"No attempt is made to indoctrinate students as to the truth or falsity of the biblical documents."
That's from my course description. It's not easy to carry out. I once received a call from a local college student who was writing an expose' of public school Bible teachers in Chattanooga. He asked me if I told students that the virgin birth of Jesus is an irrational notion. I answered, "Is that something I should have to say?"
Here is what the columnist James Kilpatrick wrote in the early '80s, after a federal district court invalidated a Bible program in the Bristol, Va., public schools, because of its "strong religious overlay."
The line that divides propaganda from instruction is a wavering line drawn on shifting sands. If a teacher breathes one word suggesting that Genesis is "true," that teacher is in trouble with the Civil Liberties Union; if a teacher implies that Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were apocryphal or symbolic figures, the local fundamentalists will be after the teacher's scalp.
Whatever else the Bible may be, the Bible is in fact literature. The trick is to teach it that way.
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