JLA, interesting article...
Textbooks ignore role of religion in King?s life
usatoday.com
By Gerald L. Zelizer
Ten days before the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in 1968, he exhorted rabbis gathered at a convention to participate in his struggle against racial injustice.
Moved by the power of his oratory, many of us rose from our seats and left the meeting to assist him in planning a march of religious conscience in Washington, D.C. We could not disregard the straight line he drew between the black struggle and the prophet Amos' pronouncement: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream."
Today's public understands that King was a civil rights reformer. They also know that he was a minister. What many do not realize is the extent to which his passion was borne out of his religious tradition.
Much of this ignorance is due to the silence of our public school textbooks, which either gloss over or are mute about the degree to which King drew upon his religious beliefs. Instead, textbooks tend to focus on secular thinkers who influenced him, such as Mahatma Gandhi and Henry David Thoreau.
Most public school textbooks are tepid - or, even worse, silent - about religious ideas.
Consider, for example, schoolbooks in my central New Jersey county. While one explains that King felt a "passionate devotion to biblical and constitutional conceptions of justice," another fleetingly mentions that he was a Baptist minister, then dwells on the principles of Gandhi's non-violent, passive resistance to British rule in India.
Most misleading is a history book used in an adult learning center for high school degrees in New Brunswick, N.J. It is totally silent about the biblical motivations of King's protests.
Why do school textbooks religiously avoid religion? The omission is largely due to the preferences of state and local textbook adoption boards. Four states - California, Texas, Florida and North Carolina - purchase one-fourth of the books and exert powerful leverage on the national market. As explained by James Loewen in Lies My Teacher Told Me, "the textbook solution is to leave out religious ideas entirely" because almost any point of view will offend some interest group.
Because the Bible was the engine that drove Martin Luther King Jr., its omission in school curricula constitutes an incomplete education about the man and what motivated him. Many of King's most notable speeches are grounded in scriptural imagery and metaphors. For example:
- In his oft-quoted Letter from a Birmingham Jail, he defends his actions against accusations by eight white clergymen that he is an outside agitator. He responds that early Christians also were convicted for being "disturbers of the peace" and "outside agitators," but "they had to obey God rather than man." One misses the vigor of King's argument without knowing the biblical examples of ruling laws that were resisted for reasons of religious conscience.
- King's moving phrase in his last speech - "He's allowed me to go up to the mountain, and I've looked over, and I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you." - is a reference to Moses' viewing of the Promised Land from afar on the eve of his death.
- Parts of King's "I Have a Dream" speech echo similar language of the prophet Isaiah.
These voids in public education can be filled in under guidelines from a recently introduced document, The Bible and Public Schools: A First Amendment Guide. The booklet, published by the National Bible Association and the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, is endorsed by groups as diverse as the National Association of Evangelicals, People for the American Way and the American Federation of Teachers. Because the Bible has contributed to American literature, history and art, the guide says, its influence should be taught in the classroom. It suggests training sessions to qualify teachers "to examine the Bible as they would other literature, in terms of aesthetic categories <ellipsis> exploring its language, symbolism and motifs." In short, teachers would not teach the Bible, but about the Bible.
Because many of America's issues, both past and present - abolition, prohibition, civil rights, capital punishment and abortion - have been directly or indirectly influenced by the Bible, public education that ignores its contribution is flawed.
Bible classes in churches and synagogues are inadequate to teach the societal contexts of these matters. Granted, there are risks in teaching it in schools, such as teachers who insert their own religious biases into the lesson or fail to point out that different religions have diverse versions of the Bible.
But portraying King as a flower severed from his roots is worse. Instituting the academic study of the Bible into public school curricula will illuminate the missing half of Martin Luther King Jr.
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