He's Not Wrong

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"I'm about to make an argument for why the Bible should be taught in public schools and prioritized over other religious texts. And I'm going to show you why even the most ardent atheist in America should agree with me.

First a little context…

This discussion is surfacing again because J.D. Vance was on Rogan a couple days ago, and I think he lost an argument he should have won.

On the topic of a Ten Commandments poster in Texas classrooms, Vance argued that seeing something isn't the same as being forced to believe in it. Rogan pushed back with one question: "Okay, so why not Buddhist scripture? Why not the Quran?"

I'll admit, that's a hard question to answer.

I can see how defending a display feels like an endorsement which is why there’s not a clean rebuttal to “why not everybody else’s?”

Now, for the record, I do think a reasonable case can be made that the Ten Commandments are a historical document that shaped Western legal traditions and that a passive display isn't the same as compelled devotion…

But that's not the argument I want to make today because there's something else Texas has done that I think is far more important and far more defensible...

They put Bible passages into the reading curriculum.

So here's my entire thesis in one sentence: you cannot have any basic literacy in Western civilization without knowing the Bible.

How do you read Shakespeare or Dickens or Dostoevsky or Melville or Faulkner or Toni Morrison without knowing the Bible? Half their imagery comes from it. Half the language we think with came out of a book many Americans have never opened.

When you watch a graveside scene in a movie and hear "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want." Where did you think that came from?

"To everything there is a season." That's Ecclesiastes, which became a number one pop single.

David and Goliath is one of the most referenced stories in Western literature and we use it to describe sporting events.

How do you read the founding documents? Or FDR? Or King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail? You can't. Not without the Bible.

And the founders weren't exactly subtle about it.

The single most cited source in political writings during the founding era was not Locke. Not Montesquieu. It was Deuteronomy.

Benjamin Franklin (who wasn't exactly a man on his knees in prayer) wanted the parting of the Red Sea on the official seal of the United States.

Our entire First Amendment rests on the religious claim that God made the free mind and no government can cram beliefs into it.

And perhaps most importantly, you cannot understand the abolition of slavery without the book of Exodus. Frederick Douglass quoted it. Martin Luther King Jr. quoted it constantly. The Promised Land, the mountaintop, let my people go. This isn't decoration on the speech. It IS the speech.

If you want your kids to understand how this country ended slavery, you have to hand them the book the people who did it were holding.

And they were singing it too. Go Down Moses. Wade in the Water. Deep River…

Enslaved people sang their way toward freedom in the language of Exodus, and that music became gospel, and gospel became soul and rock and roll. Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Aretha. There is a straight line from a burning bush to Muscle Shoals.

So to answer Rogan's question: why not the Quran?

First, the boring answer that apparently nobody complaining about this has bothered to check. The Quran IS in the Texas curriculum.

But here's the real answer…

You give priority to the text your civilization was built on. A Japanese school prioritizes Japanese texts. An Indian school prioritizes Hindu texts.

An American school should prioritize the text that shaped American law, literature, music, and civil rights movements. That's basic literacy… not endorsement.

Nobody is asking your kid to pray. Nobody is making anyone kneel.

I'm arguing that fifth graders should read about the burning bush and high schoolers should read about Job the same way they read Homer without sacrificing a goat to Athena.

The Bible in this country is load-bearing, whether you believe it's true or not.

If you don't know the roots, you probably won't care when someone starts cutting down the tree.

And perhaps that's the real objection."