Welcome to Eclectic offers long-form ruminations on the diverse modern South, education, sustainability, and social justice.

Back when I was an Alabama public school teacher, one of the courses I taught was twelfth grade English: British and World Literature. In teaching that material, discussions of and references to Christianity and the Bible were common, even necessary, in providing context for the works and their authors. In the school year’s early weeks, we talked about the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf and the Catholic monks who transcribed (and altered) it. In that same unit, the textbook had a selection about Caedmon from Bede’s History, a story about a Catholic monk written by a Catholic monk. As we moved into the fall, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales was chock-full of allusions to the medieval Church, clergy members, and the Bible. Among the so-called carpe diem poets was the Anglican priest Robert Herrick. Keep going, and we reach the staunchly Protestant John Milton. Those examples don’t even touch the historical episodes involving Thomas a Beckett, King Henry VIII, and “Bloody” Mary. That thread runs all the way through modern works like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, in which Christian missionaries are the antagonists. If the Christian religion, history, and the Bible were taken off the table, the course that I taught for a dozen years would invite the question that too many people ask anyway: what’s the point in studying this? All context removed, these works and others would ring hollow for being baseless.

So even I have to admit that the proponents of including religious material in a public school education, like the ones in Louisiana and Oklahoma currently, have a point. There really is a Judeo-Christian basis to our literature, our history, and our culture. They are correct about that. The Bible really is an important book, culturally speaking. I just listed examples from British literature, but the religious influences didn’t stop when folks crossed the pond. Even a guy like me, who favors the appreciation of diversity in a multicultural nation, has to acknowledge the truth of these assertions. But—

That also isn’t the reason why they’re trying to include the Bible and other religious material in schools. The people who are writing, supporting, and passing bills and policies, like the ones in Louisiana and Oklahoma, are not interested in finally having a quality classroom lesson on Venerable Bede. Neither are they interested in placing Henry VIII in context as a cultural force behind Protestantism. Placing the Ten Commandments on classroom walls or requiring that the Bible be taught is not meant to help students understand Paradise Lost. No, these politicians and their supporters just want what they want, which is to battle back against secularism and other modern values that they disagree with. They’re trying to use political machinations to achieve their own vision of America.

Recently, on an evening in early July, I watched Oklahoma’s state schools superintendent on the PBS News Hour as he provided his justification for that state’s new policy requiring that the Bible be taught in schools. While smirking and twisting in his chair, the superintendent sought to legitimize a political maneuver meant to garner a favorable Supreme Court decision on this issue. In doing so, he responded to the interviewer’s questions by falling back to a now-familiar boogeyman: the left wing. This narrative implies, of course, that there is a class of people whose values are out of sync with decent, hard-working Americans, and thus they oppose God, justice, truth, goodness, and our nation’s foundational principles. The narrative also deemphasizes the societal value of religious pluralism – there can’t be lots of valid ways, there can only be one – and attempts to ignore the fact that participation in mainstream Christianity is on the decline. Instead, adherents prefer to highlight their belief that America is a nation of Christians, always has been, always should be. This belief has been and is now being ossified among a significant minority of mostly conservative Americans, who merge religion and politics to the point of conflating them. The Oklahoma superintendent showed that he not only holds those beliefs, but that he also takes a certain antagonistic pleasure in opposing those who don’t.

One problem with countering this movement is that its adherents do have some of their basic facts right. The United States of America was definitely not founded on Buddhist principles, Muslim principles, or Hindu principles, nor on atheistic principles. No one could argue effectively that it was. In this rhetorical process, though, we can easily identify one of the main features of mythmaking: including facts that support a desired conclusion, while leaving out facts that don’t lead to that conclusion. Those who utilize the Christian-foundation narrative like to call upon history as their proof, but one of the central facts that they choose to ignore is: many of the earliest settlers and colonials were Christians but they came to the New World to escape government-sanctioned religion. To say that this nation was founded on Christian principles also leads us to ask what we mean by “founded.” Did the earliest settlers “found” this nation in the 1600s – we do consider these folks part of our history – or did the heroes of the Revolutionary War, who wrote the governmental documents, “found” this nation? If it’s the first of the two groups, then America was “founded” on religious liberty, pluralism, tolerance, and the idea that we really, really want a separation of Church and State. If it’s the latter group in the late 1700s, then we should take note of the First Amendment, which “provides that Congress make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

What’s the answer to this cultural quandary? I don’t know for certain, but I do have an idea.

The Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) contains a concept that proffers a possible solution. This law, enacted in 1974 and widely accepted as standard practice, declares that, to look at a student’s records, one must have a “legitimate educational interest.” Put simply, people who have no business looking at a student’s records shouldn’t be looking at them. I wonder if the same standard could be applied to the use of religious material in public schools. People who need to teach religious ideas or texts may certainly do so— if there is a “legitimate educational interest.” If its context must be there to have the lesson make sense, then include it.  But if it isn’t relevant . . . then leave it out. To gain clarity on some literary texts or historical periods, like Cotton Mather’s journals in early America or the Medieval and Renaissance periods in Europe, it can be helpful to employ Bible verses, the Seven Deadly Sins, or the Great Chain of Being. Yet, if the inclusion of such material serves no “legitimate educational interest,” it could easily become religious instruction, dogma, or at worst, indoctrination, not – as the IDEA law phrases it – part of a “free and appropriate public education” in the “least restrictive environment.”

Considering Louisiana’s recent bill that requires schools to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms, that action appears to have little to no connection to state or federal standards for a quality public education. I can concede that the commandments in Exodus 20:12-17 could be connected to federal character education standards, if someone took the time make the argument. That program “teaches the habits of thought and deed that help people live and work together as families, friends, neighbors, communities and nations.” Certainly, honoring one’s parents (or guardians), not killing, not stealing, etc. are strong and advisable guidelines for living and working together in families and communities. But the first few in Exodus 20:2-11, the ones about having no other god or honoring the sabbath . . . Even I, as a Christian who believes in those commandments and does my best to follow them, can’t make a connection between them and any public educational standard that I know of.

I would ask anyone who has a question about the separation of religion and public schools to think about this: have we ever, in our nation, had public school students to attend classes on Sundays? No. That’s because we understand these important things: that Christians should honor the sabbath and that church and public school are separate. We make sure that their regular meeting times don’t conflict. For people who do want religion to be incorporated into their children’s education, there are options. My wife and I have sent ours to a religious school. They had religious instruction and have been led in prayer by their teachers and coaches every day, out loud and as a group. But public school, where I taught, is different in that public schools should serve the general public. Just like public-school families have diverse needs socially and economically, they also have diverse beliefs religiously. Christians have long constituted the largest religious group in this country, but many, many Americans are not Christians. No myth or narrative is going to change that.