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Sunday Pages: The Bible as Required Reading in the Lone Star State
The Texas Board of Education decided to make Bible passages part of the state's English literature curriculum. The subsequent outrage was misplaced. This shouldn't be controversial.
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Dear Reader,
In January of 1991, Sting released The Soul Cages, his third (and best) studio album, inspired by the death of his father. The first single, “All This Time,” a song about his father’s funeral—and, more broadly, how we cope with death—features the line “Better to be poor than be a fat man in the eye of a needle.”
I was a senior in high school in 1991. I remember talking about the song that spring with my honors-class “frenemy,” whom we’ll call Dennis. He was going on about how dumb the lyrics were, because “fat man in the eye of a needle” struck him as silly and meaningless.
“It’s from the Bible,” I told him, explaining the meaning of the allusion, and that it was a camel, not a fat man, that could not pass through the eye of a needle; Sting was actually making fun of the passage from Matthew, mocking religion. Dennis was a smart guy, but because his parents hadn’t dragged him to Church every Sunday, this was all news to him.
A week later, there was a question about the “eye of the needle” passage on the AP English exam we both took.
“You owe me one,” I told him after.
Let’s begin with a poetical meditation on love:
If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, then I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy, and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge—if I have a faith that can move mountains—but do not have love, then I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to such hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, then I gain nothing.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears.
When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now, we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.
Beautiful sentiment, right? I particularly like when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. It hits different, as the kids say.
The passage is from Paul the Apostle’s First Epistle to the Corinthians. And, after the Texas State Board of Education voted 9-5-1 to approve its new English literature curriculum, it will soon be—shiver me timbers!—required reading for every senior at every public high school in the Lone Star State.
There are, for sure, plenty of reasons not to like the BOE decision. Is the Board trying to foist Christianity upon unsuspecting students in Texas? That may well be an ulterior motive. Is this a power grab, a brazen attempt to weld Church and State together? This being Texas, probably yes. Is it fair to mandate passages from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, but not the Quran, or other religious texts? I’ll let Annie Laurie Gaylor, president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, take that question: “Texas is telling millions of children that one religion deserves the government’s seal of approval, while everyone else is an afterthought,” she told the Houston Chronicle. “That’s government-sponsored religious favoritism—and the First Amendment strictly forbids it.”
Those are all valid arguments. But they are arguments about politics, not about education—and certainly not about literature.
Ay, there’s the rub: while critics of the BOE’s decision are correct that certain titles in the new curriculum have no place in an English lit class—more on that shortly—the Bible passages are not what needs to go. On the contrary, the Bible passages are essential reading.
In From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present, the historian Jacques Barzun—who was 93 when this magnus opus was published—argues that a distinct half-millennium-long cultural era had its genesis in the Protestant Reformation—and, specifically, in Martin Luther’s discovery and promotion of the Bible, and its subsequent mass production.
Incredible as it may seem today, when seemingly every hotel nightstand drawer in Christendom contains a copy of the “Good Book,” until the early 16th century the Bible was read almost exclusively by holy men—cloistered monks, parish priests, and the like. Churchgoers were familiar with sections of the Bible, from hearing about them at Mass. But the unabridged text? That was hard to get one’s hands on. It didn’t help that the literacy rate in Europe in 1517 was even lower than Donald Trump’s current approval rating.
After Luther’s 95 Theses, and with a big assist from Gutenberg, that all changed. Bible study was encouraged—and enabled Luther and his followers to challenge the Papal status quo: to protest. Families acquired Bibles that were passed down through the generations. This had an enormous impact on what we now call “Western” culture. Barzun writes:
To start with, it gave whole populations a common background of knowledge, a common culture in the high sense of the term. A 19C incident makes the point vivid: when Coleridge was lecturing in London on the great English writers, he happened to mention Dr. Johnson’s finding on his way home one night a woman of the streets ill or drunk in a gutter. Johnson carried her on his broad back to his own poor lodging for food and shelter. Coleridge’s fashionable audience tittered and murmured, the men sneering, the women shocked. Coleridge paused and said: “I remind you of the parable of the good Samaritan” and all were hushed. No amount of moralizing could’ve done the work of rebuke and edification with such speed and finality.
The Bible was a whole literature, a library. It was an anthology of poetry and short stories. It taught history, biography, biology, geography, philosophy, political, science, psychology, hygiene, and sociology (statistical at that), in addition to cosmogony, ethics, and theology. What gives the Bible so strong a hold on the minds that once grow familiar with its content is its dramatic reporting of human affairs. For all its piety, it presents a worldly panorama, and with particular so varied that it is hard to think of a domestic or social situation without a biblical example to match and turn to moral ends.
As Barzun correctly points out, the Bible is, first and foremost, a work of literature. Actually, it’s thousands of often contradictory works of literature, some better than others, all mashed up. But it’s literature just the same. And whether we like it or not, whether we are believers or not—and, for the record, I don’t like it and I’m not a believer—the Bible is, for the reasons he describes, the foundational text of all “Western” letters. Thus, studying English lit without reading the Bible is like building an apartment building without a foundation. The structure will collapse without it.
As I see it, literature—real literature, enduring literature, literature that influences later works—is a conversation authors have with each other, over the course of many centuries. It’s similar to a long series of inside jokes. As Dennis learned while taking the AP English exam, to not be at least familiar with the Bible is to miss all the allusions, all the references, all the context of two thousand years of Western literary endeavor. If the purpose of an English literature curriculum is to, you know, have students learn about English literature, then some knowledge of the Bible is compulsory.
And that is the context in which the Texas BOE is issuing its edict. The students are not being required to take classes in Religion, or being force-fed Christian dogma. It’s not even “Bible study,” like at Church. Students are reading short Biblical passages for English class. In English class, what you’re supposed to do is read texts and then discuss them. It isn’t about right and wrong, per se; it’s about nuance and interpretation and, above all, the development of critical thinking: a grave deficiency in the United States of Donald Trump—and the Texas of Greg Abbott particularly, as evidenced by the state continuing to choose such a cruel, performative, spiteful monster as its governor.
Take the passage from 1 Corinthians. That’s an ideal text to generate lively class discussion: It’s short, so everyone will have read it and thus can participate. It’s relatively straightforward, but just cryptic enough to allow for different interpretations. A teacher might ask: What does St. Paul mean by “when completeness comes, what is in part disappears?” What is he trying to convey with the metaphor of childhood and adulthood? Can life have meaning without love? What kind of love? Does love trump faith and hope? In the right hands, those five questions are enough to sustain a 45-minute English class, without the topic of Christianity even coming up.
Because indoctrination involves closing rather than opening minds, English classes are not an effective medium for proselytization. I had a Shakespeare professor in college who taught the plays with a religious zeal, as if the Bard came down from the mountaintop with Macbeth and Romeo & Juliet etched into stone tablets. It didn’t work. His zealotry only bred resistance in me, as zealotry should.
Speaking of Shakespeare: seniors in Texas high school English classes will also have to read Hamlet, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and [checks notes, drops jaw] “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” That poem contains these lines:
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet
Readers unfamiliar with the Bible story of Salome and John the Baptist will have no idea what Eliot is talking about there (just as they will have missed my allusion to Moses receiving the Ten Commandments from Jehovah, in the last paragraph). Heads on platters? Prophet? Huh?
T.S. Eliot was hardly some Christian evangelist, nor was he exclusive to that faith; as anyone who’s attempted to analyze “The Waste Land” well knows, he incorporated all kinds of ancient texts, spiritual and otherwise, into his allusive and esoteric work.
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The poem ends like this:
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
That final Sanskrit word, repeated thrice, is, as Eliot explains in his notes, the formal end to an Upanishad: like saying “Amen” three times—or, in New York City this summer, “Knicks in five.” He translates it as “the Peace which passeth understanding.”
Do we cast out “The Waste Land” because it alludes to the Upanishads? Of course not. Eliot’s poem is no better at converting readers to Hinduism than St. Paul’s epistle is at bringing them to Jesus.
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The required reading list does, I concede, get more Bible-y.
In English III junior year, Texas high school students will read Chapters 2 and 3 of the Book of Genesis, subtitled in the online version “The Origin of Human Beings” and “The Origin of Evil”—the whole Adam and Eve saga.
Variations of the Garden of Eden myth are found throughout Western literature. To name only the most obvious example, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, one of the finest works in the English language, cannot be understood without familiarity with Genesis 2 and 3.
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We all know the story, but here, for sake of argument, are the actual excerpts:
The Lord God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden so that he might work it and care for it. The Lord God told the man, “You can eat of any of the trees in the garden, but you must never eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If you were to eat from it, you would surely die.”
And the Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I wish to make another creature who will be like him.”
The Lord God therefore formed every sort of wild animal and all the birds of the air, and he brought them before the man to see what he would name them. Whatever the man called each living creature, that was the name that it would bear. The man gave names to every type of animal, all the birds of the air and all the wild animals, but the man could not find anything that was like him.
The Lord God therefore caused the man to fall into a deep sleep. He took one of his ribs and replaced it with flesh. The Lord God then formed a woman out of the rib that he had taken from the man. He brought her before the man.
And:
The serpent was the most clever of all the wild animals that the Lord God had made. It said to the woman, “Is it true that God told you not to eat of any of the trees in the garden?”
The woman answered the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but as for the fruit of the tree in the midst of the garden, God said that we must not eat it, nor even touch it, lest we die.”
But the serpent said to the woman, “Certainly you shall not die! God knows that when you eat from it, your eyes will be opened, and you will become like God, knowing that which is good and that which is evil.”
The woman saw that the tree was good for food and pleasing to look at and desirable for imparting wisdom. She took some fruit and ate it. Then she gave some to her husband who was with her, and he also ate it. Their eyes were opened and they realized that they were naked. They took fig leaves and sewed them together, making themselves a covering.
They then heard the Lord God walking in the garden toward the evening. The man and his wife hid themselves from the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called out to the man and said to him, “Where were you?”
He answered, “I heard you walking in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid myself.”
He said, “Who let you know that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree from which I commanded you not to eat?”
The man answered, “The woman whom you put here with me, she gave me some fruit from the tree and I ate it.”
The Lord God said to the woman, “What have you done?”
The woman answered, “The serpent tricked me and I ate it.”
The story ends like this:
The Lord God said, “Behold, man has become like one of us, for he has knowledge of that which is good and that which is evil. Now, we must prevent him from reaching out and taking the fruit of the tree of life lest he eat it and live forever.” The Lord God cast him out of the Garden of Eden; henceforth he was to labor tilling the soil from which he had come. When he expelled him, he placed cherubim to the east of the Garden of Eden with flaming swords to keep watch over the way to the tree of life.
Take it from a former creative writing adjunct professor: those Genesis passages are excellent fodder for critical classroom discussion—which is the entire point of English class! Why did God only create two humans? Why did He think denying them knowledge was a good idea? What was the serpent doing in the Garden in the first place? Wasn’t it God’s job to keep Eden free of snakes? How can two creatures ignorant of good and evil be expected to understand that the serpent is a bad actor? Why did Eve heed the serpent but Adam did not? Was it because Adam was kind of a dolt, and she was bored? If he was so sure he wasn’t supposed to take the bite, why did he do so? Where did the shame come from? Why would they think God, who created them, would object to their nudity? Why should nudity be shameful? Why did Adam immediately throw Eve under the bus? Why did God react like such a butt-hurt dick? Why did He banish them for all eternity and not give them a second chance? Why was He so concerned about them eating the fruit of the tree of life and living forever? Who are the cherubim who guard the Garden? Are they still there? Isn’t that kind of a boring job? Why didn’t Adam and Eve, or any of their descendants, ever try to return to Eden? Can the story be read as anti-patriarchy, because Jehovah behaves like an abusive father and Adam is a spineless coward, while Eve is the only one who has agency, curiosity, common sense, and courage?
Have we been reading it wrong this whole time?
On its face, the Garden of Eden story is ridiculous. Even the most pious, literal-interpretation-of-the-Bible English teacher in all of Texas would be besieged by clever students poking holes in the narrative. No thinking person would read those Genesis chapters and be like, “You know what? Christianity sounds great! Sign me up!”—not least because the Adam and Eve story is not unique to Christianity, but originates in Judaism and recurs in Islam. Five billion of the eight billion people now alive regard that story as part of their culture. Why not discuss it in an English lit class?
Infinitely more offensive to me than the Bible chapters is the fact that Ayn Rand is the lone woman author on the list of readings for junior year:
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The best Rand novels—Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead—are, at best, engaging Young Adult yarns, not exemplary enough examples of literary fiction to merit inclusion, especially on such a short list. But On Capitalism? Setting aside that it’s nothing but oligarch propaganda, it’s more applicable to a class in economics, philosophy, or history. Miss me with that claptrap.
While Texas juniors contemplate Adam and Eve, its sophomores will read the Book of Job, which is probably the most novelistic book in the entire Bible, as well as the funeral oration of Pericles, from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War:
Let me say that our system of government does not copy the institutions of our neighbors. It is more the case of our being a model to others than of our imitating anyone else. Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people. When it is a question of settling private disputes, everyone is equal before the law; when it is a question of putting one person before another in positions of public responsibility, what counts is not membership of a particular class, but the actual ability which the man possesses. No one, so long as he has it in him to be of service to the state, is kept in political obscurity because of poverty. And, just as our political life is free and open, so is our day-to-day life in our relations with each other. We do not get into a state with our next-door neighbor if he enjoys himself in his own way, nor do we give him the kind of black looks which, though they do no real harm, still do hurt people’s feelings. We are free and tolerant in our private lives; but in public affairs we keep to the law. This is because it commands our deep respect.
Good on the Texas BOE for sneaking this subversive anti-fascist text into the curriculum!
The outlier for English II is not Job or Pericles but rather—and I can’t believe this turd made its way into the literary punchbowl—Margaret Thatcher’s ho-hum eulogy for Ronald Reagan. Just because you’re the leader of English people doesn’t make you a luminary of English literature.
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“Ronald Reagan carried the American people with him in his great endeavours because there was perfect sympathy between them,” the Iron Lady said. “He and they loved America and what it stands for: freedom and opportunity for ordinary people.” Thatcher declined to mention that “Ronnie” expressed his love for ordinary people by dismantling the welfare state, ignoring the AIDS epidemic, disseminating racist tropes, thwarting the law by doing business with Iran, and planting the seeds of the implosion of democracy and the ascension of the exact same corrupt oligarchy he (to his credit) helped bring down in Russia.
Could it be that the Texas Board of Education knew that performative liberals would reflexively object to the establishment of compulsory Bible passages, and used that as cover, so it could sneak in brazen pro-oligarch propaganda? I wonder.
Less Margaret Thatcher, I say, and more Margaret Atwood; less Ayn Rand, and more Ann Radcliffe. But the Bible excerpts should be part of the curriculum. How can we expect students to learn about English literature without making at least a passing acquaintance with its foundational text?
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.
ICYMI
A “neat” show on Friday:
And we went doo-wop:
PROGRAMMING NOTES
I am on the road the next two weeks on business trips: first Madrid, where I will wait out the 250th, and then Orlando. My tentative plan is to produce new PREVAIL pieces this week (June 30, July 3, July 5) and then take off the following week (July 7, 10, 12).
I am on actual vacation the week of July 20.
There will be no new Five 8 this Friday. I will do the show live from Florida on the 12th; on the 17th, we will have a very special guest.
Finally, I am working on another “Infrequently Asked Questions” series. I hope to have more time to work on that this summer, and will begin posting it in installments in a few weeks.
Thanks, as always, for your support. I hope you’re enjoying the summer, insofar as that’s possible…
Photo credit: The dancer and choreographer Gertrude Hoffmann, scantily dressed for role in the controversial Salome opera, with head of John the Baptist.
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