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By Mark Chancey
Assistant Professor
Department of Religious Studies
Southern Methodist University
August 2005
Until recently, the National Council on Bible Curriculum in
Public Schools (NCBCPS) was a little-known group that had managed to fly under
the radar of most scholars in biblical, theological, and religious studies. Now
that the organization has come to our attention, however, scholars throughout
the field are concerned. As the author of a recent report on the NCBCPS for
Texas Freedom Network (TFN), a religious and individual liberties advocacy group
based in Austin, I have been asked many times about the NCBCPS and its
curriculum, the situation in Texas, and how I became involved. This article
provides a brief answer to these questions; for more details, see the report
itself at
www.tfn.org/religiousfreedom/biblecurriculum.
In the spring of 2005, a group of citizens in Odessa, Texas began urging the
Ector County Independent School District to offer an elective Bible
course—specifically, a course based on the NCBCPS curriculum, The Bible in
History and Literature. Official representatives of the NCBCPS went to
Odessa to rally followers, and the council’s supporters gathered a reported 6000
signatures. On April 26, the school board voted 6-0 to offer an elective Bible
course—beginning not in the fall of 2005, but in the fall of 2006. Despite local
public pressure to use the NCBCPS curriculum, they left the choice of curriculum
open, to be decided later.
Not all Odessa citizens were enthusiastic about this turn of events. One
concerned parent was a Jewish man named David Newman, whose daughter attends
public schools. Newman knew that his daughter would be affected by this course,
regardless of whether or not she herself took it, and when he began
investigating the National Council on Bible Curriculum, he became even more
concerned.
Newman made his opposition to the course clear, and the media noticed. The
Odessa American, Dallas Morning News, New York Times, CNN, and
other outlets ran stories on the situation. Texas Freedom Network monitored the
situation and sent out e-mails across the state, letting the public know what
was happening.
I read TFN’s e-mails and the stories in the media. I was particularly moved by
David Newman’s comments in the Dallas Morning News, where he said that
his daughter was already sometimes uncomfortable with her classmates’ questions.
Newman said, "They'll ask her why 'your people' killed Jesus. Or if she knows
that Jesus is her savior . . ." He continued, "I don't think it's hate. It's
just kids being kids."
With my devotion to Jewish-Christian relations, my background in biblical
studies, and my support for public education, I wanted to know more about the
NCBCPS curriculum, which had never been reviewed by a biblical scholar. Texas
Freedom Network and I exchanged e-mails and phone calls, and they obtained a
copy of the curriculum and sent it to me for review.
From the very beginning, TFN and I were on the same page on crucial issues.
Neither they nor I dispute the legality of Bible classes in public schools. The
issue, as another commentator has put it, is not whether the Bible can be
taught in public schools, but how it is taught. A Bible course in a
public school must be taught in a non-sectarian manner, and it must be
academically informed. The National Council on Bible Curriculum claims that its
curriculum passes these tests—but it actually falls far short. My investigation
discovered numerous troubling aspects of both the organization and its course.
The NCBCPS is a Greensboro, North Carolina-based organization that was founded
by Elizabeth Ridenour in 1993. It claims that its curriculum is used in 1000
schools nationwide—over 300 school districts in 37 states. The group has been
endorsed by Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, the Eagle Forum,
Focus on the Family, and a host of similar groups and figures. The Board
of Directors and Board of Advisors Advisory Committee are a who’s who list of
the Religious Right. The Board of Advisors does include one Jew: Rabbi Daniel
Lapin, who heads an organization called Toward Tradition that is closely
connected with the Christian Religious Right. The Advisory Board includes no
biblical scholars.
The NCBCPS has withheld a considerable amount of information from the public.
The curriculum itself is very difficult to obtain. It costs $150 from the
NCBCPS website—if they decide to ship it to you. Amazon.com
remains unable to fill my order for the curriculum, which I placed 2 months ago
because the NCBCPS will not send it a copy. The curriculum is apparently not in
libraries and so is not available through inter-library loan. The Council has
not identified the author of the curriculum. Though it claims that over 1000
schools use it, it will not identify those schools. It claims that the
curriculum has been approved by hundreds of lawyers, but it has named only a
handful, and it claims the curriculum reflects biblical scholarship, though the
identities of involved biblical scholars are largely unknown, too.
Rabbi Lapin and a few Roman Catholics aside, the individuals behind this
curriculum are Protestants, and the curriculum is basically an introduction to
the Protestant Bible. The curriculum tries to explain the differences between
the Protestant and Roman Catholic Bibles by talking briefly about the books
Protestants call the Apocrypha, but it is not very successful. Eastern Orthodox
Christians are almost entirely absent from the book’s discussion. The
curriculum is even less successful at highlighting the distinctive
characteristics of the Bible used by Jews. The curriculum nowhere uses the word
Tanak, nowhere describes the organization of the Tanak, and does not even make
clear that Jews do not regard the New Testament as scripture.
The curriculum does make occasional efforts to be non-sectarian, but all too
often, the theological assumptions of its creators are very evident. In
particular, the curriculum reflects fundamentalist beliefs in the Bible’s
literal, historical, and scientific accuracy. Miracle stories are often
presented as factually accurate, with no other view discussed.
The curriculum also recommends showing videos from the Creation Evidence Museum
in Glen Rose, Texas. These videos advocate a literal six-day creation, a
6000-year-old earth, and the simultaneous co-existence of humans and dinosaurs.
When I visited there two summers ago, it was collecting donations to fund the
construction of a biosphere that would replicate the atmospheric conditions
before Noah’s flood.
Much of the course appears designed to persuade students and teachers that
America is a distinctively Christian nation. This belief that America is a
Christian nation that should be governed by Christian principles is sometimes
called "dominion theology." Several of the National Council’s advisers and
endorsers—such as D. James Kennedy and David Barton--are very active in the
dominion theology movement.
One need not even open the book to find this agenda. The cover is decorated not
with biblical or archaeological imagery, but with a photograph of the
Declaration of Independence and an American flag. The title pages of most units
depict similar images. Visually, the curriculum seems to Americanize the Bible
and Christianize American symbols.
The book relies heavily on the thought of David Barton, a member of the NCBCPS
Board of Advisors. Barton is the founder and president of WallBuilders, an
organization based in Aledo, Texas that argues against the separation of church
and state. Barton’s video, Foundations of American Government, is
suggested viewing for students even before they begin reading Genesis. This
video argues (among other things) that increases in sexually transmitted
diseases, teen pregnancies, divorces, and violent crimes can be attributed to
the Supreme Court’s 1962 church-state separation ruling in the school prayer
case (Engel v Vitale). Almost an entire unit of the curriculum is based on
Barton’s books, which argue that the Founding Fathers intended to found a
distinctively Christian nation. The curriculum says, "In fact, some have even
conceded that ‘historians are discovering that the Bible, perhaps even more than
the Constitution, is our Founding Document.’"
In addition to its sectarian nature, the book also contains a surprising number
of factual errors. Archaeological findings are misrepresented, kings’ reigns are
misdated, the Jewish calendar is erroneously described, even biblical stories
are misread. The book is also full of typographical errors, misspellings, and
unclear writing.
One of the curriculum’s factual errors is now famous. Page 117 suggests that the
class "note in particular the interesting story of the sun standing still in
[Joshua] chapter 10. There is documented research through NASA that two days
were indeed unaccounted for in time (the other being in 2 Kings 20:8-11)." It
then directs the class towards a web page titled the Sun Stood Still. When the
type of urban legend that would normally circulate by e-mail ends up in a public
school curriculum, it’s a problem.
The curriculum also often relies on extremely idiosyncratic, non-scholarly
literature. On page 170, for example, the curriculum says, "Respected scholar,
Dr. J. O. Kinnaman, declared: 'Of the hundreds of thousands of artifacts found
by the archeologists, not one has ever been discovered that contradicts or
denies one word, phrase, clause, or sentence of the Bible, but always confirms
and verifies the facts of the Biblical record." This quote clearly reflects the
book’s attempt to convince students that the Bible is 100 percent historically
accurate.
Here Kinnaman is said to be a "respected scholar," but most scholars are
unfamiliar with him. Kinnaman argued in his 1940 book Diggers for Facts: The
Bible in Light of Archaeology that Jesus and Paul visited Great Britain,
that Joseph of Arimathea was Jesus’ uncle and dominated the tin industry of
Wales, and that he himself had personally seen Jesus’ school records in India.
According to an article by Stephen Mehler, director of research at the Kinnaman
Foundation, Kinnaman reported finding a secret entrance into the Great Pyramid
of Giza, in which he discovered records from the lost continent of Atlantis. He
also claimed that the pyramid was 35,000 years old and was used in antiquity to
transmit radio messages to the Grand Canyon. The National Council’s August 4
press release, available at bibleinschools.net under the link titled "NCBCPS
responds to attack," defends Kinnaman’s stature.
One additional problem also deserves special mention: much of this curriculum is
plagiarized. The entire last chapter, for example, is reproduced word for word
from uncited art history web sites. Other pages come from Microsoft Encarta
Encyclopedia. Even the discussion of "Thou shalt not steal" is plagiarized. It
comes from a commentary, now available online, written by Adam Clarke between
1810 and 1825. Use of an early 19th century source explains why the curriculum
notes that "Thou shalt not steal" applies to slave trading. The NCBCPS is
apparently charging school districts $150 for a curriculum that includes large
portions written by other, often uncited, parties.
NCBCPS has responded to the report by spreading misinformation to its followers
and the media about me, Texas Freedom Network, the report, the curriculum
itself, even its own web site. Its August 4 press release, mentioned above,
dismisses the TFN report as the product of "radical humanists" and
"anti-religion extremists" who are "attempting to become the biggest censor in
the State of Texas," "desperate to ban one book—the Bible—from public schools,"
and are advocating "totalitarianism." More recently, a representative of the
NCBCPS told the press that "anyone who's against this [curriculum] has just got
to be French."
The TFN report has now been endorsed by dozens of scholars, largely because of
efforts like those of www.bibleinterp.com
to get the word out. Read it for yourself at
www.tfn.org/religiousfreedom/biblecurriculum. After all, the NCBCPS has
announced an effort to step up adoption of its curriculum in public schools
throughout the country. It’s not just in Texas.
 Look
for academic tools and books for biblical studies at Dove
Books.
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