Erase the Bible, lose the West — and that’s the point

The cultural revolution of the 1960s undermined every pillar of American identity, and public religion was no exception. Supreme Court rulings in 1962 and 1963 struck down state-led prayer and mandatory scripture reading in public schools. While these decisions didn’t explicitly ban biblical education as literature or cultural instruction, they effectively removed it from the classroom. Over time, institutional pressure and administrative caution eliminated nearly all engagement with the Bible in the public square.

As large-scale immigration introduced greater religious diversity, demands for a more “neutral” education further pushed cultural Christianity into the realm of the taboo. Christmas and Easter became “winter” and “spring” break. Schools reduced biblical references to passing mentions — if they acknowledged them at all. The result: a rootless, amnesiac society cut off from the spiritual and cultural traditions that once inspired greatness.

Humans remain narrative creatures. Even in an age obsessed with data and reason, we understand ourselves through stories. Every civilization has a set of core narratives that define its identity. These stories echo through its literature, art, science, and daily language. People imitate the archetypes they inherit — knowingly or not—so the stories a culture preserves shape its citizens’ behavior, values, and imagination.

For ancient Greece and Rome, Homer’s “Iliad” served as a civilizational anchor. For Western Christendom, that role belonged to the Bible.

As with all enduring societies, the Western canon both reflected and created its civilization. The canon includes the foundational works every educated citizen was once expected to know, at least in outline: “The Divine Comedy,” “Paradise Lost,” the plays of Shakespeare. But none of these are truly intelligible without biblical knowledge. These literary masterpieces do more than quote scripture — they shape theology itself, popularizing specific interpretations of Christian doctrine.

Art doesn’t just reflect a culture; it defines it.

The stories are everywhere: David and Goliath, Samson and Delilah, Judas the betrayer, the unwelcome prophet, the good Samaritan, the sacrificial Christ. These archetypes saturate Western literature. Even works not explicitly Christian — like Shakespeare’s plays — reference scripture on nearly every page. And for directly inspired texts like Dante’s “Inferno,” biblical illiteracy makes the work incomprehensible.

Yet American legal doctrine now treats biblical ignorance as a virtue. Misreadings of the First Amendment have transformed cultural illiteracy into a legal mandate. Forget the Bible’s spiritual value — removing it from schools broke the chain of cultural transmission.

As a former public school history teacher, I saw this biblical and cultural illiteracy firsthand. I routinely had to explain the story of David and Goliath or the birth of Christ to 16-year-olds — just so they could understand the references in a historical speech or literary text. Students weren’t rejecting scripture. They had simply never heard it before.

Shakespeare and Dante still haunt English literature curricula, but only as lifeless relics. These works already challenge students. Strip out the biblical framework, and they become unreadable. That’s one reason woke activists now demand their removal altogether. Too white. Too Christian. Too patriarchal. But the push to obliterate the canon also masks a deeper failure: Today’s teachers often find these works unteachable — because students lack the cultural foundation to make sense of them.

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