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Outrage Over Texas Teaching The Bible Is Anti-Intellectual

Outrage over the Texas State School Board of Education’s requirement that the Bible be included in the K-12 curriculum isn’t just anti-God, it speaks to a lack of understanding of what made the West great.

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Three graduate students sat around a table with the great historian Forrest McDonald. In the twilight of his career, he no longer taught anyone that he didn’t himself choose. That mostly meant only a handful of master’s and doctoral level students. I was fortunate to be one of them. In a 2016 obituary, the New York Times called him the “historian who punctured liberal notions,” and no notion, liberal or otherwise, did he take more glee in puncturing than poor scholarship. On this occasion, McDonald, who wasn’t particularly religious, began our discussion by holding up a copy of Barbara Tuchman’s bestseller A Distant Mirror, a history of the fourteenth century, and read aloud this passage from her forward:“While I recognize [Christianity’s] presence [in the Middle Ages], it requires a more religious bent than mine to identify with it.”McDonald closed the book demonstratively and tossed it on the table.“And with that,” he declared, “read no further and throw it in the trash. Tuchman casually informs the reader in the opening pages that she hasn’t bothered to understand the mindset of the period about which she has presumed to write a history. Since the Christian faith is unimportant to her, she dismisses it as unimportant to her subject. What insight can she possibly offer about the motivations of the people of that time? Tuchman is admitting that she has no authority to write such a book.”1

This brings us to Texas.Last week, the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) approved a mandatory k-12 reading list that includes, among many other things, parts of the Bible. Predictably, the cultural bloodletters rode to the scene like a Texas posse to a hanging:

“Bible lessons should be taught on Sundays,” said SBOE member and Democrat Tiffany Clark. “Not all of us believe the same.”

One might reasonably say that drag queen story hour has no place in the curriculum, but there is no record of Ms. Clark protesting when Texas public schools hosted them. Apparently, twerking trannies are deemed high art while the Bible is banned literature. But given the obvious agenda here, it makes sense. If you have one, you are very unlikely to have the other. And Ms. Clark’s implicit charge that the SBOE is proposing the Bible be taught as a source of spiritual guidance and inspiration in public schools as in a church on Sunday is dishonest. As she well knows, it is included in the curriculum, like every other reading on the list, as a critical piece of classical literature. Which it is.

One suspects that what Ms. Clark really means is the Bible is the only religious text on the list that anyone takes seriously, and therein lies critics’........

© The Federalist