Revised Standard Bunk: Religion Scholar Dissects Religious Right’s Flawed Bible Course
In one section, the curriculum attempts to argue that 40,000 animals could have easily fit on Noah’s Ark with room to spare.
For years, civil liberties activists have worked to warn public school officials about a Bible curriculum offered by a group called the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools (NCBCPS).
The curriculum purports to be a constitutionally legitimate course of study that helps public school students learn about the Bible. But Americans United for Separation of Church and State had suspicions about this group when it came to our attention in the mid-1990s. The organization, based in Greensboro, N.C., and run by a woman named Elizabeth Ridenour, had close ties to TV preachers and other Religious Right figures.
Ridenour also had a bad habit of saying alarming things in the media. In 1994, she told the Greensboro News & Record, “The reason I feel it is so important is the breakdown of society. We’ve taken the Bible out and put metal detectors in. That speaks for itself.” She promoted materials by the notorious “Christian nation” propagandist David Barton.
The NCBCPS also remained cagey about its activities. It claimed that the curriculum was being used in hundreds of public schools but would not name them. It also refused to provide copies of the curriculum.
It took a few years, but now a religion scholar has thoroughly examined the curriculum – and he finds it wanting. Mark A. Chancey, associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, reported his findings in the September 2007 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.
This is a peer-reviewed journal, meaning that Chancey’s conclusions aren’t just his personal opinions. His findings were subjected to rigorous scrutiny and had to meet a high degree of scholarship.
Chancey notes that the curriculum lists no authors or editors. He asserts, “The overall level of quality is strikingly low.”
Continues Chancey, “Early editions include hand-drawn charts and graphics. Most editions – with some improvement in the 2005b version – are replete with capitalization, punctuation, and sentence construction errors; factual errors; unsubstantiated claims; faulty logic; and unclear wording. Exercises are based almost entirely on memorization of biblical stories.”
The curriculum, Chancey writes, is saturated with a fundamentalist Protestant view of the Bible. In one section, the curriculum attempts to argue that 40,000 animals could have easily fit on Noah’s Ark with room to spare.
The curriculum cites creationists like Henry Morris as authorities. In one case, it cites a writer named J.O. Kinnaman, who argued for biblical inerrancy. Ridenour was apparently unaware, however, that Kinnaman was an eccentric who also argued that Jesus and St. Paul traveled to Great Britain and that Jesus studied in India. Kinnaman himself claimed that he had learned the secret of anti-gravity by examining devices from the lost continent of Atlantis.
The religion scholar writes, “The overall impression the various editions convey is of an inability to differentiate between pseudoscience, urban legends, fringe theories, and mainstream scholarship as well as between faith claims and nonsectarian descriptions…. In short, students will leave this course with the understanding of the Bible apparently held by most members of the NCBCPS and with little awareness of views held by other religious groups or within the academic community.”
Chancey also scores the curriculum for distorting Thomas Jefferson’s views on church-state separation and failing to discuss James Madison’s thinking at all. The curriculum, he says, “provides little evidence of the robust discussions among the nation’s founders about the relationship of church and state…. Instead, the curriculum offers students a tendentious and at times misleading history implying that the separation of church and state is a modern aberration.” (The full paper is available online only to subscribers of the Journal, but the abstract can be read here.)
Chancey concludes by asserting that the NCBCPS’s curriculum is unlikely to survive court challenges. Indeed, portions have already been struck down by one federal court, and a challenge to its use is under way in Odessa, Texas.
Teaching about the role of religion in history, literature, art and other topics is constitutionally permissible in public schools. But the NCBCPS’s curriculum is designed to indoctrinate students in a fundamentalist view. Chancey’s in-depth study should be the death-blow that consigns this lesson plan to the academic dustbin.