The Grand Illusion
Last Friday, the Texas State Board of Education approved the required reading of Biblical stories and Bible verses as part of the state’s K-12 English and literature curriculum. While the Biblical “literature” requirements do not take effect until 2030, part of the new requirement is that any literature selection on the required list must be “read in its entirety.”
This follows last year’s requirement for all classrooms to display the Ten Commandments, a law recently upheld by the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
While the U.S. Constitution states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” it’s pretty clear that the Texas State Board of Education has either not read the Constitution or believes that states can disregard its provisions.
According to the Pew Research Center, 67% of Texans identify as Christians; 6% identify as believers in other non-Christian faiths; and 26% are religiously unaffiliated, which means that more than a third of Texas students will be required to read religious tracts contrary to their beliefs.
Maybe I’m a bit old-fashioned, but I don’t believe that freedom of religion includes using the government, either federal, state, or local, to require students to read religious texts of a specific faith “in their entirety.”
Those Texas “Christians” (and others) got rather violently opposed to even the thought of students studying other faiths, but they’re more than willing to force their beliefs on others?
But then, the “true believers” have always been willing to force their beliefs on others, or at the least, to look the other way when the zealots did the forcing.
I hope many vote with their feet in Texas. Unfortunately, we can’t count on the courts to intervene for modern constitutional interpretations of even originalist doctrine (as your last post has described). So, I guess for this capitalist country of ours, the only hammer is a monetary one.
So pathetic the way they can’t see beyond their own narrow viewpoint. If some US city or state mandated Quran readings, would those Christians be okay with that?
Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and everyone keep their religion out of the public schools.
In England, religious education is mandatory in state schools but now termed Religion, Values and Ethics, so wider and no emphasis on one religion. I suppose humanist belief is also a form of religion and could be included.
Likely as a consequence, 350 churches close annually of which 25-30 are Church of England and likely to be rural Medieval.
Faith schools still exist but I am uncertain whether they get any state support, or if so, how this affects their teaching.
To your point Tim, The Salon article discussed on this issue by Amanda Marcotte makes the point that classroom discussion and debate about the Bible in a non-church setting May not provide the intended effects that these legislators want. To wit, from the article’
“Russell Moore, who was pushed out of Southern Baptist leadership after speaking out against Donald Trump, told NPR that congregants who hear the Beatitudes in church have complained, asking, “Where did you get those liberal talking points?”
She closes by saying that American children don’t lack from being exposed to religion, but that they eventually are not becoming lifelong churchgoers probably says something about how the churches are conducting themselves. Will the Bible discussions and debates open up the hypocrisy that may be at core of America’s capitalism and warmongering? I don’t know, but we can hope.
I am not sure where to provide my thanks to the author for trying to discuss rationally and without rhetoric versus logic in his books that I received the latest of today through Amazon Kindle without DRM. I find his books provide a wonderful parallel to the complications we face in current Days and saved my “treat” to read tonight while wading through more complicated “current day” troubles
Until 1833, various states had established religions, explicitly not a precondition for holding office, but largely ceremonial by then.
State constitutions and the broad interpretation of the 14th amendment to the states have eliminated that.
But in the latter decades, I doubt it did any harm, even if those of other or no religion didn’t find it entirely congenial.
Everyone wants things their way. But most values have a common source, and disconnecting that appears to many to have disposed of the values.
So I’m not quick to say there’s a right or wrong answer. If it’s imposed excessively on people, it’s wrong. But other than that, I’d just as soon wait and see.
The Law of Unintended Consequences. It was reading the whole of the Bible that led me in the end to being an atheist! Step one on that road was disputing the likelihood of Jonah’s story at Sunday School (I was studying whales) and the teacher’s insistence that every word was ‘gospel’. If she’d gone with the view of the original writers, that these are parables and instructive stories, not reporting, I’d maybe have stayed. But possibly would still have gone on to Step Two.
Step two was concurring with Dawkins’ famous sentence “The God of the Old Testament is the most unpleasant character in fiction”. Why would I want to worship a being so manifestly capricious and unfair? Plus (maybe Step Three) being by then short-sighted enough o need glasses, I realised that accoring to Leviticus I wasn’t going to heaven anyway.