Time for New “Old Deluder Satan” Laws?
Combatting Biblical Illiteracy in Public Education
Alas, too much of what we hear from public schools these days is stupid and toxic. It’s easy to understand the explosion of private and parochial schools, of home schooling and co-ops. Yes, as we say of the FBI, “There are many good agents in the body, but the institution as a whole needs cleansing, reorientation.” And the concern extends beyond messaging to matters of academic competence. In that connection, I read not long ago that the number of term papers I was assigned in my secondary school days was as much as three times what’s laid upon students today. And it’s not at all clear that the teachers are well-equipped to write or grade an excellent one themselves, given the decline in their own education.
A good indicator of their lameness is the extent to which they’re willing to pass along (indeed, indoctrinate in) the tendentious dreck served up by Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States) and Nikole Hanna-Jones (The 1619 Project). Maybe they fear for their jobs should they dissent. Or maybe their critical faculties are so nascent or depleted that they’re more than happy to pass along, with conviction and zeal, the latest LGBTQ+, BLM, DEI, and CRT/I conceit. Whether to liberate callow youth from their traditional convictions or maintain their own positions in the government school system, they serve up a lot of nonsense.
I asked my daughter about her public-school experiences. Thanks to her inexcusably thoughtless, peripatetic father, she found herself in three different high schools within a twelve-month period. In each, she was assigned Marx’s Communist Manifesto, but not a single passage from the Bible. (The closest she came was through assignment of Tony Morrison’s Song of Solomon, with a Bible-book name, but it is a nasty, thoroughly unbiblical piece of work.) And she remembers in particular a materialist middle-school teacher who served up Darwin to tout a godless universe.
So, what are serious Christians parents to do? Vouchers for alternative providers sound good. But what if they applied them to Muslim madrasas? And isn’t it the case that what the government funds, the government controls? And then there’s the matter of church-state separation. We Southern Baptists affirm a “free church in a free state,” but how fair is it for godly parents to pay taxes to support government schools which are arguably marinated in another religion?
What’s to be done? Though a Baptist, indebted to Roger Williams who was expelled from Massachusetts Bay colony in 1635, I think back to that same colony, which, in 1647, passed the Old Deluder Satan Act , requiring each town with at least fifty families to establish a school to teach the kids to read and write. They wanted to ensure that children could access the Bible. This would prepare them to deal with the devil, in whom, according to Jesus there is no truth: “When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”
When I hit fifth grade in Arkansas in the 1950s, we had daily Bible readings in the classroom, thanks to Mrs. Hale. Then, a couple of years later, the Gideons had charge of one of our junior high assemblies. Those were the days. Or not, according to the prevailing legal and cultural consensus. Sure enough, only a year or so after we got our free Gideon New Testaments, the Supreme Court, through Abington School District v. Schempp, shut that down.
But these twentieth-century rulings came too late to fully satisfy the Father of Lies. Thanks to the public schools, we were more or less learning to read just the same, and we had generous access to Bibles out in the world, many of them in our homes. Even then teaching of American church history—the effect of the Bible— was absent. I did not learn about Jonathan Edwards and the great American revivals until I was a freshman in college, and then from a Newsweek article. But at least biblical literacy was comparatively high.
Of course, reading competency has been dropping through the years, but all sorts of child-and-youth-level versions have emerged, including Ken Taylor’s Living Bible. As a Moody Press editor in downtown Chicago in the 1960s, he worked on this paraphrase for his kids while he was riding the train from and to his home in Wheaton. Granted, not everyone was pleased with Taylor’s work, including a Nashville pastor who picketed our local Baptist bookstore for selling a version that used, regarding Mary, the blunt word “pregnant” in place of “with child.”
Thus, the King James Version was sliding out of prominence, what with its often-archaic language. A few months back, I bought a marked-up, $5 copy from Goodwill, one I could annotate with ink without feeling like a vandal, and it’s been fun to reacquaint myself with words like “victuals,” “fain,” “trow,” “scrip,” “holden,” and “ensample,” plus the correct use of “presently” (as “soon,” not “now”). Then there’s the daunting verse, Philippians 1:8: “For God is my record, how greatly I long after you all in the bowels [deep-seated affection] of Jesus Christ.” In other words, it’s not just SCOTUS precedent that make it tough to get the authorized version back in the hands of schoolboys.
It is not just that the courts want Bibles out of schools, or that kids can’t read half the words in the King’s English. There is outright hostility in the curriculum itself. Many public schools have now turned on the Bible, pushing things it rejects, twisting its message, and ignoring its voice altogether. So, perhaps it’s time to draft some sort of new “Old Deluder Satan” law to rescue our kids from spiritually perilous stupidity.
Be that as it may, only a handful of students can name the Ten Commandments today. And only a tiny number could recite the books of the Bible. Despite the ready availability of utterly readable translations, scripture illiteracy is the rule. The left has gone to great expense to poison public education with mendacity, to smear Christianity with post-colonial garble, and to adulterate America’s once culturally prevalent biblical ethic. If Scripture is publicly cited today by politicians, it is usually to twist it to social justice ends. Again, what is to be done?
I’m not suggesting that taxpayers underwrite catechesis for all the nation’s kids, but shouldn’t the schools familiarize students with the Bible? After all, it’s the book upon which 43 of our presidents have taken the oath of office, including George Washington and everyone since 1923. (That’s when Calvin Coolidge took it in his Vermont home upon hearing that Warren Harding had died; his father, a justice of the peace, presided Bibleless in the parlor in the wee hours of the morning.)
Of course, high commendation for this book is not limited to believers. Even such decidedly non-Christian men as W.E.B. DuBois and Christopher Hitchens attested to its critical place in our culture. The former observed, “There are certain books in the world which every search for truth must know—the Bible, the Critique of Pure Reason, The Origin of Species, and Karl Marx’s Capital”; the latter said, “You are not educated if you don’t know the Bible. You can’t read Shakespeare or Milton without it . . .”
That being said, let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine that you, a public-school teacher, posed for discussion one of these Bible-connected questions in your classroom:
1. Does Romans 7 proscribe anarchy? What about civil disobedience?
2. Does the E (Equity) in DEI track with biblical teaching on justice? If ‘equity’ means “similarity of outcomes,” how does it accommodate the ways and fortunes of slackers (Proverbs 24) and fools (Proverbs 26)?
3. Does God’s promise in Genesis 9 undermine the apocalyptic messages in such films as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and The Day After Tomorrow, starring Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal?
4. Can homosexual behavior square with God’s created order, spelled out in the opening chapters of Genesis and Romans?
5. Proverbs 14:12 reads, “There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end, it leads to death.” Should this put a hitch in our enthusiasm for running free with our feelings, our passions, and our self-expression?
6. Doesn’t the creation account in Genesis 1 undermine our confidence in Darwin’s version of the “origin of species”? Did the judge in the Kitzmiller case overreach when he disallowed the teaching of “intelligent design” as a supplemental alternative to a purely evolutionary explanation for the appearance of humanity?
7. In 2003, PETA published a series of ads comparing turkeys in a factory farm enclosure with Jews in an Auschwitz dorm. They read, “Holocaust on a Plate” and appeared in the fall, so as to influence the composition of Thanksgiving and Christmas meals. Is there biblical warrant for such a comparison?
8. The Society of Christian Philosophers meets in conjunction with the American Philosophical Association’s annual gatherings. They have a journal called Faith and Philosophy. Are these two realms—Christian faith and the work of philosophers—like oil and water, essentially incompatible? Does the Bible have anything to say about it?
9. How might the Noahic Covenant in Genesis 9, the lex talionis in Exodus 21, and talk of the ruler’s sword in Romans 7 speak to the issue of capital punishment?
10. Does the Bible support dividing humanity into two classes, the oppressors and the oppressed? If not, what overarching division or divisions does it teach?
11. Which of the Ten Commandments affirms property rights?
12. Does Psalm 139 have anything to say about abortion?
13. When someone campaigns for “Palestinian” dominion “from the river to the sea,” which river and which sea? And is there any biblical pushback to that chant?
14. What physical object did Jesus hold up as he addressed the question of the relationship between “church and state”?
15. Which of the Ten Commandments discourages a politics of envy and resentment over another’s prosperity?
16. In his play, No Exit, Jean-Paul Sartre, presents a notion of hell as essentially having to abide with other people. Is this the Bible’s teaching on the subject?
17. Why do you think that Christianity is distinguished as the singing faith, what with its hymns, oratorios, cantatas, requiems, spirituals, gospel songs (Southern, urban), Gregorian chants, psalters, hip hop, CCC, etc.?
18. Can you think of any passages that teach that utopian schemes which promise some sort of “heaven on earth” are delusional?
19. Do you see any linkage between Romans 2:14-15 and the universal incest taboo?
20. Which one of these expressions doesn’t come from the Bible?: 1. ‘feet of clay,’ 2. ‘writing on the wall,’ 3. ‘wild goose chase,’ or 4. the blind leading the blind’?
Float just one of these questions in the public-school classroom, and you’d very likely see blank stares, as if you’d asked them what’s the going rate for durian in Jakarta. Just as likely, you’d need to run for cover. You’re not supposed to use such language—Bible talk—as an indignant student once told me when I was serving as a sub in Evanston Township High School on Chicago’s North Shore. In contrast, the students, colleagues, and administrators would quite possibly admire a reverential quote from the Koran, Dhammapada, or Upanishads. What could be cooler than to display your multi-culti credentials, signaling indifference to the special status of the Bible?
So, what are we to do? Granted, church-state puzzles are challenging, but I don’t think they’re insoluble. At Christmastime 2023, I gave it a shot regarding the Satan statue in the Iowa statehouse, and I think there’s carryover to the school issue. In short, it’s entirely appropriate for America to give special honor and place to the Bible while accommodating dissent.
As our founders knew, you can’t build an ideal nation on atheism, animism, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism. That’s been tried (and is being tried) with sad results, typically as the other religionists try to choke out rival religious and irreligious voices. So again, it would be dangerously moronic for the US to act as though it were metaphysically baffled when it came to the framing of public policy.
What, then, might we do to ensure that all our kids get it, that they have a decent chance to comprehend the book on which our presidents have sworn to uphold the Constitution? I can only brainstorm at this point, but here goes:
1. Spread across the four years of high school, a series of survey tests keyed to the divisions of the Bible, e.g., Freshman (Torah and Old Testament History), Sophomore (Poetry/Wisdom and Prophets, both Major and Minor), Junior (Gospels and Acts), Senior (Epistles and Revelation). Just the basics of content, whether persons (Isaiah and Paul), places (Sinai and Galilee), events (the Babylonian Captivity and the Crucifixion), or teachings (the Decalogue and the Sermon on the Mount). That sort of thing. Multiple choice will do. No special courses are necessary. Students can read sufficiently on their own to do well (approximately 300 pages per year). And yes, flunking these tests could hinder advancement even as flunking math, English, or history could cost you.
2. Special assemblies, respectfully featuring visiting speakers on the opposing topics, “Why I Cherish the Bible” and “Why I Don’t Cherish the Bible.” Perhaps face-to-face debates would be a better option. Either way, the disputants could point to scriptural texts, historical connections, personal experiences, or philosophical perspectives—whatever they think might carry the day. And Christians shouldn’t suppose that this defeats the purpose of lifting up the Bible, for they have the confidence that the book “is an anvil which has worn out many hammers” and that there is a “self-authenticating” character to the book. Besides, we’re supposed to be a discursive society, with the faithful “seeking to persuade [not coerce] people.” And you can be sure the skeptics’ pushback would stir up a bunch of young apologists as well as a fresh inquirers.
3. Vouchers could be given to students attending secular or heterodox religious schools (even those of the Muslim persuasion) if they and the schools agreed to honor the survey-test and competing-speakers requirements.
I’ve often heard that public education is for citizenship. Okay, there’s a nice fit with the test-prep questionnaire presented by the US Citizenship and Immigration Service. It includes, “How many amendments does the Constitution have?”; “What is the capital of your state?”; “What is the last day you can send in federal income tax forms?”; “Name one American Indian tribe”; “Why does the flag have thirteen stripes?”
The USCIS quiz also includes “Name two national U.S. holidays.” One of them is Christmas, a day set aside in 1870, the legislation signed by President Grant. That bill also included New Year’s Day and July Fourth, saying that they should be treated as if they were Sunday. There we go again, more Bible talk woven into our national fabric. Doesn’t it make sense to bring our students up to speed as citizens on what Christmas and Sunday are all about, whether or not they choose to respect them?
That’s my opening suggestion for vexing the Old Deluder, who is as surely at work in 2025 as he was in 1647 in New England. Perhaps, most Christians would prefer to avail themselves of private education. There will certainly be less resistance there to my kind of proposal. But the public schools exist. They may not be educating your children, but they are educating your neighbor’s children. You may not be that interested in your neighbors or the local public school, but the Old Deluder definitely is.
Image Credit: Unsplash.