Yesterday, I wrote about the effort to resist the plan to push Christianity on public school students through Bible Education classes. In particular, I cited concerns about the lack of academic rigor of the Bible Literacy Project. In response, a reader asked: Isn’t it the National Council on Bible Curriculum that’s the nasty right wing Bible Education program?
The easy answer is that, yes, the National Council on Bible Curriculum does support a program of Bible Education in public schools that is based on very sloppy academic foundations. The fact that the National Council on Bible Curriculum has been exposed as an academically shoddy operation, however, does not in any way suggest that the Bible Literacy Project has sound academic operations. It is quite possible for both Bible Education programs to be the result of academically invalid work.
In fact, that’s just the case. I’ll be coming out with a more complete accounting of the Bible Literacy Project’s flaws tonight, but here’s a teaser for now. The Society of Biblical Literature, by no means an anti-Christian organization, describes the academic merit of the Bible Literacy Project’s textbook as follows:
“This textbook does not engage in what most SBL members would consider academic study of the Bible. There is no real critical analysis concerning such matters as authorship, date, and historicity of biblical books. The treatment of the biblical material is essentially a superficial summary of content. Statements in the text are, for the most part, accepted at face value without the recognition that such acceptance is in itself an interpretation.”
The Society of Biblical Literature also writes, “the main question raised by this textbook is why biblical scholarship as an academic discipline is so blatantly ignored in a work that professes to provide an academic approach to the Bible.”
The Society of Biblical Literature has the mission statement of promoting study of the Bible, so it’s worthy of remark that they would find the Bible Literacy Program lacking in academic worth. From the perspective of Christians who are dedicated to encouraging scholarly examination of the Bible, the Bible Literacy Program’s work is regarded as a poor introduction.
So, even if you think it’s a good idea to have public school students instructed in the holy book of one religion to the exclusion of the holy books of all other religions, it doesn’t make sense for you to support the Bible Literacy Project.
