A good look at the Good Book

Special Issue | Teaching the Bible in public schools just got easier | Gene Edward Veith, Lynn Vincent

When John Steinbeck called his 1952 tale of two families' migration, angst, and betrayal East of Eden, he had good reason to believe most readers would recognize the title as a biblical allusion to humanity's exile from earthly paradise. America then was still an unabashedly Christian nation and the Bible was still the Good Book.

Today, though, the Bible itself is in exile from many public schools, as administrators—even those not hostile to biblical faiths—feel the Good Book is more legal trouble than it's worth.

Though the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that public schools may teach about the Bible so long as that teaching isn't religious, many schools, lacking appropriate curricula, have simply steered clear. That's a problem, according to college and high-school English teachers who overwhelmingly say that biblical ignorance equals cultural and historical ignorance.