“Bible bill” sponsored by Democrats
Democrats in 2 Southern States Push Bills on Bible Study - New York Times
A couple of Democrats are endorsing a Bible class in public schools—but only if it’s based on a specific textbook about the Bible (”The Bible and Its Influence”) and not the Bible itself (or, for that matter, any other textbook, apparently).
This has stirred up some ill-will among Republicans who have been pushing for Bible classes for years (which the same Democrats have opposed). They are accusing the Democrats of using religion as a political tool in this election year. And the Democrats really aren’t denying that assertion:
The Democrats who introduced the bills said they hoped to compete with Republicans for conservative Christian voters. “Rather than sitting back on our heels and then being knocked in our face, we are going to respond in a thoughtful way,” said Kasim Reed, a Georgia state senator from Atlanta and one of the sponsors of the bill. “We are not going to give away the South anymore because we are unwilling to talk about our faith.”
Not all liberals are happy either.
Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, argued that “The Bible and Its Influence” was “problematic” because it omitted “the bad and the ugly uses of the Bible,” like the invocation of Scripture to justify racial segregation.
Both points of view here are valid. The Democrats are obviously pandering, though I have no reason to believe that they are being dishonest. And since this textbook purports to show the “influence” of the Bible, it ought to show how it is mis-used as well.
I would imagine some very interesting discussions could come out of a class of this nature—though I don’t think I’d refer to it as a Bible class. As I understand it from this article, it would be about the effect the Bible has had on history, not the message of the Bible itself.
For my money, the best quote was at the end of the article:
For his part, Mr. Stetson, founder of the group that produced the textbook, said a political fight was not what he wanted. “We are the first English-speaking generation to have lost the biblical story,” he said, lamenting that studying the Bible had become “a political football.”
Though I’m not sure his textbook is the answer, I think he nailed the problem.
Tags: politics, religion
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