The Bible Literacy Project is Thinly Veiled Proselytizing

In my particular corner of the Bible Belt there are billboards that have sprung up like weeds claiming “An educated person knows the Bible” and directing drivers to the Bible Literacy Project.  I never understood why projects like this always seem to spring up in the Bible Belt where they’re already preaching to the converted.  It seems like their time would be better spent hawking their religious values in the Godless areas closer to either coast, but they’re showing up in my neck of the woods so I’m going to complain about them here today.

First off, their slogan is annoying and wrong.  An educated person knows the Bible?  Perhaps that’s the case.  I know a few educated people who have read the Bible, myself included, and in each case reading the Bible was what led them to decide that Christianity was just another pack of nonsensical myths the same as any other pantheon that has fallen out of favor over the millennia.  I also know plenty of educated people who haven’t read the Bible, and I would say that they’re better people for not having that pack of lies forced on them as universal truths in their formative years.  I would argue that in some fields, basically any of the sciences and math (God was notoriously bad at math, I read it in the Bible!), an educated person is better off not being acquainted with the Bible lest they have a minor crisis of faith when they realize that the universe and the Bible just don’t match up.

But none of that matters, because the Bible Literacy Project is nothing more than yet another thinly-veiled attempt by Christians to get their religious teachings incorporated into the schools by dressing them up with a facade of secularism.  The “project” is really nothing more than a retread of the whole Intelligent Design fiasco, only this time they’re coming at the problem from a liberal arts perspective rather than a science perspective.

The basic idea is that knowledge of the Bible is a necessity for students studying literature and history due to the influence that the holy book has had on society over the past few thousand years.  Their website is full of attempts to get educators to adopt their program in a class, using clever lines like “You wouldn’t teach Shakespeare without reading his plays” to justify forcing students to read the Bible in an educational setting.  In fact, their website is  so loaded down with secular-sounding justifications and rationalizations for forcing kids to read the Bible in school that I’m reminded of one of my favorite Shakespeare quotes: “The lady doth protest too much.”

Now you might think that they do actually have some justification for teaching the Bible.  It’s actually a little scary how justified their argument can become when it’s switched from the science classroom to the English classroom.  The evidence clearly points to God having absolutely no influence whatsoever in the scientific realm, but he’s been quite busy in literature where fictional characters thrive.  But we’re in luck, because they shoot themselves in the foot and reveal their true intentions in plain sight on their Frequently Asked Questions page:

Of course, the Bible is not merely literature—for a number of religious traditions it is sacred text. Our curriculum and online teacher training prepare teachers to address the relevant, major religious readings of the text in an academic and objective manner.

Emphasis mine.  If this was a secular project to examine the Bible and teach its influence to young people so that they’d have a better understanding of Western literary tradition then yes, the Bible is merely literature.  No matter what you might personally believe about everything written between Genesis and Revelation, the instant you step into an English classroom the Bible is just literature.  It’s another set of myths that literary greats have drawn on for inspiration over the years.  It most definitely is not a holy text, which is how the Bible Literacy Project is treating it.  Like I said before, this is nothing more than another thinly-veiled attempt to get Christian theology shoehorned back into the curriculum by shoving it in a nice secular-sounding trojan horse.

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