to regulate some aspects of religion, and that the First Amendment bars only the establishment of a national church.

I am not aware of anyone that believes that. The second part is true, but I am not aware of anyone that believes the Constitution gives government the power to regulate some aspects of religion

The other side in the debate believes that the Constitution gives government no power over religion, and that the First Amendment should be broadly read to ban all types of interference with religion.

The first part of that is true, but the second part is not

Actually, they are both right and both wrong. The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States says, simply, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;. . . "

The government can't establish a national church and they can't interfere with anyone's practice of their religion. (Until, of course, the ACLU came along.)

That is absolutely correct.

The reason for this amendment is that the founding patriots who wrote the Constitution specifically did not want the government to establish a state church like they had seen in the Church of England. That's really ALL that was intended originally. And they didn't want anyone criticizing their the way they practiced their religion.

Actually on Independence Day, 1776, nine of the original thirteen colonies had official state churches. They were worried about the Federal Government declaring a particular church to the the official church for the entire country, thus putting in jeapordy the other eight state churches.

Of course over the years the secularists have done all they could to murky the waters and confuse the issue so that the debate now has strayed far from the issue of original intent. Now that we have pseudo-intellectual "progressives" practicing "postmodern relativism," like the ACLU, Christians and Jews are especially restrained from practicing their faiths.

Because of this all-invasive secularism we no longer have prayer in our schools and it has been difficult if not impossible for teachers to use Biblical references in teaching. Textbooks have been purged and classical literature dropped because of Biblical references; history has been revised.

With the strenghtening of traditional values conservatism, however, there seems to be a fresh scent of freedom in the air.

According to World Net Daily, "About 1,000 high schools in 35 states are using material produced by the North Carolina-based National Council On Bible Curriculum In Public Schools in classes during regular school hours."

The National Council on Bible Curriculum says that 93 percent of the school boards it has proposed the curriculum to have accepted it. In addition to "Bible Belt" schools, the curriculum has been accepted in more "liberal" states like Alaska, California, Pennsylvania and Florida.

"Elizabeth Ridenour, the National Council's president, explained to World News Daily that people have been duped into believing that because the Bible was "removed" from public schools in 1963, it couldn't be taught at all.

But the U.S. Supreme Court consistently has upheld the teaching of the Bible as literature, as long as it is not employed for devotional purposes or indoctrination," says an article in World Net Daily.

The ACLU, that defender of all liberties except the ones it doesn't agree with, is in it's usual snit, attempting to intervene whenever they hear of a school district adopting the program.

Nevermind that children who have no knowledge of the Bible are totally "out of the loop" when it comes to understanding more than half of America's literature and most of its history. The nation was founded by men who called for the aid of God in all their endeavors and Biblical references abound throughout our society.

Elizabeth Ridenour, the National Council for Curriculum's president, says that 94 percent of the documents that shaped the founding of the United States were based on the Bible, according to a national secular research body. Among those documents, 34 percent of the contents were direct biblical quotations.

'There has been a gap in education,' she said. 'Unless you have a working knowledge of the Bible, it's difficult to understand our nation's history.'" And its literature, I might add.

One class in the curriculum is "The Bible in History and Literature," which examines things like how the Bible influenced America's founding fathers, art, music and literature, including Shakespeare. Not your average Sunday school curriculum fare, although it really should be. Churches should share the responsibility of this kind of education, too, but if they did, they could lose their tax-exempt status.

The World Net Daily piece continues, "the NCBCPS sees an indication of the Bible's impact in oft-cited statistics showing dramatic increases in unwed pregnancies, cases of sexually transmitted diseases, violent behavior and other social factors since the Bible largely was removed from classrooms in 1963.

"The group says its updated 300-page curriculum and a new CD-Rom -- produced by a development studio that works with Dreamworks -- already is being requested by school districts.

"Celebrities such as Chuck Norris and his wife Gena, Dean Jones and Tony Dorsett have participated in commercials to promote the project."

I think I'll buy the materials to share with my grandchildren this summer. So sue me, ACLU.

Hat tip to Danny Carlton