 | | Harry T. Cook |
Because I was pastor of two different parishes over 40 years, my name found its way on to the mailing list of dozens of religious supply companies selling everything from candles to Bibles to Sunday school lessons.
Even now, six years retired, daily I find in my inbox email ads from such suppliers. Just now the bulk of the stuff advertises the wonders of Vacation Bible School material and other related miscellany.
What, basically, these Vacation Bible Schools provide is free child care for parents trying to amuse their children during the three-month summer recess. For the price of being able to introduce your kids to one or another of the flavors of Christianity, the church involved will take them off your hands for five mornings or evenings in a week.
The problem is that the exposure, if you will, is being conducted largely by earnest laypersons whose knowledge of scripture probably came from attending a Vacation Bible School during their own childhood years.
This would be like having aspiring auto mechanics training future surgeons -- no offense intended to the incredible skills of the auto mechanics who keep my vehicles drivable. I can neither change the oil nor perform appendectomies -- at least not so the car will start or the patient will make it out of the operating room alive.
Vacation Bible Schools are essentially Christian madrasas. They teach the most simplistic versions of the Christian religion and its scripture text to the accompaniment of the simplistic theology that goes with them. That kind of religion tends to breed the antiscience bias that possesses all too many Americans -- as in those who deny the facts of climate change and of the critical need to vaccinate children.
The primary beneficiaries of the summer Bible schools are the parents who, as we have said, gain a week's worth of relief from child entertainment. The kids profit by having something constructive to occupy their time while keeping them off the streets.
Yet their exposure to the Bible and its history is gravely deficient and, moreover, harmful. Why harmful? Because much of the biblical text is as difficult to parse and understand as Beowulf -- that is, absent the mastery of Hebrew and Greek together with the known history out of which the contents of the Bible came.
That is the reason graduate schools and seminaries exist, viz. to equip those who will go on to teach through sermons and classes the text itself and the tools appropriate to its interpretation. (Hint: You can take the Bible literally, or you can take it seriously.)
I have no doubt offended not only future auto mechanics but as well many a well-intentioned adult who regularly gives up a week to help with a Vacation Bible School. But the issue is this: One cannot credibly teach what one does not know. Yes, one can drill biblical texts into the brains of kids through the exercise known as "memory verses."
Thus does a child grow up with a text like John 3:16 etched in her or his psyche: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believes in him may not perish but have everlasting life."
I was one such Vacation Bible School child. However, as my public school education progressed and I began to read more and think for myself, I found that I did not "believe in Jesus," mostly because I did not know what it meant to do so. Still don't.
After my mother died when I was 14, I spent some little while in mental agony fearing my own death and my nonbeliever's deserts: perishing, presumably, in the kind of Hades I had read about in Dante's "Inferno."
It was not until I had mastered New Testament Greek and could handily translate John 3:16 for myself and had acquired a decent understanding of early Christian history and theology that I could put the text in context. It is propaganda, not a statement of fact. Also the Greek commonly translated as "everlasting life" is meant to account for the quality of a life: its breadth and depth, not its length.
No kid sent off to Vacation Bible School this summer will be given, much less have in advance, the tools to understand all that. Which is why I refer to such Bible schools as madrasas. Their Islamic versions pound Qu'ranic texts into boys and young men yet give them no tools of interpretation, which leads them to take literally those texts that, on the face of it, seem to insist Allah's will is that good Muslims should kill non-Muslims. By the way, one can find similar texts in the Bible.*
All this leads me to the advocacy of teaching religious texts in public schools. Those who teach would be required to have graduate degrees from accredited universities and understand that they were doing with the Hebrew/Christian Bible and with Qu'ran and with Buddhist and Hindu texts what the teachers down the hall were doing with Spenser, Milton and Shakespeare.
Of course, you'd have to make it clear that such courses were electives so that the same kind of parents who refuse to vaccinate their children could be ensured that they would not be instructed in any heretical catechism, either.
Churches that in the past had put on Vacation Bible Schools could simply run recreational programs without the element of evangelization, still relieving fatigued parents for a few days during those long summer months surrounded by kids with not enough to do. Now there would be a worthwhile ministry.
* From among many dozens of passages:
Exodus 21: 12 15, 17, 22:19
Leviticus: 20: 9-10, 16, 27
Numbers 31:17
Deuteronomy 13: 5, 9
I Samuel 15:3
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