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Should the Bible be taught as a secular course in public high schools? Not a bad idea, concludes David Van Biema, Time magazine’s senior religion writer, in a recent essay. But not such a good one either, responds professor Stanley Fish, recently of UIC, in an op-ed in the New York Times. In order to disagree with Van Biema, Fish first quotes one of his witnesses, Stephen Prothero, chair of the department of religion at Boston University. “The academic study of religion provides a kind of middle space . . .” Prothero says in Time. “It takes the biblical truth claims seriously and yet brackets them for purposes of classroom discussion.” And Fish snaps, “But that’s like studying the justice system and bracketing the question of justice. (How do you take something seriously by putting it on the shelf?) The truth claims of a religion — at least of religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam — are not incidental to its identity; they are its identity. . . .
Is he saying religion is too important to be studied? In fact the question of justice is bracketed in law schools, which aren’t called schools of justice. But the idea of justice survives. Brackets aren’t the devil’s tool. Furthermore, Fish is misrepresenting what the “secular project” can accomplish. When he argues that to teach the Bible as a “secular text” is to miss its point, he himself is missing the point that it’s not simply the text but the truth claims made by it and of it that command our attention. Who in his or her right mind would propose studying the Koran in our schools as a secular text? It needs to be studied because it commands the devotion of hundreds of millions of people.
