Make High Schoolers Read the Bible

Welcome to Radio Free America, Aaron Kleinman’s take on stories that matter in state politics but aren't getting enough attention.

What book that you read in high school do you think about the most in your adult life? The Catcher in the Rye? Pride and Prejudice? The Invisible Man? For me, it was the Bible.

I didn’t grow up in the Bible Belt; I grew up in a Connecticut suburb that usually supports the Democratic presidential nominee by more than 50 points. But if you took AP English (like most newsletter writers, I am an underachieving former gifted student), you spent a few weeks reading the Bible as a literary exercise.

I’m not a Christian, so most of my knowledge of the religion came from The Simpsons. I knew more about Santa than I did about Jesus. But finally reading the New Testament really opened my eyes to what more than 60% of my fellow Americans believe.

I learned about the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, throwing moneychangers out of the temple, turning the other cheek and the meek inheriting the earth. I saw Christianity in a new light. It wasn’t just Jerry Falwell and Jingle All The Way, but rather some really powerful ideas about how to be a good person and live a moral life. I even better understood those jokes on The Simpsons!

The Bible seems to come up a lot these days because of how often our president flouts its teachings. His foreign policy worships Moloch, his domestic policy worships Mammon and he’s currently feuding with the Vicar of Christ. Just this week, he posted an image of himself as Jesus, which as a Jew even I understood probably wouldn’t fly on account of the Ten Commandments, which Republicans seem far more interested in displaying than reading.

The liberal Christian tradition in the United States dates as far back as Christians in the country themselves. From Roger Williams to Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King, Jr., Christian ideals have spurred on social progress in America for centuries. Our two greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln and FDR, both regularly made religious appeals. The first person to prominently stand up to Trump in his second term was an Episcopal bishop. 

Of course, liberals have been trying to make this case for decades, to little avail. As those efforts haven’t worked, they need a gesture to show that they’re not just talk and trying to meet religious voters where they are. And I really think the positives outlined here outweigh the biggest risk; that it becomes an excuse to proselytize instead of sticking to reviewing it as literature.

And I also think the marginal additional risk from that is low. In 2022’s Kennedy v. Bremerton, the Supreme Court gave the green light for school districts in conservative areas to engage in all sorts of proselytization, so it’s not like this would be the first time students in those schools encountered a right-wing version of Christianity. And if you add a requirement to study the Bible instead of just hearing about it from hidebound institutions, then you could undermine their power. Just ask Martin Luther about that!

Moreover, requiring high school senior study the Bible does not conflict with values around protecting reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights. In spite of a single line in Leviticus, I think that a message of loving thy neighbor is just what this country needs right now. And for voters that don’t share all of our values, it’s a message that we at least want to understand where they’re coming from. And in a country as diverse and messy as America, that’s still worth something.

Reading this in a forward? Click below to get the newsletter directly in your inbox.

Oh noooo, toilet! Thank you Edward Odell for finding this hypnotic swinging toilet that does battle with other fixtures as well as a gas tank for some reason. Never before has ASMR been this tense!

Ireland did it again. The tiny island with the population of Arizona has churned out four Nobel Prize in Literature winners, past icons Oscar Wilde, James Joyce and current all-stars Sally Rooney, Anna Burns, Colm Toibin, Sebastian Barry, Claire Keegan, John Banville, Anne Enright… I could go on. But let’s add Dermot Bolger to the list. I chanced across his 2008 novel The Journey Home and got immediately hurled into ‘80s Dublin. It’s beautiful and breaks your heart like any decent Irish coming of age story, but somehow, it’s been overlooked. Well, let’s not overlook it any longer; you can get it for less than the cost of a Wendy’s Value Meal, and it might be at your local library.

I got so many great entries in my King of the Hill GIF contest but I decided to award it to Mike P for this beauty. He put it in the comments, and I’d love it if the comments here started popping off. Imagine if we could replicate Bluesky but without the people who don’t know how to use a computer.

As for this week, my house’s waffle consumption has reached the point where we should get an iron of our own. Do you guys have any recommendations for the best one? Ease to clean is high on our list of criteria. Hit reply and tell me what you think.

Like my newsletter? Click the button below to forward it to a friend.