Ah, high school, that magical time when everything seemed like it was just around the corner, and life was a little bit simpler. A time when most of the students really knew who their classmates were. A time when students shared everything with each other: from mono and homecoming to drugs and gossip.
Recently, things seem to have changed a bit. Now the students aren’t the only ones doing the sharing in high school. Now, the Gideons Bible company has seen all the fun high-schoolers are having and decided to tag along.
This is the case right now at Rockwall High School, where The Gideons Bible company was allowed not just on campus, but into the school itself and given an area where they handed out roughly 2,000 Bibles to passing students. That’s almost exactly the number of people in the student body.
The practice of passing out Bibles in a public school is on shaky legal ground to begin with. Recently in Missouri, a federal judge ruled against a school for giving Gideons permission to hand out Bibles at a local elementary school, saying it “improperly promotes Christianity.”
This isn’t just another case of students of differing religions having thin skins and getting offended over something small just to shout from the steeple tops that the school wasn’t protecting their beliefs. Even students of Christian affiliation reported that they felt this was a horrible move on the school’s behalf.
Ed Board agrees with these students – they have a right to be offended. While the Rockwall ISD has issued a formal apology to all students and said that no one was forced to take a Bible, it is clearly missing the point entirely.
It isn’t just that the Bible was allowed into the school that’s the problem here. It’s that by offering a book that clearly preaches religious doctrine in a school, you introduce a totally new element – a religious one at that – to the education process. How can a school say it doesn’t favor any one religion while it allows Bibles to be passed out? It almost outright forces any student with a differing religious preference or set of beliefs into confrontation with other students if they don’t follow the crowd and pick up a Bible.
Offering Bibles or any proselytizing materials on school grounds raises questions about whether the school really is forcing something on students. The First Amendment is pretty clear about the separation of church and state. So maybe it would best if we could recognize that we’ve drawn a line between religion and school (the two don’t mix) and that it’s in poor taste for anyone to cross it, even if it’s “just” high school.
