Alabama Bill's Required Textbook Raises School Board Members' Concerns
by Jim Brown and Jenni Parker
December 16, 2005
(AgapePress) - - Some members of the Alabama Board of Education are objecting to a bill in the state legislature that would require schools offering a biblical literacy elective to use a controversial textbook on the Bible. (See earlier article) The measure, House Bill 58, is being sponsored by two Alabama Democrats and would require that Bible literacy electives offered statewide use The Bible and its Influence, a textbook published by the Virginia-based Bible Literacy Project. However, Alabama school board members Stephanie Bell and Betty Peters are leery about mandating the book, partly because it has not been approved by an Alabama textbook committee or by the state or local school boards.
Peters feels House Bill 58 is not only ill advised but unnecessary. "It mandates that only one textbook could be used," she emphasizes, "and this book has not been reviewed in the state, which is unusual. And one of the other main things is we already allow the schools to offer an elective on Bible literacy -- you know, the Bible in history or Bible in literature."
The Bible Course Conundrum -- A Question of Content or Competition?
In fact, a number of Alabama schools are already offering a Bible elective called "The Bible in History and Literature," based on course materials put out by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools (NCBCPS). That curriculum has widespread approval across the U.S., having been voted into 312 school districts in 37 states and with 92 percent of the school boards that have been approached with it to-date electing to implement it.
The NCBCPS curriculum has been endorsed by a lengthy list of pro-family groups like Concerned Women for America and the Family Research Council, educator associations like the Foundation for Academic Excellence, and legal organizations such as the American Center for Law and Justice, Liberty Council, and the Pacific Justice Institute. Nevertheless members and supporters of the Bible Literacy Project have criticized the competing NCBCPS curriculum as containing serious factual inaccuracies and being overly sectarian -- not to mention possibly unconstitutional.
But Peters has concerns about the content of the Bible Literacy Project text that the education bill before the Alabama legislature proposes to make mandatory. She notes, "Some of the things in there seem to raise some question on the authority of the Bible, kind of getting into theology whereas I thought this was not supposed to be about theology."
The Alabama school board member says she thought Bible literacy electives were supposed to be "about how certain references in poetry or art or music or whatever would be alluding to the Bible, and if you didn't understand where they came from, you couldn't understand, say, the poem or the short story." She feels passage of a bill requiring a textbook that has yet to be officially reviewed and that delves into theological controversies would be counterproductive.
Peters has attempted to make public her concerns about mandating The Bible and Its Influence for use in Alabama schools, but she says the Gannet-owned Montgomery Advertiser newspaper refused to publish her press release on House Bill 58. A key spokesman for the Bible Literacy Project, Charles Haynes, is a senior scholar with the Freedom Forum, which was formerly known as the Gannett Foundation.
Haynes, who also worked at one time for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, helped to develop the standards of the Bible Literacy Project's curriculum. He also served on the advisory board of "The Pluralism Project," a Harvard-based study commissioned to explore, among other things, "the real challenges and opportunities of a public commitment to pluralism in the light of the new religious contours of America."
