Critics fear elective Bible classes in public schools erode line between church and state

ODESSA, Texas - (KRT) - This hardscrabble town of 90,000 on the West Texas oil patch famous for its obsession with high school football is becoming the new ground zero in a culture war.

The Ector County Independent School District unanimously approved an elective course in biblical literacy in April, an action underscoring the marked increase of such "Bible study" classes nationally. Constitutional scholars are concerned that these classes constitute a subtle erosion of what they see as the traditional and necessary wall of separation between church and state.

More than 300 school districts in 35 states use course material offered by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, said its president, Elizabeth Ridenour.

The North Carolina-based organization offers courses in biblical study in public schools as part of its commitment to restore religious and civil liberties in the nation. The council's board of directors and advisers draws heavily on such religious conservatives as evangelist Ben Kinchloe of television's "The 700 Club" and David Barton, a prominent conservative author and speaker on church-state separation.

"The world is watching to see if we will be motivated to impact our culture, to deal with the moral crises in our society, and reclaim our families and children," Ridenour wrote in a welcoming message on the organization's Web site.

Odessa school officials say they are walking a narrow path to ensure the proposed course meets educational and constitutional requirements.

"This will be an academic elective on biblical literacy, not a devotional," said Odessa Superintendent Wendell Sollis. "We have no intention of proselytizing. ... You really have to educate people about what you can and can't do."

But assurances that the course will be voluntary and non-devotional have done little to allay the fears of non-Christians and religious moderates that the class may evolve into the covert preaching of God's word.

"There's an awful lot of people in this town convinced that they're going to get Jesus taught in the classroom, a tool for evangelism. And that concerns people like me," said David Newman, an English professor at Odessa College who opposes the new Bible course. He is Jewish.

"If they want to teach the biblical influences on culture and art, why not make it a traditional humanities course that examines all the influences on Western culture?" he asked. "If I see this thing becoming more of an advocacy course, I can assure you there will certainly be legal action taken."

While relations between Odessa's 150 Christian churches and its non-Christian minority are good, Newman said his 12-year-old daughter has been subjected to some anti-Jewish statements from classmates.

"They'll ask her why 'your people' killed Jesus. Or if she knows that Jesus is her savior," Newman said. "I don't think it's hate. It's just kids being kids. But I worry what will happen if a pronounced Christian viewpoint is taught in the class."

Alfred Brophy, a University of Alabama law professor who teaches American legal history, said Odessa may reflect a new battleground for religious conservatives who complain God has been taken out of the nation's public schools.

"This is ground zero in the next culture war," Brophy said. "They're introducing a religious curriculum into the schoolhouse, but it's subtle. It's the camel's nose poking under the tent."

John Waggoner began organizing a petition drive in Odessa this year to develop a high school Bible course. He said he was not prepared for the results. By April, his group had obtained more than 6,000 signatures.

Waggoner said he and two friends began the drive out of a grass-roots interest in bringing legal Bible study to the classroom. Once they went public, they were supported by a cross-section of the community. "We just tapped into something people are very passionate about," he said.

"I don't mean to be flippant, but when people ask why we want a Bible course in the schools, I ask, 'Why not?'" Waggoner said. "The Bible is such a foundation of all that we have in this country, it just makes sense to educate our children about it."

"Sure, we understand their concerns. We know these are good people who just disagree with what we're doing. I just think they're wrong," he said. "This will be the most heavily moderated course in the school's history. There will be no proselytizing. We don't want to subject this school district to a constitutional conflict.

Though no course curriculum has been picked, Waggoner said his group favors the curriculum designed by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools.

"We invited the council's lawyer to speak to the school board on the constitutionality of the issue, and we know the council's curriculum has already been approved in Texas," he said. "Our hope is that ... we'll continue to have a seat at the table as the board picks a curriculum."

Conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh told his radio listeners he'd stand with Odessa schools against the American Civil Liberties Union - even though the ACLU hasn't joined the fray. School officials have been swamped with interview requests and hundreds of phone calls and e-mails - some accusing them of violating the Constitution and others thanking them for putting the Bible back in the classroom.

Roughly 80 percent of the schools using the national council's Bible course are small or rural districts, according to Ridenour, the group's president.

"It's not just gone into the Bible Belt states. It's gone into Alaska, Pennsylvania, California," Ridenour said. "We've already had over 170,000 students take the course nationwide. It's never been legally challenged."

Ridenour stressed that the curriculum is designed to help students understand the Bible in the context of its influence on culture and the arts. She emphasized it is not a course in Bible devotion.

"You wouldn't learn this in Sunday school class," she said. "How in the world could you understand what's going on in the Middle East today without introducing the Bible and understanding the background? How can they understand Michelangelo's Moses or Leonardo Da Vinci's Last Supper without knowing about the figures that inspired those works of art?"

Ridenour said supporters of non-Christian faiths could approach a school board and go through the same process as the council.

"Now the Quran has not had the influence on our society, of course, that the Bible has and our founding fathers didn't base things on the Quran," she said. "But it's a free country if anyone would like to approach the school board."

Judith Schaeffer, deputy legal director of the People for the American Way Foundation, said her group plans to monitor the case to see if the curriculum Odessa adopts is constitutional.

"We have no problem with the board's vote the other night," she said. "It puts it on our radar screen in the sense that we hope they will do this the right way."

Schaeffer said her organization is aware that the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools is "running around the country trying to get school boards to adopt their material for these courses."

Ridenour said her organization does not solicit school districts to carry their curriculum. "If people in the district, if it's on their hearts to do this, they'll call us."

Schaeffer said another potential problem for school districts is finding instructors that are "academically competent" to teach what is often a lightning-rod topic.

"You really shouldn't be teaching the Bible in public schools," she said, "unless you have teachers who are qualified to do so."

Earlier this year, schools in Michigan decided not to use the council's Bible curriculum.

In January, the school board in Frankenmuth, Mich., ended a yearlong debate by turning down the council curriculum as "not academically rigorous enough." Frankenmuth Superintendent Michael Murphy told board members, "It goes beyond talking about religion and becomes faith-based."

K.K. Brannies, assistant superintendent of the Brady Independent School District in Texas, said her district has offered the council curriculum since the late 1990s as an elective and has had no complaints.

She is surprised that the course is offered in 49 districts in Texas and that more are considering it because the opportunity to offer electives is dwindling as course requirements increase.

However, she said she does not see the course "as something that will really continue heavily just because of the fact there are so few opportunities for any elective classes," Brannies said. "When we get to the new science requirements, the chances of us having to do away with it are probably good at some point just because kids won't have room for as many electives in their schedule."

Kathy Miller, President of the Texas Freedom Network, a statewide nonprofit group formed to protect religious freedom and individual liberties, said there is no inherent problem with studying religion in school.

She cautioned, however, that schools may unintentionally end up promoting a particular religion in the classroom and violate the principles of religious freedom.

"I think the danger here is that this Bible class could turn a public school classroom into a Sunday school classroom," Miller said. "Many school boards have rejected the curriculum because they feared the controversy around it, because they feared that it did possibly put them in an untenable position."

Angie, 17, a senior at Permian High School, won't benefit from the proposed Bible course. But she would take it if she could. "I don't think it would hurt anyone to study about God's word," she said.

Across the parking lot, Ray, a junior, is noncommittal. "It's OK, I guess. But there's already a lot we have to get done for graduation; there's not much room for electives. It's like we'd have to choose between football, more science or the Bible."

Their last names were not used because neither student would give a contact number for their parents.

Nearby, Patricia Clark waited outside Permian High to pick up her daughter, Natasha, 16. Clark supports the idea of a Bible class.

"It'll be a good thing, something positive," Clark said. "I'm glad to see it happen."

"She hasn't said she'd be interested in taking it," Clark said. "We've talked about it, and she just rolls her eyes."

...do you have a specific point in mind?

Part IV. Of the Kingdom of Darkness
Chap. xlv. Of Demonology and other Relics of the Religion of the Gentiles.

[10] Another relic of Gentilism is the worship of images, neither instituted by Moses in the Old, nor by Christ in the New Testament; nor yet brought in from the Gentiles; but left amongst them, after they had given their names to Christ. Before our Saviour preached, it was the general religion of the Gentiles to worship for gods those appearances that remain in the brain from the impression of external bodies upon the organs of their senses, which are commonly called ideas, idols, phantasms, conceits, as being representations of those external bodies which cause them, and have nothing in them of reality, no more than there is in the things that seem to stand before us in a dream. And this is the reason why St. Paul says, "We know that an idol is nothing": not that he thought that an image of metal, stone, or wood was nothing; but that the thing which they honored or feared in the image, and held for a god, was a mere figment, without place, habitation, motion, or existence, but in the motions of the brain. And the worship of these with divine honour is that which is in the Scripture called idolatry, and rebellion against God. For God being King of the Jews, and His lieutenant being first Moses, and afterward the high priest, if the people had been permitted to worship and pray to images (which are representations of their own fancies), they had had no further dependence on the true God, of whom there can be no similitude; nor on His prime ministers, Moses and the high priests; but every man had governed himself according to his own appetite, to the utter eversion of the Commonwealth, and their own destruction for want of union. And therefore the first law of God was: they should not take for gods, alienos deos, that is, the gods of other nations, but that only true God, who vouchsafed to commune with Moses, and by him to give them laws and directions for their peace, and for their salvation from their enemies. And the second was that they should not make to themselves any image to worship, of their own invention. For it is the same deposing of a king to submit to another king, whether he be set up by a neighbour nation or by ourselves.

[14] An image, in the most strict signification of the word, is the resemblance of something visible: in which sense the fantastical forms, apparitions, or seemings of visible bodies to the sight, are only images; such as are the show of a man or other thing in the water, by reflection or refraction; or of the sun or stars by direct vision in the air; which are nothing real in the things seen, nor in the place where they seem to be; nor are their magnitudes and figures the same with that of the object, but changeable, by the variation of the organs of sight, or by glasses; and are present oftentimes in our imagination, and in our dreams, when the object is absent; or changed into other colours, and shapes, as things that depend only upon the fancy. And these are the images which are originally and most properly called ideas and idols, and derived from the language of the Grecians, with whom the word eido signifieth to see. They are also called phantasms, which is in the same language, apparitions. And from these images it is that one of the faculties of man's nature is called the imagination. And from hence it is manifest that there neither is, nor can be, any image made of a thing invisible.

[15] It is also evident that there can be no image of a thing infinite: for all the images and phantasms that are made by the impression of things visible are figured. But figure is quantity every way determined, and therefore there can be no image of God, nor of the soul of man, nor of spirits; but only of bodies visible, that is, bodies that have light in themselves, or are by such enlightened.

[16] And whereas a man can fancy shapes he never saw, making up a figure out of the parts of divers creatures, as the poets make their centaurs, chimeras and other monsters never seen, so can he also give matter to those shapes, and make them in wood, clay or metal. And these are also called images, not for the resemblance of any corporeal thing, but for the resemblance of some phantastical inhabitants of the brain of the maker. But in these idols, as they are originally in the brain, and as they are painted, carved moulded or molten in matter, there is a similitude of one to the other, for which the material body made by art may be said to be the image of the fantastical idol made by nature.

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