Readers respond to Oklahoma’s superintendent ordering each teacher to teach the Bible in their classroom.
Last month, the Oklahoma Education Department’s state schools superintendent, Ryan Walters, ordered each Oklahoma teacher to teach the Bible in their classroom — with special attention paid to the Ten Commandments. “The Bible is one of the most historically significant books and a cornerstone of Western civilization,” Mr. Walters stated in aI’d like to remind Mr.
As a high school English teacher in Montgomery County, I personally relished the thought of teaching a unit called “The Bible as Literature.” I remember preparing my unit with poetry, metaphor, irony, proverbs, anthologies, redactors, allegory, hyperbole, parables, letters, satire, symbolism, prophecy, personification, wordplay and puns. Thethat religious texts used in classrooms cannot be used for religious purposes.
It is undeniably true that the Bible holds an important place in American history. As a historian of religion, I, too, am concerned with upholding religion as a genuine agent of historical change. If Mr. Walters’s directive urged teachers to pay close attention to the role that religion played in history, I doubt there would be much pushback. I would vigorously defend such a policy. The issue is that his demands infer particular theological judgments about both the Bible and the United States.
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