Should the Bible Be Taught in Public Schools? No.

Earlier this summer, the Texas State Board of Education approved a list of mandated texts, making it the first state in the nation to have a statewide required reading list. Out of the roughly 200 mandated works, about a dozen are Bible passages. The selections are spread from second grade through senior year of high school. The list takes effect starting in the 2030–31 school year.

Not surprisingly, the inclusion of biblical texts has sparked the usual divides across partisan cultural lines. Yet the reading list has also received both opposition and support from surprising places. Adam Kirsch, a secular Jewish writer and senior editor of The Atlantic, recently wrote an essay titled “The Bible Belongs in the Classroom.” And at least one theologically conservative leader has expressed vehement opposition to such a requirement.

“For my part, I have no hesitation in saying that I am strongly opposed to it,” he said. “I think I am just about as strongly opposed to the reading of the Bible in state-controlled schools as any atheist could be.”

Admittedly, this criticism was made before the Texas State Board of Education decision was released. In fact, it was made 93 years ago at an education convention by J. Gresham Machen.

Machen (1881–1937) was a New Testament scholar at Princeton Theological Seminary and the leading conservative voice in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the 1920s and ’30s. He left Princeton to found Westminster Theological Seminary and helped establish what became the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. His book Christianity and Liberalism (1923) remains the classic argument that liberal Protestantism isn’t just a variant of Christianity but a different religion altogether.

Three Reasons That Still Apply

Machen is worth hearing on this issue precisely because no one can accuse him of theological squishiness or embarrassment about the Bible. He gave his career, his reputation, and eventually his denominational standing to defend the full authority of Scripture.

Why, then, did he so strongly oppose Bible reading in public schools? His reasons are worth considering today.

1. The Bible is unlike any other book ever written.

The Bible is the most important text ever produced in the entire history of the universe. It’s the most important text any child will ever read. As Tony Reinke says, “Since Moses descended from the mountain with two loose-leaf stones under his arms, all literature can be divided into two genres,  Genre A: The Bible . . . Genre B: All other books.”

Yet the way Texas plans to teach the Bible is to treat it as merely a part of Genre B—and not even the most important part. From sixth grade to senior year, each Bible passage is connected to a thematic grouping of readings connected to an “anchor text.” For instance, Matthew 6:25–34 (whose theme, as the ESV headline points out, is “Do Not Be Anxious”) is included as a grouping with the novel All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot, two poems (“The Power of the Dog” by Rudyard Kipling and “The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry), and a short story (“A White Heron” by Sarah Orne Jewett).

No one can accuse Machen of theological squishiness or embarrassment about the Bible.

What connects these texts is the relationship between humans and the world of animals and nature. While the Matthew passage is tangentially about that connection (“Look at the birds of the air. . . . Consider the lilies of the field”), the main point Jesus is making is about trusting in God. Yet of the two competing messages—we should care about animals, and God cares about us—which are sixth graders likely to take from the reading, especially when it’s framed by the context of those other literary works?

Similarly, the section on “The Eight Beatitudes” is grouped with the anchor novel The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton, and Psalm 23 (“The LORD is my shepherd”) is tied with The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank.

Even if we were to set aside the problem of reading these passages in the context of other secular works, we still have the problem of unorthodox bias. As Machen points out, “The reading of the Bible is very difficult to separate from propaganda about the Bible.” His example was a school reader whose “selections” quietly presupposed a naturalistic view of the Old Testament. We see this in the way the selections in Texas are arranged, with each being connected to a broader theme rooted in a generic humanistic worldview.

It’s shocking that the same people who don’t trust public school teachers to teach history, literature, or science in a sufficiently unbiased way endorse having those same teachers teach interpretation of Scripture.

2. It trades the gospel for civil religion and cultural literacy.

Some Christians may agree that allowing state employees to interpret Scripture is less than ideal. But they’ll counter that knowing the Bible is necessary for understanding cultural references or creating a moral citizenry.

On this point, believers share common ground with many non-Christians. For instance, in Kirsch’s Atlantic essay, he argues, “For a high-school graduate not to know about the parting of the Red Sea or the Sermon on the Mount is a disadvantage, for the same reason that not knowing about the Puritans or the Civil War is a disadvantage: It leaves them ill-equipped to understand America’s past, and therefore its present and future.”

This might seem unobjectionable, as would the idea that reading the Bible is helpful for character-building. But Machen finds this secular use of the Bible contrary to our faith.

“What surprises me about this program is not that its advocates propose it; for it is only too well in accord with the spirit of the age,” says Machen. “But what really surprises me about it is that the advocates of it seem to think that a Christian can support it without ceasing at that point to be Christian.”

Machen refuses “character education” on a “civilization basis” and any study of “religion” in general, calling that syncretism “the deadliest enemy of the Christian Faith.”

Using the words of Scripture—stripped of the requirement to see Jesus as Lord—to promote civics, character formation, or national heritage is a replacement of the biblical orthodox faith for generic civic religion.

3. A ‘garbled Bible is a falsified Bible.’

Perhaps the sharpest criticism Machen offers is how reading the “ethical portions” apart from the redemptive core makes the Bible say “the direct opposite of what it really says.” The example he uses is non-Christian children reciting the Lord’s Prayer as though “Our Father” belongs to man as man.

The Texas requirement does something similar in having children read Psalm 23. Reciting words claiming “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want” is providing false hope for those who don’t know Jesus as the Good Shepherd. What they’ll get from this and the other Bible passages is an optimism about human nature without a doctrine of sin. That’s a false gospel. It’s not using the text to make Christians but to make moralistic therapeutic deists.

Why would Christians want the state teaching a Christless Bible as if it were the real thing?

Where We Disagree

Many Bible-believing Christians will disagree with Machen—and with me—about the Bible’s role in public schools. Yet I hope such disagreement can remain free of hostility and suspicion of motives.

Those who welcome the Texas reading list aren’t (necessarily) seeking a theocracy; they simply want children to encounter the most important book ever written, in a culture that increasingly treats it as optional. And those of us who object aren’t (necessarily) embarrassed by Scripture or eager to surrender public life to secularism.

It’s not using the text to make Christians but to make moralistic therapeutic deists.

The question that divides us isn’t whether the Bible deserves a central place in the formation of children—on that we agree—but whether a state curriculum is capable of giving it the place it deserves.

Machen’s answer, and mine, is that it isn’t. We believe that the responsibility to teach God’s Word to children remains where God assigned it: with parents and with the church. Machen opposed handing it to the state because he believed both Scripture and kids deserved better. So, I believe, should we.

Addendum: The following is the list of Bible passages Texas will be requiring, along with the translation mandated:

• Grade 2: David and Goliath (excerpt from The Children’s Book of Heroes)
• Grade 3: ROAR! – Daniel and the Lion’s Den – Children’s Adapted Version, CBN
• Grade 4: The Necessity of Humility (Book of Luke, Chapter 14, Verses 7–11), New International Reader’s Version
• Grade 5: Moses (Book of Exodus, Chapter 3: The Burning Bush and Book of Exodus, and Chapter 14: The Parting of the Red Sea), New International Reader’s Version
• Grade 6: Do Not Be Anxious (Book of Matthew, Chapter 6, Verses 25–34), ESV
• Grade 7: The Shepherd’s Psalm (Book of Psalms, Chapter 23)
• Grade 7: The Eight Beatitudes (Book of Matthew, Chapter 5, Verses 1–12)
• Grade 8: To Everything There Is a Season (Book of Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3), KJV
• Grade 8: Book of Lamentations, Chapter 3, Tanakh: Jewish Publication Society 1917
• English I: Parable of the Prodigal Son (Book of Luke, Chapter 15, Verses 11–32), ESV
• English II: The Book of Job (Book of Job, Chapters 1–7, 11, 14, 19, 28, 38–42), New International Reader’s Version
• English III: Adam and Eve (Book of Genesis, Chapters 2 and 3, New International Reader’s Version
• English IV: The Definition of Love (Book of 1 Corinthians, Chapter 13), ESV