Saturday, January 31, 1998

Bible kicks up controversy in return to classroom

By YONAT SHIMRON / Raleigh News & Observer

RALEIGH, N.C. -- The perennial favorites among high school electives have traditionally been psychology, drama and art. These days, however, the favorites have come to include a subject long considered forbidden: the Bible.

Three decades after the U.S. Supreme Court banned prayer in the public schools, Bible classes are making a comeback in high schools across the nation. In North Carolina, a leader in the resurrection of religion at school, the number of Bible classes has nearly tripled over the past four years.

These new electives are, in many cases, detonating a minefield of legal questions. Yet, under the law, teaching about religion or the Bible is perfectly legal so long as the instruction is academic and not devotional. Schools cannot promote or denigrate any one faith. They must stay neutral.

But walking that fine line of neutrality can be difficult, especially when there are no widely used textbooks on the subject and little teacher training available.

Although some districts have written intellectually challenging Bible classes that have won praise from legal and academic quarters, experts say that many other school districts don't give the class the careful attention it deserves. And they run the risk of ending up in court.

"The good news is that in the last decade, there has been a growing consensus on the importance of teaching about religion," says Charles Haynes, scholar in residence at the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University and a leader in the field of religion in the public schools. "The bad news is that getting schools to do it right is more difficult than getting national groups to agree on it."

Many of the schools that have adopted Bible electives in the past decade have done so at the urging of conservative Christians, Haynes said. Such was the case in Fort Myers, Fla., according to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU, the People for the American Way and seven residents of Lee County in Florida. The suit alleges that against the advice of two lawyers, the school board in October pushed through a curriculum that is intended to promote Christianity -- a violation of the constitutional separation of church and state.

The curriculum is the product of the National Council on Bible Curriculum in the Public Schools, a small nonprofit group in Greensboro that says its course outline is used in 53 school districts across the country.

According to the lawsuit, William Bracken, a member of the committee recommending the new curriculum, wrote: "Our founding fathers, as you know, thought the Bible should be taught as a required subject. ... I do not understand how Jewish people can object, since the Old Testament, which is essentially the Jewish Bible, will be taught as a separate course. Besides this is a Christian nation and being founded on the Bible, how can we understand our own country without a knowledge of the Bible?"

On the night the board voted on the curriculum, school board chairman Douglas Santini said he quoted from the Bible regularly when he was an elementary school teacher in the 1960s. "We weren't afraid of a lawsuit at that time; we weren't afraid to really give things kids needed in society." The five-member board voted 3-2 to adopt the curriculum.

Recently, U.S. District Judge Elizabeth Kovachevich cleared the way for Lee County schools to teach the first part of the class -- an Old Testament component -- under videotape monitoring. But she banned the New Testament class, saying accounts of the resurrection of Jesus cannot be taught as secular history.

In her decision, the judge was not clear on whether the Old Testament could be taught as history, spending more time chastising the school board for bringing the matter before her in the first place.

"It is an abuse of public trust when elected officials ignore established legal standards," Judge Kovachevich said. "... It is unfortunate that it was necessary for the court to become involved in this dispute. Both parties have able counsel available to them, and litigation of this dispute is not the most constructive use of counsel's abilities, nor is it in the best interest of Lee County."

The curriculum in question -- a 30-page course outline produced in Greensboro -- looks like a straightforward list of Bible books, class activities and suggested reference books. But according to the lawsuit, the curriculum is a disguised attempt to provide students with a theological rather than academic understanding of the Bible.

Instead of teaching about the Bible by presenting it within a historical context -- supplementing the text with recent scholarship and the latest archaeological findings -- the curriculum basically uses the Bible as a textbook. For example, the curriculum recommends repetitive exercises so students will be able to quote the Bible at length, instead of providing challenging questions meant to unveil the Bible's complexity.

In various sections, students are told to "prepare a puppet presentation of Genesis 3"; "prepare a diary, pretending to be Noah, telling of his adventures on the ark"; and "design a coat of arms for each of the 12 disciples with symbols which represent the life and death of each."

These types of activities, the suit suggests, look more like a Sunday school lesson than a critical learning exercise -- and in effect teach the Bible as secular history.

"When you're talking about presenting an objective Bible course, you're talking about looking at something much more complex than what this curriculum offers," said Tom Julin, a lawyer with Steel Hector and Davis, a Miami firm representing the seven Lee County residents. "You can't just convey the religious teachings of the faith. It has to bring critical analysis to bear."

Wake County's Bible in History class, by comparison, recommends that all essays be researched using library reference materials. Tests require students to find definitions for such words as "Pentateuch," "Annunciation" and "eschatology." When researching the missionary journeys of the apostles, for example, students are asked to explore their different meanings for Christianity, Judaism and Hellenistic culture.

But lawyers defending the Fort Myers curriculum say that though theirs might not be perfect, it does not advance religion or create excessive entanglement with a religious organization. This is the National Council's only lawsuit so far. "This curriculum is as objective as it can be," said Stephen Melchior, who is preparing an appeal of the judge's decision on behalf of the National Council.

"It has no sectarian bent. Never (before) has anyone objected to this class as a proselytizing tool."

The call to bring the Bible back to the classroom has been heard across the country. And in North Carolina, the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools is leading the charge.

The council is a 4-year-old organization based in a brick town house in Greensboro and subsisting largely on the donations of conservative Christians. Prominent evangelical Christians such as Bill Bright, president of Campus Crusade for Christ, have joined its advisory board. Entertainers Jane Russell and Glen Campbell have spoken for the group in radio and TV announcements.

Two years ago, the group launched a public relations campaign titled "It's Coming Back and It's Our Constitutional Right." The campaign speaks of the moral crisis in society and urges people to reclaim children and families by teaching religion at school.

"There has been a great social regression since the Bible was removed from our schools," the first paragraph of the campaign reads. "We need to refer to the original documents that inspired Americanism and our religious heritage."

The National Council's Bible curriculum is a revised version of a course developed by teachers and advisers in the Charlotte Mecklenburg school district 40 years ago.

"We polished it up and deleted some things so as not to offend people," said Elizabeth Ridenour, president of the National Council. "The curriculum is very similar. It's basically the same."

Ridenour said the council works by involving citizens in its quest to reach the nation's school boards. "We send them information and work with them step by step and try to help get it adopted."

In 1994, in a typical campaign, the National Council approached a group of parents and children in the Winston-Salem Forsyth school district and urged them to push for a Bible curriculum. They were successful. The school board adopted the National Council's curriculum, and Bible classes are now taught in six of the district's nine high schools. The National Council, along with area churches, provided each high school with 38 Bibles -- which feature the King James and New International Version translations. In addition, they donated Bible atlases, study materials and Bible dictionaries -- all published by Zondervan, the publishing house favored by evangelical Christians.

In the past four years, the number of high schools offering Bible classes in North Carolina has nearly tripled. Before the 1962 and 1963 Supreme Court decisions banning prayer and devotional Scripture readings, most of the state's high schools taught the Bible. But the misunderstanding resulting from those decisions, and the fear of getting sued, put an end to many of those classes.

In Durham and Chapel Hill, Bible classes have not been offered for years. Other counties, including Mecklenburg and Lenoir, never dropped the Bible from their list of course offerings. In those districts, church associations often propped up the Bible classes -- paying for both the teachers' salaries and the class materials.

Legally, so long as the teacher is accountable to the school, there's no problem with churches paying a teacher's salary, said Deborah Ross, the executive director of the state ACLU chapter. "It's like IBM giving the school a bunch of computers," Ross said. "The question is, 'Who controls what she does? What master is she serving?' If the effect is that it promotes religion, then that becomes a problem."

But others say such an arrangement crosses the line between church and state. "It leaves the impression that what's taught are the religious views of that group," said Rabbi Lucy Dinner of Temple Beth Or in Raleigh. "I would hope it doesn't put the nonmajority students in a compromising situation."

Guttenberger, a certified social studies teacher, says the church federation doesn't dictate what's taught in the class and she is especially careful not to impose any particular view. Other Bible teachers expressed similar caution. Angell Caudill, a Bible teacher in Winston-Salem, said she tries to expose her students to as many views as possible.

"The students know there's never going to be anything from my mouth to their ears that says, 'This is the truth,' " Caudill said. "My view is to give students as much education as I can and let them arrive at their own conclusions."

Douglas Punger, school attorney for the Winston-Salem school district, says the teacher ultimately determines whether the class is taught according to constitutional guidelines. "It's how the teacher uses the material that's more important than the text itself," he said. "It's the methodology rather than the text."

Still, a good curriculum is an even better defense, experts say. "Any district can craft a constitutional approach," Haynes said. "But the teacher has to be educated in how to teach the Bible academically and constitutionally. There has to be a commitment to doing it right. Bible classes can be a tremendous addition to the curriculum. Biblical literacy is absolutely essential. But it must be done right."

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)