David Van Biema makes a compelling case for teaching the Bible as literature in public schools in last week’s Time Magazine. The article does a good job of going over arguments for and against, reviewing some of the constitutional issues involved, and the impact such classes may have on upcoming elections. It’s obviously a very thorny issue and I appreciate the sentiment that, in a largely Christian country, it would be difficult to maintain objectivity. But the Bible a simply too important to leave out of school curriculum completely. And I say this knowing full well that much of what’s discussed here is only applicable to the Christian Bible. The fact is that Christianity has played and continues to play a major role in shaping American culture and politics. I went to a Jewish high school and, in 10th grade, my English teacher spent a few classes going over some basic Christian themes so that we could identify them in our reading. I wrote a paper for that class on references to the Trinity in Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

[W]hen your seventh-grader reads The Old Man and the Sea, a teacher could tick off the references to Christ’s Passion–the bleeding of the old man’s palms, his stumbles while carrying his mast over his shoulder, his hat cutting his head–but wouldn’t the thrill of recognition have been more satisfying on their own?

If literature doesn’t interest you, you also need the Bible to make sense of the ideas and rhetoric that have helped drive U.S. history. “The shining city on the hill”? That’s Puritan leader John Winthrop quoting Matthew to describe his settlement’s convenantal standing with God. In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln noted sadly that both sides in the Civil War “read the same Bible” to bolster their opposing claims. When Martin Luther King Jr. talked of “Justice rolling down like waters” in his “I Have a Dream” speech, he was consciously enlisting the Old Testament prophet Amos, who first spoke those words. The Bible provided the argot–and theological underpinnings–of women’s suffrage and prison-reform movements.

And then there is today’s political rhetoric. For a while, secular liberals complained that when George W. Bush went all biblical, he was speaking in code. Recently, the Democratic Party seems to have come around to the realization that a lot of grass-roots Democrats welcome such use. Without the Bible and a few imposing secular sources, we face a numbing horizontality in our culture–blogs, political announcements, ads. The world is flat, sure. But Scripture is among our few means to make it deep.