Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
A public policy lobbying group is in the process of preparing a proposal for Idaho’s legislature that would mandate daily Bible readings to become part of the daily routine in public schools. This would be done without comment or discussion, exclusively from the King James translation.
I personally object to a couple of things regarding this proposal as I understand it. While the King James Version of the Holy Bible rivals Shakespeare in shaping the modern English language, it is not by any means the best translation from the Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New. Mandating the exclusive use of this translation is illegitimate.
The context of any lesson, especially in the humanities, is of critical importance. To read blanket Bible verses over the loudspeaker without offering context or an opportunity for student comment or discussion would constitute an implicit endorsement of a specific religious text by schools as being objectively valid. This is neither wise nor is it Constitutional.
Having acknowledged this, the Holy Bible (Old & New Testaments) is at the heart of the canon of books that are the underpinning of our shared Western Civilization. One simply cannot understand what makes the West distinct from every other human civilization without being reasonably conversant with it and its messages.
The intrinsic valuing of every single human being that is fundamental to Western thought, law, and society originates in Scripture. Genesis asserts that each of us is made in God’s image. The Gospel of Luke in particular, and Christ’s known life in general, shows God’s interest in and love for ordinary men, women, children, and slaves. The very concept of inalienable human rights comes from the Bible.
While we get much from Classical Greco-Roman Civilization, we only recognizably become the West after Constantine the Great legalizes Christianity and sets the stage for it to become the official religion of the Roman Empire. The West is fully born in the Dark Ages, when the only intact intellectual and spiritual legacy of Ancient Rome was the Christian Church. The Christian faith is nothing less than the mote of dust around which the raindrop that is our Western Civilization cohered.
Since the 1960s, we in the West have been alone in all the world in not teaching our mainstream values in a thorough, systematic, and persistent fashion. This is in part because since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Engel v. Vitale (1962) decision forbidding school prayer, many Americans have come to conflate purposeful acculturating students into our shared Judeo-Christian Western values with propaganda and indoctrination.
If we fail to bring coming generations into a deep understanding of our common values, they will not be perpetuated into the future. With them will go everything we hold dear, from human rights to a functional Republic to toleration to intellectual liberty and a freedom of conscience that is at variance with the ruling consensus (dissent).
These are all exclusive products of the Western heritage. They are not the human norm. Throughout today’s world and across humanity’s history it is tyranny and oppression, a forced conformity, that constitutes the norm.
Our cultural heritage is unique in offering plausible models of pluralism as viable alternatives to tyranny. While our cultural heritage is not perfect, it has produced a society that millions worldwide crave so much that they are willing to risk all in the hope of joining us in it.
The Warren Court was in error in stripping prayer from school. It would not be the first time that a U.S. Supreme Court decision would have been destructive, divisive, and overturned; such as in the cases of Dredd Scott v. Sandford (1857), Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), and Roe v. Wade (1973).
Being a tolerant Judeo-Christian society, we allow those with convictions at variance from our mainstream to live in peace as participants within our society. However, there is very much a Judeo-Christian “we” that once, and should again, set the norms for our society. The overwhelming majority of Americans from all racial and ethnic groups adhere to Judeo-Christian values.
Restoring the conviction that we are a tolerant Judeo-Christian society and not a religiously neutral one is not totalitarian. To the contrary, this would restore the way that most Americans saw our society before 1962. Since then, we have systematically stripped our institutions of all references to assumed shared values and mainstream understandings in favor of a default Atheistic neuter.
This abandonment of our self-conscious Judeo-Christian Western identity has caused unprecedented problems. Declining overall birthrates, rising illegitimate birthrates, mainstreamed abortion, normalization of broken families, skyrocketing violent and property crimes, ubiquitous drug abuse, spiking suicide rates, and exponentially increasing rates of clinical depression have all exploded across our society.
Is keeping the bogeyman of a Christian Fundamentalist Theocracy at bay worth all of this needless suffering? In rejecting Judeo-Christian norms, we have abolished any shared transcendent hope from our schools. Every one of the crippling social problems referenced above originate from some form of existential despair.
Self-evidently, not all social progress after 1962 has been bad. Much of this progress has more truly fulfilled the idealistic hopes of our Founding Fathers. But it is not necessarily true that the fully realized emancipation of black Americans, normalization of women in the workplace, and toleration for homosexuality needed to be accompanied by the kind of moral and ethical dissolution and resulting human sufferings that plague modern America.
Our society will never heal, our people will never thrive, and many of our schools’ graduates will never energetically pursue their biggest dreams while we categorically refuse to reconnect Judeo-Christian hope into our mainstream culture and its institutions.
Our shared values do exist. They are the American norm. We should not be ashamed to acknowledge this. As we did from 1775 through 1962, we Americans can abide vibrant disagreement and enshrine healthy debates without scrapping our essential Judeo-Christian Western identity.
