A REPORT JUST ISSUED BY the Bible Literacy Project (more
on this later) suggests that young Americans know very little about
the Bible. The report is important, but first things first: A fair
number of Americans don't see why teenagers should know anything at
all about the Bible.
Scripture begins with God creating the world, but there is something
these verses don't tell you: The Bible has itself created worlds.
Wherever you stand on the spectrum from devout to atheist, you must
acknowledge that the Bible has been a creative force without
parallel in history.
Go to the center of Paris and drop in on the apotheosis of the
French Middle Ages--Sainte Chapelle, whose walls are made almost
entirely of stained glass. It "has rightly been called," writes the
scholar Shalom Spiegel, "the most wonderful of pictured Bibles." The
King James Bible, says Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, "has influenced our
literature more deeply than any other book--more deeply even than
all the writings of Shakespeare--far more deeply." The poet and
painter William Blake calls the Old and New Testaments "the Great
Codes of Art." America's foremost prophet offers his culminating
vision in the second inaugural address--"With malice toward none;
with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to
see the right . . . " Lincoln's speech "reads like a supplement to
the Bible," writes the historian William Wolf, with its "fourteen
references to God, four direct quotations from Genesis, Psalms, and
Matthew, and other allusions to scriptural teaching." "The best gift
God has given to man," Lincoln called the Bible. "But for it we
could not know right from wrong."
Ronald Reagan called America "a great shining city on a hill,"
three-and-a-half centuries after John Winthrop (sailing for Boston
in 1630) anticipated a new community that would be "as a Citty upon
a Hill"--invoking the famous verse in Matthew, "Ye are the light of
the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid" (5:14).
Which harks back in turn to the prophets (Isaiah 2:2-3, Micah 4:2)
and the book of Proverbs (4:18). John Livingstone Lowe called the
King James Bible "the noblest monument of English prose" (1936);
George Saintsbury called it "probably the greatest prose work in any
language" (1887). Nearly two millennia earlier, the great Pharisee
rabbi Hillel described the ideal life: "loving peace and pursuing
peace; loving humanity and bringing it close to the Torah."
Here is a basic question about America that ought to be on page 1 of
every history book: What made the nation's Founders so sure they
were onto something big? America today is the most powerful nation
on earth, most powerful in all history--and a model the whole world
imitates. What made them so sure?--the settlers and colonists, the
Founding Fathers and all the generations that intervened before
America emerged as a world power in the 20th century? What made them
so certain that America would become a light of the world, the
shining city on a hill? What made John Adams say, in 1765, "I always
consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the
opening of a grand scene and design in Providence"? What made
Abraham Lincoln call America (in 1862, in the middle of a ruinous
civil war) "the last, best hope of earth"?
We know of people who are certain of their destinies from
childhood on. But nations?
Many things made all these Americans and proto-Americans sure; and
to some extent they were merely guessing and hoping. But one thing
above all made them true prophets. They read the Bible. Winthrop,
Adams, Lincoln, and thousands of others found a good destiny in the
Bible and made it their own. They read about Israel's covenant with
God and took it to heart: They were Israel. ("Wee are entered into
Covenant with him for this worke," said Winthrop. "Wee shall finde
that the God of Israell is among us.") They read about God's chosen
people and took it to heart: They were God's chosen people, or--as
Lincoln put it--God's "almost chosen people." The Bible as they
interpreted it told them what they could be and would be. Unless we
read the Bible, American history is a closed book.
Evidently young Americans don't know much about the Bible (or
anything else, come to think of it; that's another story). But let's
not kid ourselves--this problem will be hard to attack. It's clear
that any public school that teaches about America must teach about
the Bible, from outside. But teaching the Bible from inside (reading
Scripture, not just about Scripture) is trickier. You don't have to
believe in the mythical "wall of separation" between church and
state--which the Bill of Rights never mentions and had no intention
of erecting--to understand that Americans don't want their public
schools teaching Christianity or Judaism.
But can you teach the Bible as mere "literature" without flattening
and misrepresenting it? How will you address the differences (which
go right down to the ground) between Jews and Christians respecting
the Bible? (The question is not so much how to spare Jewish
sensibilities--minorities have rights, but so do majorities; the
question is how to tell the truth.) What kind of parents leave their
children's Bible education to the public schools, anyway? How do we
go beyond public schools in attacking a nationwide problem of Bible
illiteracy?
Tricky questions.
AMERICAN HISTORY STARTS with the emergence of Puritanism in
16th-century Britain. The Bible was central to the founding and
development of Puritanism. It was central to the emergence of modern
Britain in the 16th and 17th centuries--and modern Britain was
important in turn to America and to the whole world.
"Puritan" has been an insult for hundreds of years. (Where are the
revisionists when you need one?) It suggests rigid, austere,
censorious--exactly the kind of religion that secularists love to
hate. The Puritans were rigid and censorious to a point; most
caricatures are partly true. But mainly they were Christians who
hoped to worship God with their whole lives, body and soul; with a
dazzling fervor that still lights up their journals, letters, and
poetry 300 years later. In the early 18th century the young Jonathan
Edwards (eventually one of America's greatest theologians) writes of
being "wrapped and swallowed up in God." "The Puritans wanted that
fullness of life that made David dance before the ark" (thus J.D.
Dow in 1897). America was born in a passionate spiritual explosion.
The explosion was created and fueled by the Bible.
The invention of printing in the mid-15th century, and the
Protestant Reformation in the early 16th--whose central idea was
that Scripture and not human theological doctrine must be decisive
for Christianity--created an English Bible-reading craze. The masses
were hungry for literature, and religion was the hottest topic on
the agenda. Already in Henry VIII's reign (1509-47), the Bible was
"disputed, rhymed, sung and jangled in every alehouse and tavern,"
according to the king himself--who was not happy about it. The Bible
was a radical, subversive book.
English Bible translations date back to medieval times. (In fact
earlier: The first translation, into Anglo-Saxon rather than English
proper, was a word-by-word crib added to the Latin of the circa-700
Lindisfarne Gospel Book--one of history's most sublimely beautiful
manuscripts and greatest artworks.) But translating the Bible into
English was no mere literary act. It was a controversial theological
declaration. Religious reformers saw the English Bible as nothing
less than a direct connection between ordinary Christian believers
and the Lord. Putting the Scripture into English was sacred work;
some were willing to die for it. They were opposed by such Roman
Catholic stalwarts as Sir Thomas More, who expressed a widely held
view when he proclaimed it "pestilential heresy" to think that "we
should believe nothing but plain Scripture."
The English Bible as we know it begins with John Wycliffe's work in
the late 14th century. Wycliffe preached the primacy of the Bible
and founded the Lollards' movement, which in many ways harks forward
to the Protestant Reformation. When he died in 1384, Wycliffe's
English Bible was nearly complete. But his translation was banned in
1408, and the Lollards (who had become revolutionaries of a sort)
were brutally suppressed. Many were burnt alive with Bibles hung
around their necks.
In the early 16th century the next great English translator, William
Tyndale, announced to a learned theologian that "ere many years I
will cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the
scripture than thou dost." Tyndale was inspired by Luther and
dedicated to the task of producing an up-to-date English Bible. The
English church denounced him; he fled to the continent. He was
declared a heretic nonetheless, arrested near Brussels, and executed
in 1536.
Henry VIII banned Tyndale's translation for its alleged Protestant
tendencies, but promised the nation a religiously acceptable English
Bible. Meanwhile he brought Protestantism to England in his own
idiosyncratic way. From Henry's time onward, the English Bible was
an established fact of English life. In his exhaustive analysis
(1941), Charles Butterworth ranks Tyndale's the early version that
contributed most to the King James Bible. The Geneva Bible ranks a
close second. It was published in 1560, two years into the reign of
Queen Elizabeth.
"No greater moral change ever passed over a nation than passed over
England during the years which parted the middle of the reign of
Elizabeth," writes the historian John Richard Green in a famous
passage (1874). "England became the people of a book, and that book
was the Bible." Religious reformers, inspired by continental
Protestants as well as the Bible itself, became dissatisfied with
the Church of England--which was closely associated with the
monarchy. They found it too popish, too fancy-shmancy,
insufficiently "purified"; too removed from the Bible. They wanted a
biblical Christianity.
People called the reformers Puritans. Most were Congregationalist or
Presbyterian but some were Baptist, Quaker, or something else; some
never left the Church of England. (Denominations weren't as sharply
defined as they are today. Nor did they stand for the same
theological positions. Early Quakers, for example, weren't
necessarily pacifist.)
Elizabeth tolerated the Puritans. But things changed when the Virgin
Queen died and the Stuarts came to power. On succeeding Elizabeth,
James I announced that he would make the Puritans "conform
themselves or I will harry them out of the land." He meant it.
Persecuted Puritans set sail in rising numbers for the New World.
THE GENEVA BIBLE became and remained the Puritans' favorite. It had
marginal notes that Puritans liked--but King James and the Church of
England deemed them obnoxious. The notes were anti-monarchy and
pro-republic--"untrue, seditious, and savouring too much of
dangerous and traitorous conceits," the king said. Under his
sponsorship a new Bible was prepared (without interpretive notes) by
47 of the best scholars in the land. The King James version appeared
in 1611--intended merely as a modest improvement over previous
translations. But it happened to be a literary masterpiece of
stupendous proportions. Purely on artistic grounds it ranks with
Homer, Dante, Shakespeare--Western literature's greatest
achievements. In terms of influence and importance, it flattens the
other three.
"The Bible was central to [Britain's] intellectual as well as moral
life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries," writes Christopher
Hill (1993). "The effect of the continual domestic study" of the
Bible, according to the eminent historian G.M. Trevelyan (1926),
"was greater than that of any literary movement in our annals"--in
fact was greater (he adds) than that of any religious movement since
the arrival of Christianity in Britain. "The Bible in English
history," he writes, "may be regarded as a 'Renaissance' of Hebrew
literature far more widespread and more potent than even the
Classical Renaissance."
We aren't discussing a merely "popular" or "influential" book. We
are talking revolution. In 16th and 17th-century Britain, the
English Bible was capable of affecting the first thoughts people had
on waking, their last thoughts before sleeping, their dreams, and
their nightmares. British homes were decorated biblically--with
Bible quotations or pictures painted or papered on the walls or
printed on cloth wall-hangings. British life grew and flourished on
a biblical trellis. Centuries later, Quiller-Couch wrote of the
Bible in Britain that "it is in everything we see, hear, feel,
because it is in us, in our blood."
ARCHBISHOP LAUD, high church and bitterly anti-Puritan, made life
even harder for the Puritans under Charles I, who followed James.
James and Charles had picked a fight that would continue in one form
or another almost till the end of the 17th century--a period that
includes the English Civil War, the execution of Charles I, the
Puritan Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell as "Lord Protector," the
restoration of the Stuart kings, and their final booting-out in the
Glorious Revolution of 1688. When the smoke cleared, Britain was
transformed: Parliament's power had been established forever;
absolute monarchy had been permanently rejected.
Friction between Puritans and the Church of England was a major
cause of the Civil War (1642-51)--which in turn was a major shaping
event of the modern world. Parliament and the Puritans (to strip
things down to essentials) rebelled against King Charles I and the
Church of England. The Bible figured heavily on both sides,
especially among the Puritans. The Puritan army was famous for
chanting psalms. Oliver Cromwell once halted his army during a hot
pursuit so they could all chant psalm 117 together. (He was a fine
general; 117 is a short psalm.) The biblical passage in which Samuel
warns the Israelites of the nightmare dangers of kingship was a
natural Puritan favorite. The idea of a "Covenant with God," the
whole population swearing loyalty to the Lord, was important too.
(But the Bible was crucial across the theological and political
spectrum. "Although the Puritans were great Psalm-singers, they were
not as prominent in the writing of literary Meditations based on the
Psalms as were the moderate Anglicans," for example--thus the critic
and historian Harold Fisch, 1964.)
In 2002, Fania Oz-Salzberger published a major paper documenting the
Hebrew Bible's influence on such seminal British political thinkers
of the period as John Selden, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke. They
all agreed, writes Oz-Salzberger, that "the people of Israel had a
republic, a nearly perfect republic, from the time of the Exodus
until at least the coronation of Saul. . . . And precisely because
of its transcendent origin, it was an exemplary state of law and a
society dedicated to social justice and republican liberty."
John Locke is often described as the most important philosophical
influence on the American revolution. Locke believed in a "social
contract" in which citizens swap some freedom for a civilized life:
Everyone's freedom is curtailed, and everyone benefits. The results
are civil society and the state. Locke relied heavily on the Bible.
For Locke, writes Richard Ashcraft (1987), "the Bible was the
primary source for any endeavor to supply a 'historical' account of
man's existence."
After the 1600s, the Bible declined as a political hot topic in
Britain, but all sorts of evidence attests to the nation's
continuing tendency to see itself as ancient Israel reborn--with an
exalted destiny and special relationship to the Almighty. In 1719,
for example, Isaac Watts published a bestselling translation of the
Psalms--in which references to "Israel" were replaced by the words
"Great Britain." When Georg Friedrich Händel settled in London, he
determined (naturally) to do things British-style. Thus a long
series of oratorios--Esther, Deborah, Judas Maccabeus, Joshua,
Susannah, Jephtha, Israel in Egypt--all presupposing that Britain
was the new Israel.
The Bible's influence on British literature was profound. The work
of John Milton, peerless semi-Puritan poet and political agitator,
would have been inconceivable without the Bible--"that book within
whose sacred context all wisdom is enfolded," he wrote in 1642.
Wordsworth said of Milton's poetry, "However imbued the surface
might be with classical literature, he was a Hebrew in soul; all
things tended in him towards the sublime." (The first-century Greek
who is now called "Pseudo-Longinus"--real name uncertain--got this
ball rolling when he famously associated "sublimity" with the Hebrew
bible, especially the start of Genesis.)
The Bible continued as a vital influence on English literature
through William Blake and the romantics and (of course) even
farther, down to our own day. In the literature of ancient Greece,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge announced, "all natural objects were dead,
mere hollow statues," whereas "in the Hebrew poets each thing has a
life of its own." In the Bible "I have found," he wrote, "words for
my inmost thoughts, songs for my joy, utterances for my hidden
griefs. . . . " In certain of Lord Byron's Hebrew Melodies (poems to
be sung to Hebrew tunes), the poet captures not only the mood but
the subject matter of the biblical Song of Songs--"She walks in
beauty, like the night / Of cloudless climes and starry skies; / And
all that's best of dark and bright / Meet in her aspect and her
eyes. . . . " Examples of the Bible's centrality to English
literature are countless.
MEANWHILE, ANGLICAN SETTLERS founded Jamestown, Virginia, in
1607; Pilgrims arriving on the Mayflower founded Plymouth in 1620.
Boston and Salem, 1630. The goal of the early Puritan settlers,
writes the historian Sidney Ahlstrom, was "a Holy Commonwealth
standing in a national covenant with its Lord." Ahlstrom mentions
also that "an 'Anglicanism' deeply colored by Puritan convictions
would shape the early religious life of Virginia"; so it seems fair
to describe the first stages of the invention of America as a
basically Puritan affair. The early settlers founded a series of
colleges to provide them with pastors and theologians, starting with
Harvard in 1636. By 1700, a quarter of a million ex-Europeans and
their descendants lived in the future United States.
America's earliest settlers came in search of religious freedom, to
escape religious persecution--vitally important facts that Americans
tend increasingly to forget. A new arrival who joined the Pilgrims
at Plymouth in 1623 "blessed God for the opportunity of freedom and
liberty to enjoy the ordinances of God in purity among His people."
America was a haven for devoutly religious dissidents. It is a
perfect reflection of the nation's origins that the very first
freedom in the Bill of Rights--Article one, part one--should be
religious freedom. "Separation of church and state" was a means to
an end, not an end in itself. The idea that the Bill of Rights would
one day be traduced into a broom to sweep religion out of the public
square like so much dried mud off the boots of careless children
would have left the Founders of this nation (my guess is) trembling
in rage. We owe it to them in simple gratitude to see that the Bill
of Rights is not--is never--used as a weapon against religion.
You cannot understand the literature and experience of 17th-century
American Puritans unless you know the Bible. The Pilgrim father
William Bradford reports in his famous journal, for example, that
his people had no choice but to camp near their landing-place on the
Massachusetts mainland. There was no reason to think they could do
better elsewhere; after all they could not, "as it were, go up to
the top of Pisgah to view from this wilderness a more goodly
country."
Bradford saw no need to explain that he was referring to Moses
gazing at the Promised Land from atop Mount Pisgah before his death
(Deuteronomy 34:1). To 17th-century readers, the reference would
have been obvious--and so too the implied message: These Pilgrims
are like biblical Israelites. They are a chosen people who made a
dangerous crossing from the house of (British) bondage to a Promised
Land of freedom. Other Puritan settlers expressed themselves in
similar terms. There is a fascinating resemblance between these
Puritan writings and the Hebrew literary form called "melitzah," in
which the author makes his point by stringing together Biblical and
rabbinic passages. The Puritans' world, like traditional Jewish
society, was permeated and obsessed with the Bible.
Bradford's comparison between Puritans and ancient Israel is central
to the American revolution and the emergence of the new nation.
Americans saw themselves as Israelites throwing off a tyrant's yoke.
Most historians look to the British and Continental philosophers of
the Enlightenment, Locke especially, as the major intellectual
influence on America's Founding Fathers and revolutionary
generation. To rely on Locke is to rely (indirectly) on the Bible.
Yet the Bible itself, straight up, was the most important
revolutionary text of all. Consider the seal of the United States
designed by a committee of the Continental Congress consisting of
John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. (They don't
make congressional committees like they used to!) Their proposed
seal shows Israel crossing the Red Sea, with the motto "Rebellion to
kings is obedience to God." The pastor Abiel Abbot proclaimed in
1799, "It has been often remarked that the people of the United
States come nearer to a parallel with Ancient Israel, than any other
nation upon the globe. Hence Our American Israel is a term
frequently used; and our common consent allows it apt and proper."
That Britain and America should both have been inclined to see
themselves as chosen peoples made a subterranean connection between
them that has sometimes--one suspects--been plainer to their enemies
than their friends. Down to the war in Iraq, enemies of America and
Britain have suspected an Anglo-Saxon conspiracy to rule the world.
In part this is paranoia; but it might also have something to do
with Britain's and America's Bible-centered cultural histories. The
two nations speak of a "special relationship" with each
other--besides which, each has a history of believing in its own
"special relationship" with the Lord Himself.
THE BIBLE CONTINUED TO SHAPE AMERICAN HISTORY. Some Americans saw
the great push westward as fulfilling the Lord's plan for the United
States, modeled on Israel's settlement of the holy land. Meanwhile,
many have noticed that the history of modern Israel resembles
earlier American experience. Harassed Europeans arrive in a sparsely
settled land in search of freedom. They build the place up and make
it bloom. They struggle with the indigenous inhabitants, some of
whom are friendly and some not. At first they collaborate with the
British colonial authorities; each group winds up in a push for
independence and a deadly fight with Britain.
But long before Israel resembled America, America resembled Israel.
It's true that Manifest Destiny--the idea that America was
predestined to push westwards towards the Pacific--was less a
Bible-based than a "natural rights" approach to America's place in
God's plans. You didn't have to consult the Bible to learn about
America's Manifest Destiny; it was just obvious. But America was
called back to her biblical faith by no less a man than Abraham
Lincoln himself.
As the Civil War approached, both North and South saw their
positions in biblical terms. Southern preachers sometimes accused
abolitionists of being atheists in disguise. Lincoln rose above this
kind of dispute. "In the present civil war it is quite possible," he
wrote in 1862, "that God's purpose is something different from the
purpose of either party."
Lincoln was America's most "biblical" president--"no president has
ever had the detailed knowledge of the Bible that Lincoln had,"
writes the historian William Wolf. Lincoln turned to the Bible more
and more frequently and fervently as the war progressed. His
heterodox but profound Christianity showed him how to understand the
war as a fight to redeem America's promise to mankind. Lincoln never
joined a church, but said often that he would join one if "the
Saviour's summary of the Gospel" were its only creed. He meant the
passage in Mark and Luke where Jesus restates God's requirements in
terms of two edicts from the Hebrew Bible: to love God with all your
heart and mind and soul and strength, and love your neighbor as
yourself. Lincoln's religion was deeply biblical--and
characteristically American.
In modern times the Bible was no less important as a shaper and
molder of American destiny. Woodrow Wilson, another intensely
biblical president, spoke in biblical terms when he took America
into the First World War--on behalf of freedom and democracy for all
mankind. Harry Truman's Bible-centered Christianity was important to
his decisions to lead America into the Cold War, and make America
the first nation to recognize the newborn state of Israel--to the
vast disgust of the perpetually benighted State Department. Reagan's
presidency revolved around Winthrop's Gospel-inspired image of the
sacred city on a hill. George W. Bush's worldwide war on tyranny is
the quintessence of a biblical project--one that sees America as an
almost chosen people, with the heavy responsibilities that go with
the job.
There is no agreement whether God created the world, but the Bible's
awe-striking creative powers are undeniable. There is no agreement
whether God "is not a man that He should lie" (Numbers 23:19), but
the Hebrew Bible's uncanny honesty respecting Israel and its many
sins is plain. The faithful ask, in the words of the 139th psalm,
"Whither shall I go from Thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from
Thy presence?" And answer, "If I take the wings of the morning, and
dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall Thy hand
lead me, and Thy right hand shall hold me." Secularists don't see it
that way; but the Bible's penetration into the farthest corners of
the known world is simple fact. Most contemporary philosophers and
culture critics are barely aware of these things, don't see the
pattern behind them, can't tell us what the pattern means, and (for
the most part) don't care.
--------------o--------------
THE BIBLE LITERACY REPORT: What Do American Teens Need to
Know and What Do They Know? was commissioned by a nonprofit
organization called the Bible Literacy Project; it was published
April 26. Students in the Gallup-conducted survey were mostly in 7th
through 9th grades; they were enrolled at 30 public and 4 private
schools (one Catholic, one Protestant, and 2 non-sectarian).
Forty-one teachers took part--"a diverse sample of high school
English teachers in 10 states." All are reputedly "among the best
teachers in their subject."
These teachers are convinced that students ought to know the Bible
and don't. Forty of forty-one agreed that "Bible knowledge confers a
distinct educational advantage." But the majority estimated that
fewer than a quarter of their current students are "Bible literate."
Contrary to what a person might guess, the teachers don't
necessarily believe that Bible literacy has declined in recent
decades. They describe a complex picture; naturally, individuals
differ. (One teacher said that "Pentecostal kids or religious Muslim
kids" seem better-informed than the others.)
The teachers are strikingly confused about the legal status of
Bible-teaching in public schools. The ACLU and kindred organizations
are winning the fight to suppress religion in public--to ban it from
the public square as religion has traditionally been banned under
regimes that tolerate it only marginally; to force it indoors and
under wraps, as minority religions have traditionally been treated
by powerful majorities that threaten violence. The ACLU and friends
are winning by court order and--more important--by confusion and
intimidation. "It was not uncommon," says the report, "for educators
to hold erroneous beliefs about the legality of using the Bible and
Bible literature in public-school classrooms."
Another of the report's sobering aspects has to do with the Bible
topics deemed by teachers to be important. Mostly these are people
and stories, not ideas. The report lists 72 biblical "items" that
the teachers consider essential. The list starts: "Ten Commandments,
Cain and Abel, Christ, Genesis, Jesus, Adam and Eve, Bible, Moses,
David and Goliath"--and so on. Not what you would call challenging
stuff. From the special viewpoint of American history, it seems to
me you would rate four biblical "items" essential: Exodus, Covenant,
and the related ideas of Promised Land and Chosen People. Two of
these appear on the teachers' list; Covenant and Chosen People don't
make the cut. This is no criticism of the teachers or the report,
merely a sad reflection of the collapse of our educational standards
across the board. It used to be that young children learned Bible
stories and Bible basics. They didn't need high school teachers to
bring them up to speed on the Ten Commandments.
Now let's consider the actual results. What do high school
students know?
The good news: If you ask questions that are so simple the average
arthropod would find them patronizing, and cast them in multiple
choice format to make things even easier . . . American high school
students do okay. Almost three-quarters (72 percent) of students in
the survey could answer correctly that Moses "led the Israelites out
of bondage." Ninety percent could tell you that Adam and Eve were
the first man and woman in Genesis. Sixty-nine percent figured out
that "the Good Samaritan" was "someone who helps others." Break out
the champagne!
On second thought . . . "Significant minorities of American students
have not yet achieved even this rudimentary level of Bible
knowledge." "Eight percent of American teens," for example, "believe
that Moses is one of the twelve Apostles."
Go beyond rudimentary and you find that "very few American students"
have the level of Bible knowledge that high-school English teachers
regard as "basic to a good education." "Almost two-thirds of teens"
couldn't pick the right answer out of four choices when they were
asked to identify "a quotation from the Sermon on the Mount"
("Blessed are the poor in spirit"). Two-thirds didn't know that "the
Road to Damascus is where St. Paul was blinded by a vision of
Christ." Fewer than a third "could correctly identify which
statement about David was not true (David tried to kill King Saul)."
And so on.
WHAT TO DO? Every school that teaches American history must teach
the Bible's central role. Easily said; but experience suggests that
many of today's classes in English and U.S. history are stuck
somewhere between useless and harmful. High school history and
English curricula ought to be rebuilt from scratch right now, on an
emergency basis. Those rebuilt curricula should (of course) teach
students about the centrality of the Bible.
But students need to read the Bible, not just about the Bible. High
school Bible-as-literature electives are rare and controversial. Not
long ago Frankenmuth, Michigan, became (briefly) famous when its
school board refused to allow such an elective.
There are good reasons to be wary of such courses. There is nothing
wrong with them on constitutional grounds, and the Bible Literacy
Project has reasonable, serious curricula of its own on offer. But
these courses have to keep well clear of teaching the Bible as a
sacred text, or promoting religious views of any kind. And it
happens that nearly all of the smartest, deepest readers of the
Bible through the ages have approached it from a religious
direction. No doubt their views can be worked in somehow, but in how
natural a way? And won't they be a lot easier just to skip?
And those in favor of such courses should be aware of their bleak
history--specifically, the bleak history of Bible teaching that
refuses to treat the Bible as sacred scripture. The German "higher
critics," starting with Julius Wellhausen in the late 19th century,
picked the Bible to pieces like vultures addressing a dead cow. They
were always ready to invent a new "source," never quite able to see
the point--to understand Scripture as loving readers do. Being in
love with a book doesn't guarantee that you will succeed as a
critic. But not being in love guarantees that you will fail. (One
reason "deconstructionism" is the least successful critical approach
in modern history.)
When I was a graduate student in Bible studies during the long-ago
late 1970s, this particular fight was raging. (Fights are nearly
always raging in Bible studies.) Scholars such as Brevard Childs of
Yale were struggling to wrest the Bible from the palsied grip (which
looked a lot like a choke-hold) of higher critics who could tell you
nearly everything about the Bible, in academic German as charming
and graceful as Blutwurst, except what the words actually meant. The
new "canonical critics" (such as Childs himself) were struggling to
put the Bible back into the religious context out of which it had
been untimely ripped by profoundly irritating Germans.
So let's have Bible-as-literature electives in every public high
school, by all means. But let's also face facts: These are hard
courses to teach at best. Do we have teachers who are up to the job?
(With laudable foresight, the Bible Literacy Project is already
developing workshops for teachers.) And let's also keep in mind
that, for most children, such courses can only be half-way houses.
Children studying the Bible should learn their own religious
traditions as precious truth, not as one alternative on a
multicultural list.
Teaching precious religious truth is not what America's public
schools are for. Ultimately there is only one solution to our Bible
literacy crisis. Our churches, our synagogues, and all other
institutions that revere the Bible must do better. How well are they
doing? To judge by the new report, lousy. (Of course some are doing
a lot better than others.)
It's impossible to find one global solution to the problem of Bible
teaching in America. But it's easy to find one global hope. America
is fertile ground for Great Awakenings--mass movements in which
large chunks of the population return to their religious roots. We
haven't had one for awhile; we are overdue. Great Awakenings are
big, dramatic events that take off like rockets and burn out like
rockets, after brief but spectacular careers. Even so, many people
find in the aftermath that their life-trajectories have been changed
forever.
The next Great Awakening will presumably be centered in the
Protestant community--but will deal in friendship with America's
other religious communities. To have a Great Awakening, you need a
great talker. (To change people's ideas about religion and the Bible
and God, you have to look them in the eye and speak to them from the
heart.)
My guess is that our next Great Awakening will begin among college
students. College students today are (spiritually speaking) the
driest timber I have ever come across. Mostly they know little or
nothing about religion; little or nothing about Americanism. Mostly
no one ever speaks to them about truth and beauty, or nobility or
honor or greatness. They are empty--spiritually bone dry--because no
one has ever bothered to give them anything spiritual that is worth
having. Platitudes about diversity and tolerance and
multiculturalism are thin gruel for intellectually growing young
people.
Let the right person speak to them, and they will turn back to the
Bible with an excitement and exhilaration that will shake the
country. In reading the Bible they will feel as if they are going
home--which is just what they will be doing. Nothing would do
America more good than a biblical homecoming.
What has the Bible been to this country? In 1630, John Winthrop
repeated Moses' instructions: "Lett us choose life." How to do it?
By reading and obeying the Bible, above all "the Counsell of
Micah"--"to doe Justly, to love mercy, to walke humbly with our
God." Americans (by and large) have done their best to follow
Winthrop's instructions. If they haven't always succeeded--if
America has managed at times to be a profoundly sinful nation (which
is no less than the Bible expects of all nations)--they have also
tried hard to be good. They have tried hard to choose life. And the
Bible has been as good as its own word (Proverbs 3:18)--"It is a
Tree of Life to them that lay hold of it."
David Gelernter is a senior fellow in Jewish Thought at the Shalem
Center, Jerusalem, and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
© Copyright 2005, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights
Reserved.
A report just issued by the Bible Literacy Project suggests that
young Americans know very little about the Bible. The report is
important, but first things first: A fair number of Americans don't see
why teenagers should know anything at all about the Bible.