RELIGIOUS HISTORY

Religious History



Religious History

Introduction

A recent trend since the mid-1990s has been to teach the Bible as history in U.S. public schools. While such practices have been ruled unconstitutional by federal courts, it has been a popular political option for a few school boards and superintendents who bemoan a supposed lack of religious and moral instruction in public schools.

The most famous case involving a school district's embrace of a “Bible as history” curriculum happened in Lee County, Florida, during the late 1990s. In 1997, over the objections of the school superintendent and the board's own lawyer, the district approved an elective course that presented the Bible as history, that is, everything that is described in the Bible was a factual event. The curriculum was provided by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools (NCBCPS), with the King James Version of the Bible as the only text (Anderson, 2003).

While the state of Florida did include the Bible as history courses as an option in the state-approved social studies curriculum, the Lee County curriculum went much further in its explicit embrace of one theological understanding of the Bible. For example, the NCBCPS curriculum treated Jesus's resurrection as a historical fact, something that is hotly debated by professional historians and religious scholars. Nevertheless, the Lee County School Board implemented the new curriculum in three public high schools beginning in January 1998.

Just as quickly, the board was hauled into federal court by both the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the People for the America Way (PFAW). The federal court subsequently disallowed the New Testament course but permitted the course based on the Old Testament. After the court's ruling, the school board entered into a negotiated settlement with the litigants, withdrawing the two courses that used NCBCPS materials, opting for a single course using a nonsectarian curriculum. Later during that same year, two of the strongest proponents of the original curriculum were defeated in their respective school board elections, ending the entire matter.

This and later attempts at including Bible as history in the curriculum reflect a literalist understanding of the Bible—that is, everything that is presented in the Bible actually happened. Generally, such literalist interpretations have been a hallmark for fundamentalist Christianity. Since the mid-1970s, fundamentalist Christians have been increasingly involved with politics, and this includes the politics of U.S. education. By the 1980s, they became a major component of the Protestant—or more commonly called Christian—Right. Given the Protestant Right's involvement in U.S. politics at both the macro- and microlevel, as well as its long-standing suspicion regarding public school practices, which must be officially secular, the effort to include Bible as history classes can be viewed as an extension of their political activity (Durkheim, 2003).

Discussion and Analysis

The Austrian-English historian Walter Ullmann describes the Carolingian monarchs (c. 750-919 CE) as exercising a co-regency with Christ. Hincmar of Rheims (806-882 CE) provides a detailed contemporary description of the developing Frankish royal consecration rites of the ninth century, which underline this anointed role of the ...