The Republican Party’s new platform calls for teaching the Bible as literature in public schools. But which Bible, exactly, would the Republicans approve of?
The idea of the Bible taught in public schools has a fraught Constitutional history. For the Jewish community, it can bring back memories of “prayer in the schools” or mandatory participation in school Christmas pageants. But the absence of naming a particular translation is something different. It reveals a troubling lack of awareness of how much the particular Bible we read shapes our worldviews — and an ignorance of the gulf between the Hebrew Bible and its translations into English.
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