KEY POINTS:
Now here's a hot tip for the education bureaucrats in this country who set the curriculums for all our public schools: the Bible should be designated a textbook.
Time magazine this week reports that in the United States some 460 school districts in 37 states have adopted courses on the Bible and such courses are spreading and rising in popularity.
We're not talking about Bible in Schools here. This has nothing to do with religion. It results from the realisation that the Bible ranks alongside any other history or social studies textbook if young people are to understand fully how their society developed and functions.
Thus, reports Time's chief religion writer, David Van Biema, curriculums have been developed specifically so the Bible can be taught in schools without breaching the constitutional provision for the separation of church and state.
Polls suggest that more than 60 per cent of Americans favour secular teaching about the Bible and there is a new consensus for neutral Bible study that argues that knowledge of it is essential to being a fully-fledged, well-rounded citizen.I suggest a similar poll in this country would come up with much the same result.
Van Biema reckons that the whole question is put in a nutshell in a decision of the US Supreme Court in a 1948 school secularisation case, in which Justice Robert Jackson wrote: "One can hardly respect the system of education that would leave the student wholly ignorant of the currents of religious thought that move the world society ... for which he is being prepared."
But the Time coverage also suggests that even the enjoyment of our leisure, such as watching plays and movies and reading books, would be enhanced by knowledge of the Bible. Without such knowledge, the context of films such as Babel, Superman, Pulp Fiction and The Matrix and books such as The Chronicles of Narnia and The Da Vinci Code are largely lost to viewer or reader.
"Simply put," writes Van Biema, "the Bible is the most influential book ever written. Not only is [it] the best-selling book of all time, it is the best-selling book of the year every year."
However, while polls show that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the Bible holds the answers to "all or most of life's basic questions", pollster George Gallup has dubbed the US "a nation of biblical illiterates".
Only half of American adults know the title of even one gospel and most can't name the Bible's first book. The trend extends even to Christian evangelicals, only 44 per cent of whose teenagers could identify a particular quote as coming from the Sermon on the Mount.
Don't think for a moment that applies just to American Christians. Coincidentally, the independent and non-denominational Christian newspaper Challenge Weekly (which I edit) this week devotes most of its front page to a story bemoaning that the Church in New Zealand is facing a crisis because its members aren't reading their Bibles.
The new chief executive of the Bible Society in New Zealand, Mark Brown, told the newspaper that while most Christians said they considered the Bible to be an important text, recent research suggested the number reading it regularly was low.
Of the 2048 church-attending people who were questioned, only 21 per cent read their Bible daily, 22 per cent said they read it at least weekly, while the remainder said they either read it occasionally or hardly ever.
Bible ministries in the US, Europe and Australia had reported the same alarming trend. Quoting American Professor J.H. Westerhoff, Mr Brown said it was a crisis because "unless the Bible story is known, understood, owned and lived, we and our children will not have the Christian faith".
A lecturer in religious studies at Victoria University, Chris Marshall, said what was being lost was "an awareness of the Bible's central role in shaping Christian identity and forming Christian character".
He said the leading function of the Bible was "to tell us who we are as a people, where we fit in the history of God's redemptive activity, and how we should think and act in ways that will enable us to continue living God's story faithfully".
The less Christians listened to scripture, Mr Marshall said, the more they "will accept the world as we know it as our default setting, and the less we will have to offer the world that is fresh and powerful and redemptive".
I doubt whether our education policy-makers - obsessed with ideology and blind to their system's inadequacies and failures - will take any heed of this American initiative.
It would be ironic if they did, for the state, having usurped so many functions that once were the Church's, might end up making up the slack in churchgoers' Bible reading.
