Part one:
(ABP) — As students load their backpacks for school this fall, a growing number include the Bible among their textbooks.
But critics — including Christians eager to see teenagers seriously study the Scriptures — say some public-school Bible courses are designed to promote a sectarian belief and advance a political agenda.
Few of the parties involved question either the value or constitutionality of Bible courses, provided they are nonsectarian and academically sound. But one course in particular — The Bible in History and Literature, produced by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools — has drawn fire from civil-liberties watchdogs.
The National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, based in Greensboro, N.C., claims its curriculum has been approved for use in elective courses in 37 states by 312 school districts. To date, 175,000 students have taken the course, and 92 percent of the school boards that have been approached have voted to implement it, said council president Elizabeth Ridenour.
The council does not release a list of all districts using its curriculum to protect them from being “brow-beaten and threatened,” said Mike Johnson, a member of the council's board of directors and an attorney for the Alliance Defense Fund.
Instead, the council directs inquiries to a few flagship districts that have agreed to respond to questions. One is the Brady (Texas) Independent School District, about 75 miles southeast of San Angelo.
This fall begins the ninth year the Brady Independent School District has used the curriculum. Tracey Kiesling taught the elective course for the first four years. She now works for the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, training other teachers to use the curriculum.
About 18 students a year have taken the course in Brady, she noted. “It is vitally important to offer a course of this nature because of the way the Bible crosses virtually all other parts of the curriculum,” she said. “Basically, we're into the second generation of Bible illiterates, and much interpretation in especially literature, science, history and the arts is lost if the student does not have at least some knowledge of the Bible.”
Ryan Valentine with the Texas Freedom Network agrees with Kiesling about the importance of public-school students learning about the Bible. But he faults the National Council's approach.
“The Texas Freedom Network is all for teaching the Bible in public schools as long as it satisfies the two criteria we keep harping about. It has to be nonsectarian in purpose, and it has to be academically rigorous. The problem with this [curriculum] is that it fails miserably on both counts,” said Valentine, director of the Texas Faith Network, a branch of the statewide civil-liberties group.
Mark Chancey, who teaches biblical studies in the religion department at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, wrote a 32-page report for the network's education fund critiquing the material.
Chancey supports the study of the Bible by public-school students, but he finds fault with the approach taken in the National Council's curriculum.
“Asking a biblical scholar if the Bible should be taught is like asking a chef if he likes to cook,” he said. “I think students are well served to have familiarity with the Bible, and I think it's important to our cultural literacy. I also wish students got more exposure to the diversity of religions — in America and around the world. Now, more than ever, we need that.”
In his report, however, Chancey gives the 290-page teacher's guide for The Bible in History and Literature a failing grade on at least three counts.
He maintains it is a sectarian document that “attempts to persuade students to adopt views … held primarily within certain conservative Protestant circles.” He asserts the scholarship is shoddy, failing to cite sources clearly and sometimes reproducing other materials word-for-word without sufficient attribution. And, he said, “Much of the course appears designed to persuade students and teachers that America is a distinctively Christian nation.”
Chancy also characterized the material as “thoroughly plagiarized … the kind of thing that gets students kicked out of school and gets teachers fired.”
Along with the teacher's guide, the curriculum includes a CD of The Bible Reader: An Interfaith Interpretation, an out-of-print book first published in 1969 that includes commentary from Protestant, Roman Catholic and Jewish perspectives. It sells for $150 directly from the council and more if purchased from secondary sources.
Chancey maintains the curriculum presents statements of faith as indisputable facts. For instance, he quotes passages in which the Bible is referred to in a matter-of-fact way as “the word of God” and a study on the gospels that urges readers to “picture Matthew as he begins his inspired book.”
He also cities passages in the teacher's guide in which Jesus is presented as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. “It's not as if they had a whole unit on why Jesus fulfills Old Testament prophecy. But it's their assumptions that come through loud and clear. … Their own theological presuppositions come through very, very clear, and are often stated in a way that implies they are actual and normative,” Chancey said in an interview.
The curriculum's failure to distinguish clearly between objective, verifiable facts and statements of faith is a key failure, Valentine added.
“There's a difference between saying ‘Christians believe Jesus is the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy,' which is a statement of fact and appropriate in a curriculum, and saying, as a matter of fact, ‘Jesus is the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy.' That's where this curriculum crosses the line,” he said.
Chancey also takes issue with underlying assumptions presented in the curriculum, such as its teaching that the Bible is composed of 66 books, divided into the Old Testament and New Testament.
“As Protestants — as Baptists and Methodists — the Bible they are talking about [in the curriculum] looks very familiar to us because it's basically the Protestant Bible. To Jews, Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, this doesn't look very familiar,” he said. “A good curriculum should be sensitive to the differences between the Bibles of the different faith groups.”
Chancey also believes the curriculum relies too heavily on one translation — the King James Version.
“Students who study this curriculum are receiving an introduction to a specific Bible — the Protestant Bible,” Chancey asserted in his report. “That Bible is presented as the standard; Bibles of other traditions, if they are mentioned at all, are often presented in ways that imply that they are deviations from that Protestant standard.”
However, an explanatory note on first page of the National Council's teacher's guide states: “This curriculum has been prepared using the King James Bible because of its historic use as the legal and educational foundation of America, but school districts are free to use whichever translation they choose, or they may allow each student to use the translation of his or her choice. Sometimes the student can benefit from comparing translations in and out of class.”
Chancey acknowledged the material sometimes includes learning activities and statements that present a nonsectarian view, but he said these are few and far between.
“The material makes occasional attempts to be nonsectarian, but it's not successful. It falls far short,” he said.
But, Tracey Keisling counters, the curriculum has been thoroughly scrutinized both by curriculum experts, legal authorities and local school board personnel, and in no way has it been found to be sectarian.
“We have personally worked with persons having PhDs in curriculum in designing our curriculum; constitutional scholars from at least Princeton and Notre Dame praise our curriculum highly; and hundreds of school board attorneys and school board members of different political parties across the nation laud our curriculum,” she said. “Also, every bit of material in the guide has gone through batteries of attorneys to assure that it complies with the law.
“The facts remain that our curriculum is sound according to the experts. … Not even one teacher has been brought up on even one incident. And we have more schools calling and coming on board all the time.”
Chancey also asserts the National Council materials directly reproduce lengthy passages from other sources, sometimes citing incorrect sources and sometimes failing to cite any source.
“When the number of pages copied directly from sources with minimal or no rewording and pages identical or nearly identical to uncited sources are totaled, the count approaches 100 — approximately a third of the book,” Chancey wrote.
The teacher's guide also includes errors, such as saying a sword, rather than a spear, pierced Jesus' side as he hung on the cross; stating that Herod built a synagogue, rather than correctly saying he renovated and expanded the temple in Jerusalem; and citing incorrect dates, he noted.
Attorney Johnson said, in all instances, the National Council obtained permission before reprinting material from other sources. Omitted citations of sources and factual errors will be corrected in future revisions of the material, he said.
Kiesling dismissed the criticism as inconsequential.
“Some of those flaws have been brought to our attention and most of them are unfounded, and some are simply typographical errors,” she said. “We are always working to improve our curriculum guide, as any good organization would do.”