Hmmm….

As some of you might remember, last week I brought up TFN’s latest report about Bible studies in Texas schools - and I think one or two Pages were posted by others, linking to a few blogs - and it sort of bothers me that this story has not caught on more widely in the American media.

Not that I expect much out of corporate media, but I did think the TFN report would have gotten a little bit more attention, outside of the creationist/evolution culture war blogs.

Anyway, one blogger, who writes on occasion in some big name outlets, Adam Laats, has put down some thoughts:

Teaching the Bible, Texas Style

Laats himself is not a creationist, at least in the Ken Ham style, but I’ve got to wonder if not unlike so many media writers on other topics (especially climate change, or any other sufficiently esoteric subject) the real goal is simply pushing the peanut, as the phrase goes.

Consider what Laats writes:

[…] As [TFN] points out, these doctrines are intensely sectarian. They teach a specific interpretation of the Bible as eternally true. Students in these public school classes would be told that the doctrines of conservative evangelical Protestantism are the correct and only interpretation of the Bible.

Are we shocked?

We shouldn’t be.

Here’s why not:

First of all, the numbers of schools and students involved is very small. […]

Second, the practice of teaching sectarian religion in public-school Bible classes has a long and surprisingly uncontroversial history. As I explored in my 1920s book, while public attention was focused on anti-evolution laws, between 1919 and 1931 eleven states quietly passed mandatory Bible-reading laws for public schools.

Finally, even after the anti-Bible SCOTUS ruling in 1963, many public schools simply continued the practice. As political scientists Kenneth Dolbeare and Philip Hammond found in their survey of schools in a Midwestern state, the Supreme Court rulings against public-school Bible reading made absolutely no difference in school practice. Where students had read the Bible before, they continued to do so, without raising any controversy.

So Professor Chancey’s findings that a few students in a few public schools in Texas learn a sectarian interpretation of the Bible should come as no surprise. […] Moreover, as political scientists Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer have convincingly argued, public school teachers usually teach ideas that are locally uncontroversial. In some places, that means teaching creationism as science. In others, it means teaching the Bible as history.

On the whole I find Laats’ acquiescence disquieting (and read his CoHE article for more). In the comments he demonstrates that even if he is not a YEC he is under the influence of some serious misunderstandings about the Bible:

[…] I personally believe that the Bible is often historically accurate. To pick just one example (I opened up my Scofield at random), the nativity story told in Luke 2:1 bases the story on Caesar Augustus’ tax policy. Seems like a reasonable part of both Biblical and non-Biblical history to me. […]

Frankly, the nativity portion of Luke has long been a problem for Synoptic Gospel studies because it is in direct conflict with the story in Matthew - and thus at least one of them is wrong. That Laats picked one of the most controversial parts of the gospels as “history” tells me something.

Maybe I’ll need to turn this into a Page… there’s too much to write…