I saw this article, The Case for Teaching The Bible, by David van Biema, a few weeks ago in an office, had a cursory glance at it and decided I had to write something about it. Being on the front page of Time Magazine, that's definitely a lot of eyeballs, so I've got to say something...

van Biema starts the article with a clever quote from a Texas High School teacher, Miss Kendrick, who teaches a Bible elective class: "The 'Blessed are the whatevers,' like 'the meek,' and then the reward they will get." Not a very good quote, but the key word there is meek.

The meek. Like, umm, the argument and the van Biema's opening strategy. Without reading any further, the trajectory of the article is clear--begin with a weak argument in favour of teaching about religion so as to finish of with a strong and definitive conclusion (as any good conclusion should be). Such a strategy is almost guaranteed to be effective considering 79% of Americans consider themselves Christian. Captive audience right there.

That being said, I'm sure many of said Christians are aware of or half-heartedly agree or disagree with ABINGTON SCHOOL DIST. v. SCHEMPP, 374 U.S. 203 (1963). While some might consider the imposition of their beliefs via public education unnecessary, or others bemoan the lack of Biblical tutelage, the audience is one that makes the Bible the bestselling book of all time, and best every year.

Now take that half-hearted belief in teaching, and in their faith in general and apply it to the article. van Biema starts his article with a half-hearted thesis based on a bad quote, and right there, gradually strengthening his argument with small inconsequential (or wrong) arguments, and by the end, the audience cannot help but agree wholeheartedly with van Biema, there's no avoiding it. The entire article doesn't provoke any controversy at all, by essentially making a claim, and then letting the reader string him or herself along.

Another quote from Miss Kendrick and the article

The class has "gotten a lot of positive feedback," [Kendrick] adds. "It's going to really rise in popularity."

The same might be said about public-school courses on the Bible nationwide. There aren't that many. But they're rising in popularity.

I might say a lot of things that I believe in to someone who doesn't. I might, but I'd be damn sure to have some kind of fact or figure or statistic to back up my claim. To say 460 districts are using a curriculum put out for Bible teaching is not so significant when you consider that there are 13,506 school districts in the United States. Moreover, those raw numbers don't account for size of student population of said districts.

The stunning figure of two runs of 10,000 copies of a curriculum warrants examination. There is a second large publisher alluded to, but curiously Biema gives us no numbers. Since there were approximately 53,200,000 children aged 5-18 in the U.S. in 2005 and assuming 20,000 copies of the smaller publisher, and let's say 50,000 and 100,000 copies for the larger we get some interesting numbers:

70,000 / 53,200,000 = 0.001 or 1 percent...
120,000 / 53,200,000 = 0.002 or 2 percent...

Both numbers are statistically negligible.

Another quote:

These new curriculums plus polls [suggest] that over 60% of Americans favor secular teaching about the Bible.

I reread the article looking for the polls, I couldn't find any. If I missed them, I'll leave it to David van Biema or his agent/publisher contact me.

Another quote, when van Biema cites Schempp:

the skeptics ask whether it is safe to bring back the source of all that sectarianism. But a new, post-Schempp coalition insists it is essential to do so. It argues that teaching the Bible in schools--as an object of study, not God's received word--is eminently constitutional.

I think I missed the part about the post-Schempp coalition, specifically, it's name. Right there, waste of ink. I am generous with my keystrokes however, so lets give van Biema the benefit of the doubt and assume that he's really just speaking about a broader cultural current instead of a specific group. This assumption is even worse for his case. The argument becomes opinion without a name to back it up--van Biema pulls a fast one here, switching the pronoun "it" in place of "I" to create an illusion of consensus that he can't backup with fact.

Now for a clever bit, the real crux of the whole article, neatly hidden away in the midst of a paragraph, and still attributed to our imagined coalition:

The Bible so pervades Western culture, it says, that it's hard to call anyone educated who hasn't at least given thought to its key passages.

I am uneducated because I haven't read the Bible. Oh. So the last 18 years of my schooling was a waste because I didn't ever once read the Bible. Read that again: "it says, that it's"--who is saying what about whom? Screwing around with indexical adjectives lets van Biema away with authoritative murder here.

Now van Biema does the most clever thing of all. A bait and switch. Having enticed (maybe?) with his grandiose non-attributable claim that only educated people have read the Bible, he writes "Let's examine that argument". The subheading for his next paragraph, which I assume would attempt to examine said purported argument, which still carries little weight since we don't know who is arguing it, is "Is it constitutional?"

Is it constitutional to call me educated if I have not read the Bible? Obviously the two are unrelated. The heading makes no sense, but literally, there is nothing else to which his earlier sentence structures and his question refer. Again, we require a liberal interpretation. What David van Biema really means to ask is whether teaching the Bible in the classroom, via a secular approach is constitutional. A much better question, and irrelevant to examining the argument that one cannot be called educated without having read the Bible.

Flat out, the rest of the article is a diversion from that one beautifully placed rhetorically tinged sentence. van Biema knows that most people would agree that reading the Bible is edifying, so after that quick rhetorical bait and switch, the rest of the article is filler, mission accomplished.

Given time and the inclination, I think I could/would formulate a valid and convincing objection to pretty much every single point in the article. But one objection would trump any other that I could make, having to do with the already cited New Yorker article about the Bible being the best selling book ever. van Biema writes:

SIMPLY PUT, THE BIBLE IS THE MOST influential book ever written. Not only is the Bible the best-selling book of all time, it is the best-selling book of the year every year.

End of story. No need to bother teaching about or the Bible if it's influence is already so widely felt. Not only that, if it isn't even being taught and it still outsells books like Harry Potter or DaVinci Code why bother teaching it? Why bother when there are already more Bibles than people on the planet (6.7 billion Bibles, see above link).

Why bother reading such a badly crafted article that forces the reader fill in huge gaping holes in style and argument with his or her own brand of (likely) religious based inductive reasoning and justification. Why bother reading when David van Biema pulls one last quick move on the reader in his conclusion:

And, oh yes, there should be one faith test. Faith in our country. Sure, there will be bumps along the way. But in the end, what is required in teaching about the Bible in our public schools is patriotism: a belief that we live in a nation that understands the wisdom of its Constitution clearly enough to allow the most important book in its history to remain vibrantly accessible for everyone.

That's more than enough drivel for me. Such a patently obvious move there associating patriotism with religious faith. If you don't want the Bible taught, you aren't educated, nor are you a patriot. Heavy stuff. The conflation of the Constitution with religion hints at van Biema's true intent, to ensure that religiosity has a place within political discourse. So even if you agree or disagree with van Biema's twisted argument, the insidious part is that he's already won, by not arguing for or against religion's place within the body politic.