The Bible in
Memphis
By Stephen R. Haynes
During the 1990s the image of American public schools
as religion-free zones came under concerted attack, not only from
conservative evangelicals eager to get God back into the classroom but also
from educators seeking to provide public school students with a better grasp
of the role of religion in history and culture. For both groups, a prime
goal was inclusion of the Bible in school curriculums.
Yet as states ventured to introduce (or re-introduce)
religion into their schools, the Bible education movement suffered a series
of legal and public relations setbacks. In 1996, a federal court in
Mississippi declared Bible instruction in the Pontotoc County School
District unconstitutional, finding that it was simply designed to advance
Christianity. Two years later, a federal court in Florida ordered the Lee
County School District to abandon a New Testament curriculum that presented
Jesus’ miracles and resurrection as historical fact.
These cases put public school Bible education on the
radar screen of the national media, which proceeded to examine the practices
of obscure school districts in the rural South that had been teaching the
Bible for decades. In June of 2000, Craig Timberg of the Washington Post
reported that the public school Bible instructor in Chilhowie, Virginia (a
“town of 2,000 square in the Bible belt”) also worked as youth pastor for
the local Baptist church and tested students on “the six proofs that the
Bible is God’s word.” Charles Haynes, a leading proponent of teaching
religion objectively and neutrally “across the curriculum,” was quoted as
saying that “most Bible electives being taught in the South right now are
probably unconstitutional.”
Fear of scrutiny by the media and watchdog groups
apparently contributed to the Georgia State Board of Education’s December
1999 decision not to fund Bible courses. Board chairman Otis Brumby defended
the decision in unusually blunt terms: “The net effect of our approval would
likely be minimal in terms of student enrollment but massive in terms of
costly litigation.” A story on the decision by the AP’s Rachel Zoll,
published in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, pointed out that “while
Georgia debates whether to teach the Bible in schools, the practice is
entrenched in parts of Tennessee”—including Hamilton, Rhea, McNairy, Greene,
Union, Hickman, Bradley, and Maury counties.
This revelation of ongoing Bible courses in counties
throughout the state caught the attention of the Shelby County School Board,
which oversees public education in suburban Memphis. At its January 2000
meeting, the board asked the district staff to research the feasibility of
offering Bible courses in Shelby County.
The county staff contacted officials in Hamilton County
(Chattanooga) and developed a proposal patterned closely on that district’s
long-standing Bible curriculum. In March 2000, the board voted 6-1 to
authorize a Special Course Application for “Bible History I” and “Bible
History II” and to submit the application to the State Department of
Education.
Two months later, the state turned down the
application. In a letter to Shelby County Superintendent James B. Mitchell
dated May 2, Tennessee education commissioner E. Vernon Coffey expressed his
opinion that the proposal, which “include[d] the terms ‘Old’ and ‘New’
Testaments and lists the Bible as the only text with no secular text(s)
included, has the potential of facing both legal and educational
challenges.”
After complaining to the state commissioner that the
county had received “discriminatory treatment,” new board chairman David
Pickler directed county staff to prepare a proposal for a course on
comparative religion. (In conversations with education officials in
Nashville, district administrators were led to believe that a comparative
religion course would have no problem receiving state approval.) But at its
November 16 meeting, the board rejected the alternative proposal.
“It’s just altogether a bad idea to teach Hinduism,
Buddhism, and voodoo and whatever else in our schools,” declared board
member Wyatt Bunker. The next day Bunker told the Commercial Appeal,
“If they don’t want God in our schools, then we’re not going to have Gandhi
in our schools.”
A November 20 Commercial Appeal editorial titled
“Bigotry 101” set the tone for media reaction: “It would be comforting to
know that members of the school board are in favor of learning, but
unfortunately that’s not something that can be taken for granted.” In
dismissing the comparative religion course, the board had acted “in an
anti-intellectual mood that would have done Mao proud,” the paper charged.
“Ranting against minority religions a few miles down the road from a
beautiful new Hindu temple attended by tax-paying American citizens is
inconsiderate, offensive, and a terrible message of intolerance for any
children within earshot.”
In mid-December, Commercial Appeal reporter
Michael Erskine investigated teaching practices in Hamilton County, one of
six Tennessee districts with permanent approval to teach the Bible. “We
teach it just as you would teach a history book,” said Harriet Bond, a
former Hamilton County Bible teacher. “We teach as if it’s historical fact
from Abraham on.” The article pointed out that this was the very approach
that had been overturned in Lee County. “That’s what we saw in Florida and
what Shelby County wants to pursue,” said Judith Schaeffer, deputy legal
director for People for the American Way.
Then, in the spring of 2001, Shelby County board
members learned that a new Bible curriculum for use in public schools was
under development by the Bible Literacy Project (BLP), a non-profit
organization “dedicated to the academic and objective study of the Bible and
its influence on Western Civilization.” The curriculum, which the BLP was
hoping to pilot in five classrooms across the country in the fall,
highlighted the interpretive perspectives of various religious communities.
Ironically, it was Wyatt Bunker who brought the curriculum to the board’s
attention.
While the board was confident that the BLP curriculum
could pass muster with the state department of education, it had become
apparent that state approval alone would not silence the opposition. As they
awaited word on the fate of their second proposal, board members invited
Matthew Hicks, the curriculum’s author, to lead a public forum in Memphis.
But although the forum, which took place in January 2002, relieved the fears
of some, Cheri DelBrocco of the Public Issues Forum (a local affiliate of
the ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State) warned
that when Hicks returned to Virginia, “this board is going to be responsible
for assuring the community that this is not going to be Sunday school
class.”
Then, just as Shelby County’s two-year quest to receive
state approval for Bible education was nearing a successful conclusion,
there was a reminder of Tennessee’s checkered history of church, state, and
public education. On February 8, 2002, a federal judge in Chattanooga
ordered an end to the elementary school Bible classes that had been taught
in Rhea County for the previous 51 years.
Reporters hastened to point out that Rhea County was
the site of the infamous Scopes trial of 1925—not an entire coincidence,
given that the weekly classes were being taught by students from Bryan
College, an evangelical institution named for William Jennings Bryan
himself. (The Commercial Appeal’s February 9 story ran under the
headline “Judge Closes Bible Classes in ‘Monkey Trial’ County.”)
Notwithstanding, in mid-February Shelby County received notice that “Hebrew
History” had received conditional state approval for the 2002-03 school
year. The course commenced at five Memphis-area high schools last fall.
Since December 1999, the Commercial Appeal has
devoted more than 40 news articles, editorials, and columns to this issue.
By standards of fairness and public service, it has been a mixed
performance.
As the decision-making process went forward, news
stories never gave comments by the course’s opponents the same critical
scrutiny as those made by the course’s advocates. For example, in her March
31, 2000 article, “Bible History Closer for Shelby Schools,” Aimee Edmondson
made no effort to evaluate a leading opponent’s claim that the class would
be “little more than a cover for fundamental (sic) Christian
indoctrination.” More than once, the paper referred to the proposed course
as “Bible study.”
The slanted reporting was undergirded by strong
editorial opposition to the Bible course. The Commercial Appeal’s
first editorial on the issue (March 30, 2000) raised understandable
concerns: “Who would teach the class? How would those instructors be
trained? Which version or versions of the Bible, and accompanying vocabulary
and materials, would the class use?”
But following the Bunker debacle, editorials repeatedly
portrayed the proposed class as an unconstitutional attempt to (as the paper
put it on December 3, 2000) “impose a Protestant evangelical course of
‘Bible history’ on a public school district.” A February 2001 editorial
charged that Shelby County wanted to teach “Scripture much as it would be
taught in Sunday school, while stamping the religious practices of the local
majority with the government’s imprimatur.” School board members were,
claimed the paper, looking for ways to “make Christianity the district’s
official religion.”
When Shelby County identified the curriculum that would
form the basis of its approved course in “Hebrew History,” the paper
declared on July 22, 2001, “You Bet There’s a Place for Bible Class”—in
church. On January 31, 2002, it grumpily noted that board members had
“placed a higher priority on pandering to certain constituents than on
maintaining responsible stewardship of the district’s scarce resources”—its
last editorial word on the course to date.
Overall, the Commercial Appeal failed to clarify
important issues raised by the story, instead exacerbating the natural
tendency toward polarization on church-state issues. The pattern was set in
its very first report of a possible Bible course, which quoted vehement
proponents and opponents such as board member Joe Clayton, Tennessee ACLU
executive director Hedy Weinberg, and People for the American Way deputy
legal director Judith Schaeffer but no one who might have articulated a more
balanced view.
Subsequent stories reinforced the notion that there
were just two views of the issue, mutually incompatible and equally
unyielding. Not once in its coverage did the paper offer the perspective of
a scholar of religion or the First Amendment.
It is hard to say whether the situation was helped or
hindered by the Commercial Appeal’s capable religion writer David
Waters, whose popular “Faith Matters” column appears three times a week on
the front of the paper’s Metro section. Since the story broke, Waters has
devoted eight columns to the issue, in the course of which his views have
shifted dramatically.
In January 2000, he wrote that it was “about time” the
county schools offered a class focused on “the most important book in
history.” Every public school system, he argued, should include the Bible in
its curriculum. In May, however, his tone began to change, as he
characterized the proposed class as “Christian-oriented.”
In a November 29 column that referred to the board’s
most outspoken Bible advocate as “Archie” Bunker, Waters declared, “Instead
of comparative religion, board members say they want to offer a Bible
history course. No they don’t. What they offered for state approval was a
Bible-based class on Protestant evangelicalism. The state rejected that.” On
December 6, he withdrew his support for the Bible class, which had been
tendered “before it became obvious what some school board members were up
to.” That column’s opening line was: “The Shelby County School Board has
approved a new course for high school students. It’s called ‘New Testament
Math: Why it all adds up to John 3:16.’”
During 2001, when the school board hitched its wagon to
the new curricular approach, Waters regrettably let the issue drop. When he
took it up again, he was back on board.
On January 20, 2002, the day before the county board’s
vote on the new curriculum, a column headed “Curriculum So Fair, It May Be
Inspired” declared, “[T]his isn’t a Bible class. This is a class about the
Bible. Which is exactly what we need in public schools.” The following
month, after the course received state approval, Waters congratulated county
board members for taking religious liberty seriously and finding an
“educationally enriching democracy enhancing Bible course.” Religion, he
wrote, “is too important not to be taught in public schools.”
Last August, reporter Katherine Cromer began a
back-to-school story by focusing sympathetically on one of the world history
teachers preparing to teach “Hebrew History” to students who were for the
most part from “Biblical literalist” backgrounds. After the school year
started, however, the paper went silent. County administrators, convinced
that reporters were interested only in stirring controversy, decided to deny
media access to teachers and students.
Fortunately, access was not denied to academics. In
visits to four of the five classrooms where the course is being offered, I
was impressed with the teachers’ enthusiasm for the subject matter, their
desire to make the Bible and its background accessible, and their management
of the classroom. Indoctrination in Christianity, fundamentalist or
otherwise, was non-existent.
When I asked students why they had elected to take the
class, the most common responses were, “I am a Christian, but I don’t know
much about the Bible” and “I want to learn other viewpoints on the Old
Testament.” In both cases, what surfaced was a hunger for knowledge about a
text they had engaged either superficially or from a single perspective.
David Waters reported my findings in his January 22
column—but it would have been far better had journalists been allowed to see
for themselves.
For better or worse, persons on either side of the
debate tend to invest the Bible-in-the-public-schools question with their
deepest hopes and fears for our nation. Liberals who are committed to
strengthening the “wall of separation of church and state” in an age of
burgeoning religiosity see Bible education as a potentially disastrous
breach in that wall and, perhaps, the beginning of the end for American
democracy as we know it.
Many conservatives, meanwhile, view the public’s new
openness to Bible education as an opportunity to “put God back into the
public schools.” Teaching the Bible is necessary, they warn, if we are to
slow our moral decline and avert national destruction.
In this environment of bifurcated thinking and
near-apocalyptic rhetoric, we need to hear more voices that appreciate the
constitutional issues associated with Bible education in the public schools,
but at the same time recognize religious literacy as a safeguard to our
democracy, a boon to tolerance in an age of increasing pluralism, and a way
of combating some of the more extreme religious influences students are
exposed to. |