Oklahoma School Districts Must Teach Scripture. Is That a Good Thing?
“Be careful what you pray for,” the old saying goes, “because you may get it.”
In Oklahoma, every school district will now be required to include the Bible in its curriculum on the obvious grounds that, if you are ignorant of the Bible, you will be in no position to understand most of Western history, literature, and art. It would be like trying to understand ancient Greece without reading Homer, Hesiod, and the great tragedians of Athens. The question is not whether such a thing might be possible, but why on earth you would propose to try it? You may hop for five miles on one leg, but what is the point, when you could use both, and enjoy the ease of looking about you as you do so? (READ MORE from Anthony Esolen: Higher Ed Can’t Study Art Because It Drained the Brains)
The problem has nothing to do with the Constitution, which does not demand, in this crucial regard, that a child in a public school be an ignoramus. And make no mistake, an ignoramus he will be. When I made this point on social media, someone countered, saying that the plays of Shakespeare, for instance, are “not exactly dripping with Scripture.” Well, if you don’t know Scripture, you can hardly tell whether they are or they are not.
In fact, the plays are steeped in Scripture, as Shakespeare is by far the most theologically engaged of all his contemporary playwrights, and his echoes of Scripture are not incidental, but of the essence. “There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow,” says Hamlet, just before he agrees to a fencing match with Laertes, which will be the death of both of them. Measure for Measure the play is called, whose central problem is the interplay of justice and mercy; the title is straight from the Sermon on the Mount. “O dear father,” says Cordelia, who has returned to England to save King Lear from her wicked elder sisters, “It is thy business that I go about,” echoing the words of the boy Jesus in the Temple; an echo that is the more poignant from the lips of one who lived in pagan Britain before the time of Christ.
No, the problem has to do with where our teachers are coming from and whether we can trust them to treat Scripture with the honor that a world-transforming text deserves, even if they do not accept it as the word of God. I would like to believe that they would not be so puerile as to take out their resentment on the text, gleefully picking passages out of context and with no attempt to understand them on their own terms or in the historical situation, to make them appear stupid, wicked, or a hopeless mass of self-contradictions so that those who treat the Bible as sacred will appear likewise.
“The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose,” says Antonio, the merchant of Venice in the play by that name, though the purpose here will be the reverse of what Antonio’s enemy Shylock desires. For Shylock sincerely believes he honors Scripture, while the teachers I have in mind will intend no such thing.
Are Oklahoma Teachers Up to the Task?
People do not enjoy having their deficiencies laid bare. They do not like to be shown up. Most English literature written before 1900 is an alien land to teachers and students, so it is mainly ignored, as I have gathered from nearly forty years of quizzing college freshmen. It is not a matter of teaching too little of Tennyson, for one glaring example, but of teaching nothing at all, so that in a class of 20 college freshmen you will be lucky to have as many as two or three who even recognize the name of the most celebrated and beloved English poet of his age.
If you require somebody to teach what he does not know, what is the most obvious thing he will now do? He will turn to the internet — that crashing waterfall of facts, half-truths, misunderstanding, and folly. We assume here that he is motivated by goodwill, though his patience will be tried, and he will resist putting any great effort into the task. (READ MORE: Oklahoma Public Schools to Include the Bible in Curriculum)
But why should we assume goodwill? Our schools have gone all in for the latest and maddest instantiation of the sexual revolution, and Scripture stands most obviously against it. Thus I have seen someone pretending to be eager to teach the Bible in school, picking out the passage in Genesis where Lot’s daughters get their father drunk so they can bed down with him and have children by him. That the descendants of these children will be Moabites and Amorites, Israel’s enemies, escapes the scoffer’s notice, as also that the author presents Lot and his family as tarred by having lived in Sodom too long. Would you have Al Capone teach tax law? He might do a decent job, mainly to show people how to duck or skirt it. At least they would know what it is. Better to have Capone teach tax law than to have anybody who hates what Scripture says about his way of life teach the Bible.
But suppose you do not have a teacher with a personal stake in making Scripture look ridiculous, or in twisting it for his own benefit. Suppose he has a modicum of goodwill and some knowledge, although usually vague. Can we expect something decent and instructive to come from him as he presents, say, Genesis to his students?
Not likely. There are two reasons. First, the whole “culture,” if we can call widespread amnesia by that name, makes it extremely difficult for people to see that books written in the past are worthy of our attention. We apply the pattern of technological progress, which is easy to see, to all other matters, and assume that as far as the internet is above the carrier pigeons that began the Reuters news enterprise, so far is our moral wisdom above that of the past; and so too with music and the arts, and philosophy, and human institutions such as the family.
This prejudice is utterly tenacious. I can show my students the astronomy that is everywhere in Dante — its precision, subtlety, and consonance with careful observation; I do so for students who do not know where the sun will appear in the sky at dawn in early spring, what path it will take if you are in the northern or the southern hemisphere, and how the height of that path at noon will depend upon how far you are above or below the equator. They will still revert to believing that medieval men were all dunderheads who thought the world was flat. And that is just a matter of physical science.
When it comes to the way we live our lives, they can behold all the splendors of medieval art and architecture, the boisterous and frequent celebrations, the color of folk traditions, the love songs and the Christmas carols, the invention of the university, the restless penchant for going on pilgrimages, the beginning of international banking, the mirth that characterizes so much of the poetry before global cooling and the Black Death struck in the 14th century, and still they will call the centuries of the High Middle Ages an era of darkness. No television, I guess. (WATCH: The Spectacle Ep. 123: Louisiana Makes The 10 Commandments Great Again)
The second reason is that the whole past has become an alien land. You may believe that Jane Austen has a lot to teach us about the relations of men and women, but unless you can set your own age’s understandings and misunderstandings aside and enter imaginatively into a world that is not your own, you will not discover what that lot is. And this is a sort of work that nothing in your usual experience will help you to do. You have to understand not only that Elizabeth and Jane Bennett believe that what their foolish sister Lydia has done — leaving home with a rake to whom she is not married — is scandalous. You have to understand why they believe it, and not just as an abstract notion, but as something real, something that arouses a reaction from the whole person. In other words, you have to set aside our typical indifference to such a thing, and to try to feel the force of the wrong with its full power.
But in a Western world that grows more homogeneous, turning every land into one or another shade of modern gray, you will have had little call to exercise any historical or cultural imagination. If Jane Austen seems to come from another planet, the Bible will seem to come from another universe entirely, and though you will be able to read the words on the page, they might as well be scratches and squiggles for which there is no Rosetta Stone.
And yet — the thing should be done. Who will do it, and how, and with what results, I cannot say.
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