The Bible - essential cultural luggage

Children should be taught the Bible throughout their education because it is an "essential piece of cultural luggage" without which they will struggle to fully understand literature, according to the poet laureate, Andrew Motion.

Motion made this argument in an article published in today's Education Guardian and his full argument can be read by clicking here. Also at the Guardian website, Andrew Brown has posted an interesting comment on Motion's argument while Philip Ritchie has kicked off a discussion on the issue at his blog. You can also check out your Bible knowledge with a Guardian quiz which can be found by clicking here.

Failing to understand or acknowledge our inherited language and imagery from the Bible and from Christendom is a common problem that bedevils much contemporary cultural comment. One of my earliest posts was on this issue and used interpretations of songs from Bob Dylan as an example of the way in which such lack of knowledge affects cultural interpretations.

In a Lent/Eastertide course called The Big Picture that I am involved in running in the Diocese of Chelmsford, together with my friends Philip Ritchie and Paul Trathen, we briefly survey the history of how our culture has inherited much of its language and imagery in this way in order to pose the question of how we can hope to understand our culture without understanding the biblical/Christian language and imagery that informs it.

Motion thinks that:

"Too many students arrive at university to study English literature barely knowing who Adam and Eve were because teaching of the Bible and its "great stories" is disappearing from the school system, he said. He was not arguing for religious indoctrination, but for people to learn historical stories which have influenced writers. "I am not for a moment suggesting that everybody be made to go to church during their childhood. But what I do think would be worth thinking about [is] how there could be some kind of general treatment of this all the way through a child's schooling," he told the Guardian.

People cannot expect to understand much of literature - from John Milton to TS Eliot - without learning the Bible first, he said. The sermon on the mount and the crucifixion are stories which have influenced story structures ever since, while the book of Ruth is essential because of "the beauty of the writing". Children should read the Bible, he said, "simply because it is full of terrific stories. They speak to us about human nature and the recurring patterns of human behaviour."
Motion, who is professor of creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London, said that all humanities undergraduates at university level should be given crash courses in the great stories. "I would start with Christian stories, Qur'anic stories, Greek and Roman stories, but it could be refined depending on what the subject is: a little history for people doing English, a bit of English for people doing history, for example."

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Neal Morse - Heaven In My Heart.