In The Faith - A Chronicle of the Christian Faith

“If we leave religion out completely, we cheat our students out of a good education, and we don’t prepare them to live in a world in which religion is very important,” says Charles Haynes, a senior scholar at the First Amendment Center at the Freedom Forum in Arlington, Va. “The question is, how do we do it properly?”

It provided some of the foundations of America’s laws and is referenced in literature from Dante to Dostoevsky. Bring it into the public schools, though, and the Bible can be problematic.

When parents in Frankenmuth, Mich., proposed a high school class about the Bible a year ago, the superintendent’s first question was a natural one: Is it legal?

The group providing the curriculum said yes: The course was elective, treated the Bible as literature and history, and complied with a 1963 US Supreme Court ruling that said schools could teach about religion in a secular way.

The ACLU and People for the American Way said no: The curriculum in question promoted a specific Christian interpretation and looked at the Bible as a source of history, both things that crossed over a line into unacceptable territory.

p. [ Full Story @ The Christian Science Monitor ]

p(small). Source: The Christian Science Monitor © 2005 The Christian Science Monitor

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