Read the Bible, Understand America

Many years ago, while I was in graduate school, a teacher leading a discussion of Walt Whitman’s verse made a reference to something I didn’t understand. Noting the poet’s oratorical style—the incantatory rhetoric, the expansive and rhythmic free verse, the catalogues—she compared it to the “biblical sublime.” It was just a passing reference, a quick academic judgment that wasn’t explained, but it stuck with me. I didn’t know what she was talking about, though I was in my third year in a strong doctoral program in English. It made me uncomfortable. I knew I’d missed something important.    

I hadn’t had any Bible lessons that would have helped me recognize the reference, not in school or in undergraduate classes, nor at home or in Sunday school. My parents lost their Catholicism during my early childhood and never regained it. That put me at a disadvantage twenty years later when I chose nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American literature as my field of expertise.

Graduate school is a competitive habitat; small differences are magnified when it comes to fellowships and jobs. You looked better than others if you could drop citations of “Restoration comedy,” “dactylic hexameter,” and “binary oppositions” into seminar exchanges with knowing ease. The “biblical sublime” was one I hadn’t heard. I had to catch up with fellow students who caught allusions to Rachel in Moby-Dick and “alpha and omega” in The Sound and the Fury, and I had to catch up quickly. Soon after, I grabbed a Bible, found ten samples of the sublime, and copied them into a notebook (God telling Cain the blood of his brother cries out from the earth, God’s answer to Job, etc.). 

I knew enough to choose King James over other versions, and the more I read the more I was convinced that this was one of the greatest works of English literature ever composed (the only superb composition ever done by committee). Something else happened, too: Much of the American literature I was reading opened up. Snatches of biblical language reverberated in Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman. Whitman had the oracular confidence of the prophets, Thoreau sounded like Jeremiah as he sought to “wake my neighbors up,” and Lincoln couldn’t write for very long without drawing on biblical imagery and cadences here and there. The more I knew the Bible, the better I could understand the Americans.

For this reason, educators in Oklahoma and Louisiana and a few other red states have called for biblical content in public classrooms. Right on cue, liberals have criticized them for it. It strikes them as dangerous and coercive. They don’t distinguish between the act of discussing selections from the Old and New Testaments and the act of proselytizing. If you pressed them, they might acknowledge the relevance of the Bible to the fields of English, history, art history, civics, and oratory, but they would nonetheless mistrust the practice of Bible teaching. 

It’s an ad hominem position: Secular liberals assume that people who want to teach the Bible have a deeper agenda. They don’t believe that units on the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount will frame those texts in the same way that Romeo and Juliet and Gatsby are framed in class. The Bible won’t remain a literary text, or a civic, historical, or ethical one. It won’t be a text at all, liberals worry. It will be dogma. Pressured by designing teachers, students might embrace it and join the faithful.

The right response to this liberal objection is: When liberals worry as much about the dogma of CRT, LGBTQ, and DEI as they do about the dogma of Bible instruction, we will listen. Because you don’t, we ignore you. The Bible is fundamental to Western civilization and American history. To withhold it from the young is educational malpractice.

For forty years, E. D. Hirsch has maintained that the prime factor preventing kids from becoming better readers and thinkers is background knowledge—in his words, “cultural literacy.” To Hirsch, a little learning isn’t a dangerous thing. It’s a stepping stone to more learning. When faced with a passage on a reading test, a student with but a little familiarity with the subject matter performs better than does a student with no familiarity, though they rank equally on general reading skills. In practice, this finding mandates that students should be taught that which shall provide them relevant background knowledge, that is, things that will help them handle more complex materials assigned to them in later years.

A Bible-less curriculum sustains gaps in their knowledge that will hurt them when they go to college. It isn’t neutral. It’s harmful. We have ample evidence of ignorance and incompetence among high school graduates. In 2023, according to ACT, only 40 percent of students who took the ACT exam reached college readiness in reading. Given the low rates of competence, we should wonder about the motivations of liberal critics of the Bible in school. Why would they object to material that would improve kids’ reading abilities? Secular liberals speak of church-state separation, but I think their opinions go further than that. The truth is that they don’t like the Bible. They don’t like the Western tradition. The argument for religious freedom, in their mouths, is a screen for an animus against the American past. Their protests should be dismissed.  Let’s have every American teen know the Fall and the Crucifixion backward and forward.

Mark Bauerlein is a contributing editor at First Things.

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