Scripture in schools?

“A native speaker of English who has never read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian.”

Thus wrote the famous atheist Richard Dawkins a year ago in The Guardian, responding to recent efforts by British and American educators to mandate the Bible as necessary for a basic knowledge of Western culture.

Without Scripture, he argues, it is impossible to understand Shakespeare. European history becomes senseless. Expressions such as “filthy lucre,” “go the extra mile,” and “salt of the earth” are meaningless.

Dawkins hates Christianity. He thinks God is one of the nastiest characters around. But he thinks that the Bible is as fundamental to a secular understanding of Western civilization as to a religious one. He’s right.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1963 that “the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities.” Consider these other words from 1963: “I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low.” That’s Martin Luther King Jr., with an assist from the King James translation of Isaiah.

Imagine trying to understand those words, the Emancipation Proclamation, and Rosa Parks while censoring the Articles of Confederation. The same thing happens if you teach American or European culture sans Scripture. You can reject John C. Calhoun and the cruel God of the Old Testament, but you can’t ignore them. The year 2013 can dismiss the Bible when it also dismisses the preceding 20 centuries.

You can’t force a faith on students in public schools. But if “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Catcher in the Rye” are important enough for every American high schooler to read, the Bible has to be close behind. Hamlet, Isaac Newton, and Thomas Jefferson never quoted Atticus Finch.

Aquinas on Augustine

"'Since God is the highest good, he would not allow any evil to exist in His works, unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil.' This is part of the infinite goodness of God, that he should allow evil to exist, and out of it produce good."

Church

Things happen fast freshman year. New people and priorities speed by, the girlfriend your parents met over fall break is replaced by Thanksgiving, and you’ve had three different majors in a month. That’s ok. It’s all part of growing up. But you shouldn’t treat your church the same way.

Year one of college is all about breaking you down, reexamining assumptions and cutting through bias to get to truth. A certain amount of that is healthy in a religious context. After all, religion or faith is the umbrella for most truth claims people make. The evangelicals I grew up with needed shaking to realize that not all Christians are Republicans and not all Catholics are evil. It is good to wrestle with God and to climb the mountain of faith (a solid C+ freshman paper topic on Dante). But inquiry is different from flakiness. It’s bad to be noncommittal.  

In my four years here, I’ve seen a pretty clear pattern emerge. A freshman starts by going to College Baptist or the campus Presbyterian church because they’re within walking distance. But Baptists are kind of boring, and Rev. Henes has an annoying voice, so they move on to Free Methodist and make the inevitable joke about why they really like going there. On top of the drugs, of course, Pastor Keith is awesome! He’s so energetic. He really gets you fired up. After a couple weeks, though, someone finally asks the question, “Do you think he yells too much?” Maybe Free Meth isn’t your thing after all.

Cue Country Side and Pine Ridge, but they’re pretty far away. Perhaps the real problem is that you’ve only tried Protestant churches. Maybe, instead of being the Death Star, the Catholic parish is calling you home. But that’s a big jump to make, so people split their time between Holy Trinity and St. Anthony’s, feeling Catholic but too afraid to join up on Easter. Or even that could be too mainstream, and you ought to loosen up a bit and dive in with Dostoevsky, some incense, and the edgy fathers of the East (Dude, did they really just contradict Augustine?)

This might not be such a problem if the church shopping ended by second semester or even the beginning of sophomore year. But the game of ecclesiastical roulette so often continues for juniors and seniors. College grows you unlike anything that precedes it. Every semester is a new challenge, a new heartache, a new intellectual pursuit. Something has to be stable. Someone has to be providing counsel and spiritual support. These four years can be a time of great mentorship, development of faith outside the context of home, and sanctification. Or they can be a tapas spread of dishes you never eat enough of to make you strong.

Sometimes even organizations such as Hillsdale Christian Fellowship, intended to help with community and stability, only aggravate the problem. For many, it’s a great time for encouragement and as a supplement to Sunday worship. For others, it’s an opportunity to get their Jesus for the week without having to give something back. Which is the real root problem here, the mentality that a church service is about God serving you.

Worship is hard work. Worshipping daily requires commitment, not just to the Lord, but to his people. Before asking what’s wrong with your church, ask yourself about the last time you offered to teach Sunday school, babysit those crying kids, or lead the music. Have you grabbed coffee with your pastor? Have you ever tithed? .

Ask hard questions of your faith. Don’t presume you know everything. Reread those controversial passages. But see if a little bit of self-sacrifice helps that lack of connection to Christ’s. And please, commit to a church. 

From the Collegian

My most vivid image from a childhood spent reading is a tall, skinny man cracking his thin, spidery fingers in front of a low fire. He has a shock of grizzled, unruly hair, shining eyes, and a long, pointed nose. I still get a pleasant shiver of horror the moment he rises from his seemingly empty armchair and locks his office door behind the children Digory and Jill.

It’s just a spooky picture for a child. But the wicked old man’s words in that scene have been a key lesson in my development as a student. Those words are why every incoming freshman should have to read C.S. Lewis’ “The Magician’s Nephew” before starting school.

When Digory accuses Uncle Andrew, the magician, of telling lies, he responds with these words:

“Rules of that sort, however excellent they may be for little boys – and servants – and women – and even people in general, can’t possibly be expected to apply to profound students and great thinkers and sages. No, Digory. Men like me, who possess hidden wisdom, are freed from common rules just as we are cut off from common pleasures. Ours, my boy, is a high and lonely destiny.”

Digory is tempted to buy it. For just a moment, Uncle Andrew looks so wise and spiritual and grand. It’s a hard temptation for us to avoid, too. In our world, great men with scholarly titles speak like gods to the unread masses, their words processed through pop literature and news-station interviews. Emerging from this sea of media-controlled cretins comes the corps of college kids headed to the Ivy League, Stanford, and Duke — ready to be molded by the untouchable professor and become the next man behind the curtain. It’s the quiet siren call of academia, that those who know have power and are free to use it. For an 18-year-old gifted with intelligence, education, a little pocket money, and a lot of swagger, that hidden wisdom becomes a glittering ladder out of a stupid job, stupid friends, stupid parents. For the less blatantly self-centered, it’s an appeal that whispers to the basic human fantasy of standing alone; the tragic hero wages a gargantuan battle against the forces of evil — whether that be queer theory for the “conservative” or exploitative capitalism for the “liberal”.

But Digory is better than that.

“‘All it means,’ he said to himself, ‘is that he thinks he can do anything he likes to get anything he wants.’”

At commencement my freshman year, the senior class president Jon Gregg issued an exhortation to his fellows: If your education leads you into pride, it has failed. Higher studies are worthless unless they teach you how to love the world and the people who live in it. I don’t remember who the main speaker was. I think he talked about Churchill.

Love and humility — wonderful things for a senior to have learned in his four years. But it’s so easy to miss those things, to let knowledge pass over your heart as it goes to your head. As “The Magician’s Nephew” progresses, Andrew’s ivory-tower pride gives way to Digory’s crucial choice: he rejects becoming a tyrant in Narnia and by his faithfulness saves his mother’s life. Ours is not a high and lonely destiny. We still have to go to the grocery store, buy gas, and drop our kids off at school. We are men, placed among a community of men, and dependent on all the others just as they depend on us.

Before honor comes humility. If we speak with the tongues of Washington and Aristotle, but have not love, our education has made us worse.

That’s the first lesson freshmen need to hear.

From the Collegian

If the Boy Scouts of America upholds the ban on gay members in May, the organization will have violated the core of its mission statement: “to prepare young people to make ethical and moral choices over their lifetimes by instilling in them the values of the Scout Oath and Law.” The BSA should vote to allow gays to participate in its local troops. That doesn’t mean the BSA should also choose gays as troop leaders.

Almost nobody wants Boy-Scoutness to go away. It would take a very loose reading, however, to argue that the Scout Oath and Law allows for homosexual acts. The document’s admonition to be “morally straight,” given the BSA’s evangelical history, pretty much covers any form of sex outside of traditional marriage. The code’s principles — Scouts are courteous, clean, cheerful, and reverent, to name a few — also rule out lying, swearing, disrespecting a parent, being grumpy, and even having body odor or belching in public. If the Boy Scouts are going to kick out the gays, then they should also toss out all the young men who look at girls the wrong way. But that would seem strange for a group committed to moral education. The mission statement uses the words “prepare” and “instill,” rather than “cultivate” or “enhance,” for a reason. Boys sin. Who needs Scouts if every kid’s already an angel?

The term “sin” fits because the Boy Scouts of America are fundamentally religious. If the churches and synagogues (the sponsors of 70 percent of local troops) have the right to publicly oppose homosexuality, so should the BSA. The Supreme Court upheld that right in 2000. But while the more conservative of those churches won’t ordain a homosexual pastor or accept gays as voting members, they aren’t running them out of the pews Sunday morning. They believe the gay lifestyle means distance from God, and the point of evangelism is to bring people nearer to God. It’s hard to do that if you make rules against people listening to you.

The same concept applies here. How many gay men grew up without a father figure and close male peers? How absurd is it to deprive a struggling kid of a great source of healthy masculine interaction and mentorship? Won’t it do infinitely more good to get a boy into the woods — building fires and filleting fish with his buddies and admiring the cool and capable Scout Leader — than to leave him stuck in his room wallowing in loneliness and self-loathing?

This mentorship is the key word in the second part of the current debate — whether to allow gay leaders. If the Boy Scouts’ goal is to educate honorable Judeo-Christian men, the answer has to be no. Students by definition are less virtuous or knowledgeable than their teachers, and grow up by opening themselves to his influence and emulating his example. They get grace and wiggle-room because they are there to learn and to change. While it’s a teachers’ cliche that they also learn from their students, the standard for them must be more rigid. If gay men are leading the boys, the BSA is suddenly teaching something contrary to its 100-year-long beliefs. But they need to get over being uncomfortable with the boys themselves.

There seems to be a general feeling among straight guys that showing compassion to gays would taint them, and that machismo proves they are secure in their sexuality. A young Jew once led 12 confused, tired, messed-up kids on a three-year hike all over Israel, teaching them a different way to be a man. Call him the first Scout Leader. He said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” He made friends with thieves and prostitutes. He loved murderers. A gay teenager wouldn’t have fazed him.

The Boy Scouts need to stay true to their mission. They should uphold the spirit of their tradition and make sure their troop leaders are dedicated to their core virtues.

But they can’t shun the boys who need them most.