It has been over six decades since the U.S. Supreme Court banned Bible reading in public schools. In 1963, one year after it struck down state-sponsored prayers in School District of Abington Township v. Schempp, it ruled that teachers violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment when they read Scripture aloud. The same decision also banned in-class recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.
As a result, for the last 63 years, church-state separatists have labored feverishly to make sure the “wall of separation between church and state” erected by the Supreme Court continues to act as a de facto Berlin Wall, blocking traditional religious ideas from entering the secular haven of public education. Most Americans have instinctively known from the start that the Supreme Court got it wrong. John Adams’s reflections on the public value of “the Christian Religion” show the Founding Fathers viewed Christianity not only as something of great spiritual merit, but also as a shaper of public virtue.
Adams obviously saw no inconsistency between the First Amendment’s prohibition against government doing anything “respecting an establishment of religion” on the one hand, and the acknowledgment that Christian principles were of vital importance to the fledgling United States on the other. Since the Bible is clearly the source of Christian principles, one would expect the courts to honor our Founders’ intent to treat biblical Christianity as, in Adams’s words, “necessary information” for the citizenry. Obviously, the opposite has occurred.
The Bible and the Battle Lines
In recent years, some educators have taken a close look at the 1963 Schempp decision and concluded the Bible has not been banned from public education. Schempp continues to be the pole star by which court decisions are guided. Here is a quotation from it:
It is insisted that, unless these religious exercises are permitted, a “religion of secularism” is established in the schools. We agree, of course, that the State may not establish a “religion of secularism” in the sense of affirmatively opposing or showing hostility to religion, thus “preferring those who believe in no religion over those who do believe.”…In addition, it might well be said that one’s education is not complete without a study of comparative religion or the history of religion and its relationship to the advancement of civilization. It certainly may be said that the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities. Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment. But the exercises here do not fall into those categories. They are religious exercises, required by the States in violation of the command of the First Amendment that the Government maintain strict neutrality, neither aiding nor opposing religion.
There are a number of academic references that could back up the appropriateness of both the literary and historical approaches to using the Bible. However, due to a concerted anti-evangelical bias in much of the academic world, you have to dig to find it.
On the issue of the importance of the Bible and Christian literature to the average American in the founding of the nation, one scholar noted, “Americans early on had stressed literacy in their daily, Bible-reading lives, and nearly every visitor from Europe was soon struck by the fact that even chambermaids and husbandrymen owned copies of Pilgrim’s Progress.”
These types of citations from generally accepted sources, coupled with the acknowledgement by the courts that knowledge of the Bible is indispensible to a well-rounded education, should be enough to get your foot in the door. Though there may be perfectly logical reasons why Christians might not want secular educators explaining the Bible to their children, the misguided belief that the First Amendment prohibits it should certainly not be one of them.
The Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry has been helping Christians think Biblically about Israel and prophecy since 1942, equipping believers with the tools to understand God’s Word and His heart for Israel.
