WASHINGTON (ABP) — A group that encourages teaching the Bible as history and literature in the public schools has revised its curriculum, incorporating many of the changes recommended by an organization it characterized as “anti-religion extremists.”
In late August, the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools issued the revision — the second in seven months — of its teaching guide, called “The Bible in History and Literature.”
Council leaders released the revision at a Washington press conference Sept. 9, barely a month after the Texas Freedom Network issued a lengthy report contending the curriculum has serious constitutional and academic problems.
“The best Bible curriculum in the country has just gotten better,” Mike Johnson said in introducing the changes. Johnson, a member of the council board, is also a Louisiana-based attorney for the Alliance Defense Fund, a Religious Right group.
On Aug. 1, the Texas Freedom Network released a report on the March 2005 revision of the curriculum. The report was authored by Mark Chancey, a religion professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
Chancey concluded, among other things, that the curriculum “on the whole is a sectarian document, and I cannot recommend it for usage in a public school setting. It attempts to persuade students to adopt views that are held primarily within certain conservative Protestant circles but not within the scholarly community, and it presents Christian faith claims as history.”
The Supreme Court has said that the Bible may be taught in a public-school setting but only for its importance as a literary and historical document. Government promotion of any particular faith's doctrine violates the First Amendment, the court has said.
In the 33-page report, Chancey pointed out several instances in which the curriculum and its recommended supplementary materials seemed to favor one particular doctrinal or interpretive viewpoint regarding the Bible.
At the time, National Council officials lambasted Chancey's report and the Texas Freedom Network. A statement still posted on the council's website Sept. 16 labeled TFN “a radical humanist organization” and said the group was “desperate to ban one book — the Bible — from public schools.”
It also said Chancey's report “cites several passages from the teacher's guide to the curriculum out of context, and clearly misrepresents the curriculum's contents and objectives.”
Nonetheless, many of Chancey's recommended changes — including substantive ones — are reflected in the latest revision.
For example, Chancey faulted the curriculum for assuming a Protestant view of the Bible in the material's very first section, titled “Introduction to the Bible.” It had asserted that “there are 66 books in the entire Bible” and that Scripture has “two major divisions” — the Old Testament and the New Testament.
However, Chancey noted, Jews do not accept the New Testament as part of the Bible. Therefore, it is accepted practice among biblical scholars to refer to the Old Testament as the “Hebrew Bible.”
In addition, Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians accept several books as part of the biblical canon in addition to those that Protestants accept.
The revised curriculum now begins the section by saying, “The term Bible means 'books,' but refers to different volumes for different religions. For example, 'the Hebrew Bible' of the Jewish faith contains 24 books…. While the Old Testament of the King James translation and other Protestant Bibles contains 39 books, it consists of 46 books in the Catholic Bible.”
In another example, the new version removes a citation, presented as fact, of an urban legend that attempted to prove the historical veracity of a famous passage from the book of Joshua. It had suggested that teachers tell their students to take note “in particular the interesting story of the sun standing still in chapter 10. There is documented research through NASA that two days were indeed unaccounted for in time (the other being in II Kings 20:8-11).”
A statement on NASA's website says the agency never made any such claim.
Asked if such revisions to the teacher's guide came in reaction to Chancey's report, a member of the council's board said they were simply part of a continual revision.
“We're engaged in an ongoing effort to improve the curriculum, and certainly we considered the comments and criticisms that were made,” said Steve Crampton, an attorney for the Mississippi-based American Family Association. “But, if anything, I think that the Texas Freedom Network's efforts resulted in maybe hastening some of the work that was already underway.”
But he refused to retract the council's earlier characterizations of its critics as “anti-religion extremists.”
“I think the lip-service paid by the Texas Freedom Network that they are not against the teaching of the Bible in general — they've never met a Bible curriculum they didn't dislike,” said Crampton. “They have repeatedly taken the far-left banner and attempted to squelch virtually every effort to introduce religion into the public square that has come down the pike in Texas.”
Dan Quinn, a TFN spokesman, said that simply wasn't the case.
“In the first place, this is the only curriculum that we've actually had a chance to review, so it's kind of hard to imagine that every curriculum we've seen we've rejected,” he said.
Quinn also noted that the network's stated purpose is to defend religious freedom and other civil liberties. “I think, really, the curriculum that Mr. Crampton was defending was pretty clear evidence that he and the National Council have a fundamental misunderstanding of what religious freedom really means,” he said. “It does not mean using the government to impose your own religious beliefs and values on others.”
Chancey said he appreciated the changes. “I'd like to strongly commend the council for making many of the changes that they did, and the new edition is definitely a step in the right direction.”
However, he added, there are still difficulties — particularly in the material's assertions about the Bible's purported role in American history.
“It still seems fairly clear that whoever's putting it together doesn't have a whole lot of background in the material,” Chancey said. “So I'm skeptical in its present form that this would make it through he review process of a separate publisher.”
Both Chancey and Quinn noted that they support teaching the Bible in public schools, as long as it's done in an academically rigorous and constitutionally appropriate way. They pointed to a forthcoming curriculum, aimed at high-school students, from the Bible Literacy Project.
A statement on the organization's website says that curriculum was assembled according to the standards of a consensus statement on the Bible in public schools endorsed by a wide variety of religious groups, as well as the federal Department of Education.
Due to be released Sept. 22, the curriculum also will be subject to scholarly review. ” The reviewers include prominent literature academics as well as high-school teachers and scholars from the Roman Catholic, Protestant evangelical, mainline Protestant, Eastern Orthodox and Jewish traditions,” the statement reads.