The recent decision by the Texas Board of Education to allow public schools to teach students elective courses studying the broader implications of the Bible has been criticized as being insufficiently specific to meet constitutional standards under the First Amendment. Though is is true that the board simply deferred curriculum and thus matters of legality to the school districts, this line of criticism still gives the board's decision too much quarter. No matter how defined or how specific, it remains almost certainly unconstitutional, and completely unconscionable, to allow the public school system to teach a curriculum so inherently sectarian.
As it stands legally, the idea of a Bible course is constitutional because no curriculum currently exists to be deemed unconstitutional. Once in the flesh, however, it seems impossible for any curriculum focusing on the study of the Bible to be constitutional even by the nebulous standards issued by the Board of Education. The First Amendment seems vague on the issue because the course doesn't claim to support any kind of religious proselytizing and is not mandatory. Fortunately, we have a body of common law based on the First Amendment, which contravenes the legality of religiously influenced teaching even given these concessions.
The Supreme Court's 1971 case Lemon v. Kurtzman ruled that it was illegal for the State of Pennsylvania to reimburse private schools for salaries and other materials because a large number of the state's private schools were parochial Catholic schools. Though the ruling itself may have implications to Texas' School Board decision, Lemon v. Kurtzman established the "Lemon test" for religious legislation. Any legislation must pass the following three components to be legal: a state must have a secular legislative purpose, must not have the primary effect of either advancing or inhibiting religion and must not result in an "excessive government entanglement" with religion. To say that any of the three requirements cause at least a degree of complication for Texas' new policy would be anything but superfluous.
There are a number of other major court decisions, which, should they fail to prove the unconstitutionality of the Bible curriculum, should at least make Texans uneasy about this legal gray area. Yet the Board of Education has chosen to charge boldly into the mist. According to the Dallas Morning News, when questioned about the potential legal concerns of the board's decision, board member Cynthia Dunbar informed us that "It's better for us to go ahead and do something now. We have met the requirements of the legislation. We don't want to stifle what [school districts] are doing in classrooms." What this betrays without subtlety is that the board and other advocates of Bible study really aren't concerned with the social and legal implications of religious education in schools. To them, students need to be taught about the Good Book, and whatever that entails is acceptable.
It is significant that this is not a course in "The History of Religion in the Western Tradition" or even the "Philosophy of Religion"; this a class about the Bible. The entire exercise is disingenuous. Any course that really wanted to give students an objective understanding of religion in Western civilization would not only consult the Bible, but also a greater body of theological work presumably absent from this course's curriculum. It should also be noted that though most of Western religious tradition accepts certain parts of the Bible to various degrees, it has particular significance for Protestants, who view it as the sole inspiration for faith, divorced from any kind of church or other established orthodoxy. I cannot escape the conclusion that the entire course is authored, supported, and will be taught by people with such a tacit acceptance of a particular Christian God as to make objectivity not only impossible but incomprehensible. It is dumbfounding to see the government indulge one faith, but it is insulting to watch it prefer one over the others.
I am personally angered that what little I pay in taxes may go to fund something I feel is just superstitious nonsense. In his 1779 Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson wrote "that to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical." Rather than try to blur the line between church and state, even when it may be legally permissible to do so, America should be proud of its secular history and leave religion in its churches and its homes.
Antel is a philosophy senior.
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