The Oak Ridger - December 20, 1999

Bible Class a Tradition in Some Tennessee Schools
by Rachel Zoll, Associated Press

OOLTEWAH -- The seventh-graders at Ooltewah Middle School squirm in their seats as Charlton Heston, perched atop ruins in the Middle East, retells a Bible story on video.

They read aloud from Exodus, stumbling over words like "Hittites" and "Canaanites." They try to recite from memory the names of the books of the New Testament. Two copies of the Ten Commandments are posted on the wall.

While Georgia debates whether to teach the Bible in schools, the practice is entrenched in parts of Tennessee. Hamilton County schools have offered a Bible course for 75 years. Dayton schools for 50. McNairy, Greene, Union, Hickman and Maury counties also offer a Bible course, according to the state Department of Education, as does Bradley County.

"I simply feel that it's very important for young people to have knowledge of the Bible," said Harriet Bond, a member of the Public School Bible Study Committee, which raises money to fund the course in Hamilton County.

"Our whole judicial system is based on Biblical principles. You cannot understand literature, you cannot understand Western civilization without knowing something about the Bible."

Such courses are permissible under federal law as long as they don't promote one religious view. The class is not on the approved list of the state Board of Education, so schools must apply for permission to offer the course as an elective.

Bond's group was formed 75 years ago by a panel of Protestant, Catholic and Jewish leaders who felt the public schools should have Bible study since private school students in Chattanooga received such instruction.

In Dayton, students from Bryan College teach the course in kindergarten through sixth-grade. The college was named for populist orator William Jennings Bryan who in 1925 traveled to Dayton for the Scopes "Monkey Trial" to argue in support of Tennessee's ban on teaching evolution in public schools.

In Bradley County, about 50 students per semester enroll in the course, using the same syllabus as Hamilton County. Topics such as creationism are balanced with other views, said Phyllis Wright, who has taught Bible for 25 years.

"I tell them this is one of the theories of creation, that evolution is also a theory and we just discuss the different theories," she said.

But the practice hasn't gone unchecked. In 1978, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit successfully challenging the Hamilton County Bible class curriculum.

"We had to change some things that sounded too much like Sunday school," Mrs. Bond said.

In the 1980s the ACLU fought for and won changes in Bible teaching at schools in Hawkins and Claiborne counties.

"They were reading Bible stories straight out of the Bible," ACLU Tennessee executive director Hedy Weinberg said. "The reason teaching the Bible is not acceptable in the public schools is they're promoting religious doctrine. What version of the Bible is being taught? Is it King James? Is it Old Testament?"

The ACLU has no pending challenges to Bible courses in Tennessee. The office receives complaints about the classes but few wind up in court, partly because critics fear their communities' angry response to a legal challenge, Weinberg said.

The potential for lawsuits alone is forcing change in some districts. Dayton likely will transform its decades-old class from Bible to character education if the School Board approves the new approach in a meeting next month. Travis Ricketts, the Bryan College history professor who oversees the course, calls the new syllabus "sanitized."

"They take the most prominent aspects of Christianity out of it," he said. "But it's still Christian values. We want to be inclusive and include people in the community in determining those values but I would reject the notion that all values are equally valuable for us. ... We're just trying to find a way to fit within the law."

Last month, Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker said he could offer no guarantees that proposed Bible courses in his state would survive potential court challenges from civil liberties groups. The Georgia Board of Education earlier this month refused to add the classes to the list of courses the state will fund.

Joseph Conners, a spokesman for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said Dayton is representative of what's occurring around the country. Groups such as the National Council for Bible Curriculum in Public Schools in Greensboro, N.C., have been promoting Bible classes, but many districts -- even if they support the idea -- won't offer the class because of a possible lawsuit, Conners said.

"It remains the exception more than the common approach," Conners said of Bible history classes. "I think public schools are rightly wary of appearing to endorse one religion over another. ... It's perfectly legal to have character education classes that don't promote a religion. A lot of schools are offering that instead."

At Ooltewah Middle School, 12-year-old seventh-grader Faith West said she has learned a lot from Bible history class.

"I think it's OK," she said. "It teaches you more and you're not like,'oh,' when you go to church."

Jonathan Kilgore, also 12 and in sixth-grade, said he thought the value of the class outweighed concerns about separation of church and state.

"It's a good thing to have in schools," he said. "You learn not to kill and to do bad stuff."

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