Bible should be studied in home

On Saturday morning, Nov. 24, 2007, an item was published inviting local Christian churches to send representatives to a meeting Nov. 29, to “plan how to get an elective Bible study class in area high schools, in conjunction with getting the Lord’s Prayer in public schools.” This invitation appeared in the Religious Briefs section of The Bloomington Herald-Times. Obviously, these efforts have the potential to affect members of the IU-Bloomington campus community.\nCertainly, those individuals who are conspiring to advance these efforts have every right to push their religious views. In my opinion, however, it would be prudent for concerned members of the IU community to give careful thought to pushing back.\nReligiously inspired efforts of this general type are not new to Indiana. Consider the Mooresville, Ind., effort. \nIndeed, such efforts actually go way back in our American history and were – and can be – accompanied by disastrous results. In the Philadelphia suburb of Kensington – circa 1844 – riots broke out between nativist Protestants and Irish Catholics over the practice of reading Bible verses in the public schools, not over whether Bible verses would be read, but rather in protest of a rumored effort to allow Catholics to read the verses from the Douai version of the Bible instead of the Protestant King James version. At the height of the argument, rioters were exchanging cannon fire with a militia sent in to quell the rioting. They stand as the worst religious riots in American history, leaving an unknown number of dead and wounded and several churches and neighborhoods burned to the ground.\nIn a religiously pluralistic community, shouldn’t Bible study and prayer rightfully be in the home, in houses of worship and as personal and private prayer in public schools?