Oklahoma’s state superintendent Ryan Walters on Thursday ordered all public schools to teach the Bible. It is the latest public display of intention from a movement that seeks the imposition of its interpretation of “Christian values” on the country.
From where I sit, the Bible is being used as a prop in an ambitious quest for political power. And where do children of non-Christians fit into his vision of education: children raised by Muslims, atheists, Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, or those with traditional Indigenous beliefs? Or for that matter, children of Christians with very different perspectives of the Bible than Walters?
One can’t help but suspect he hopes to inculcate his version of Christianity into all of Oklahoma’s children, regardless of what their parents may want.
The older I’ve gotten, the more I love reading the Bible. I’ve found its richness and complexity alluring. Within its pages is every conceivable human behavior — the yearning for beauty and goodness as well as a tendency for brutality and atrocity. One can find supreme acts of self sacrifice — no one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends — juxtaposed with the need to dominate and coerce, to the point of violence and death, if need be.
The Bible ponders what we see in the world – people who live a good life die young, murderous miscreants die old in their sleep. Innocents are slaughtered, children are abused and the poor and vulnerable nearly always pay the price when the powerful follow their ambitions.
Perhaps the richness I find emanates from my recognition that the Bible reflects a perennial human desire to make sense of a bewildering world.
As I’ve said in past columns, no one who takes the Bible and its messiness seriously says it offers easy answers.
Will Oklahoma teach the Bible as the messy, wonderful, difficult and frustrating book that it is, or as a simple rule book, with a list of do’s and don’ts, boring and antiseptic?
My hunch is the latter. I’m skeptical that Oklahoma’s curriculum surrounding the Bible, whenever it comes out, will teach the terribleness of Christendom as well as its highpoints. Christendom, to be clear, is different from Christianity, or from faithful living.
At the heart of the movement spurring Mr. Walters’ action is the belief that the world was a better place when Christendom ruled supreme. The nostalgia for Christendom is a yearning for a time when so-called Christian rulers or “Christian values” permeated all of life wherever Christianity had taken root — a vastly different situation from how Christianity started out in the early centuries, when followers of Jesus were persecuted, fed to the lions and lit on fire to become ancient human streetlights in Rome. That all changed in the 300s with the Roman emperor Constantine who elevated the status of Christianity. For the next 1,500 years Christianity mostly reigned supreme in Europe.
Mr. Walters wants a return to that time, when Christian leaders held the seats of power. How else to interpret this new rule that melds Christianity with our public school system?
The New York Times quoted Mr. Walters as saying the Bible is “a necessary historical document to teach our kids about the history of this country, to have a complete understanding of Western civilization, to have an understanding of the basis of our legal system.”
After observing the movement that Mr. Walters is a part of for more than three decades — I grew up as a Southern Baptist in Georgia in the 1970s surrounded by white Evangelicals and fundamentalists —my hunch is its interpretation of the nation’s history will gloss over Christendom’s role in conquest, subjugation of women, spreading slavery, genocide and white supremacy while lifting up its more inspiring moments.
What came to mind when I heard the news was a passage from the first book in the New Testament — Matthew — where Jesus goes into the wilderness to fast for 40 days after being baptized by his cousin, John, in the river Jordan.
There, Satan, or the devil if you prefer, tempts Jesus to use his divine power to sate his hunger by transforming stones into bread. After Jesus resists, Satan tempts Jesus to throw himself off a cliff so that angels can catch him as God’s beloved. Again, Jesus resists. Finally, the devil takes Jesus to a very high mountain and shows him all the kingdoms of the world and says I will give them all to you if you worship me.
“Away with you, Satan!,” Jesus says. “For it is written to ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’ ”
I wonder if Mr. Walters thinks about this passage much and, if he does, how he reconciles his public persona as a follower of Jesus with using his power to coerce others into believing the way he does.