Local School District Successfully Offers Bible Studies
CNS News - November 30, 1999

Local School District Successfully Offers Bible Studies
By Bruce Sullivan
CNS Staff Writer
30 November, 1999

(CNSNews.com) - Thanks to the individual donations of local community and business leaders, public school students in Chattanooga, Tennessee have the option to study Bible history as a social studies elective. However, the program funded by the independent Public School Bible Study Committee since 1922 has only one real problem - it's so popular that the committee's $750,000 annual budget can't keep up with the demand for the courses throughout the Hamilton County unified school district, which includes Chattanooga.

"In 1997, for the first time, we had to turn down five principals who wanted the curriculum," Henry Henegar, a board member on the Bible study committee told CNSNews.com.

Henegar said that the classes, now taught in 17 Hamilton County middle and high schools by 15 accredited volunteer teachers paid for by the committee,were taken by more than 3,400 students last year. He expects that number to grow to more than 3,600 next year.

So great has been the demand from principals for the Bible study classes that next year, for the first time, the committee is using a fundraiser in the hopes of gathering more money to meet the demand for the courses, said Henegar. He added that principals like the Bible course because, among other things, it allows them to expand their school's curriculum at no cost to the school. Henegar says that his reason for supporting the Bible history class is more old-fashioned.

"It's just a premise that no person is truly educated unless he or she knows something about the Bible," said Henegar.

The same sentiment was echoed by a number of activists concerned with the issue of religious freedom in public schools. "The Bible is the basis for our Western heritage," Religious Freedom Coalition President William J. Murray told CNSNews.com.

It was the Bible's role as an historical document that enabled the Public School Bible Study Committee to survive the only legal challenge to its right to fund Bible study classes in Hamilton County public schools. In 1979, U.S. District Judge Frank Wilson ruled in a case brought by some Hamilton County residents, and supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, that privately-funded courses which treat the Bible as an historical document or literature - but not as doctrine - were legal.

"To ignore the role of the Bible in the vast area of secular subjects...is to ignore a keystone in the building of an arch, at least insofar as Western history, values and culture are concerned," wrote Wilson in his ruling.

"I don't see this as legally offensive in any way," Phillip Vaught, communications director for the Christian Action Network told CNSNews.com. He added that if anything he believes that studying the Bible in public schools "should be federally mandated."

A spokesperson for Concerned Women of America (CWA) told CNSNews.com that she finds it unfortunate that a group like the Public School Bible Study Committee would face legal opposition for voluntarily trying to help children improve themselves and provide answers to problems such as school violence and drugs. "Yet, when these solutions are put into practice, people get sued," said Wright.

Support for teaching the Bible as a guide to the history of Western civilization seems to span a wide spectrum. A spokesman for Americans United for Separation of Church and State told CNSNews.com that he sees no problem withteaching the Bible as long as no proselytizing takes place. "The issue boils down to how the Bible's being taught in public schools. If it's being taught as part of a valid program of secular instruction with the aim of educating and not indoctrinating then that can be done in a Constitutional manner," said Robert Boston.

"However," Boston added, "if the class has become a ruse for Sunday school lessons in the public schools, then we're going to have a problem."