Alabama professor predicts biblical literacy next battle in public schools

A University of Alabama professor is predicting the next battleground for putting God back in the nation’s public schools will be biblical literacy.

This prediction was reported by The Dallas Morning News and came after the local school district unanimously approved an elective course in biblical literacy in late April in Odessa, Texas.

“This is ground zero in the next culture war,” Alfred Brophy, a law professor who teaches American legal history, told the newspaper.

“They’re introducing a religious curriculum into the school house, but it’s subtle. It’s the camel’s nose poking under the tent,” Brophy said.

Odessa school officials said they are intent on ensuring the proposed course meets educational and constitutional requirements.

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“This will be an academic elective on biblical literacy, not a devotional,” Superintendent Wendell SOllis told The Dallas Morning News. “We have no intention of proselytizing.”

The effort to teach biblical literacy in Odessa’s public schools began when a local citizen, John Waggoner, organized a petition drive and collected more than 6,000 signatures in support of such a class.

“We just tapped into something people are very passionate about,” Waggoner said. “The Bible is such a foundation of all that we have in this country, it just makes sense to educate children about it.”

Waggoner added that the Bible class will be “the most heavily moderated course in the school’s history,” and he doesn’t want to subject the school district to a constitutional conflict.

Elizabeth Ridenour, president of the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, told The Dallas Morning News that her organization’s curriculum is designed to help students understand the Bible in the context of its influence on culture and the arts, not as a devotional book.

“How in the world could you understand what’s going on in the Middle East today without introducing the Bible and understanding the background?” she asked. “How can [students] understand Michelangelo’s ‘Moses’ or Leonardo Davinci’s Last Supper without knowing about the figures that inspired those works of art?”

(BP)