The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [2]
The wire services could handle the day-to-day breaking developments in the crisis; I planned to write an overview article that explained the dynamics of the controversy. Working from my hotel room, I called for appointments with key figures in the conflict and then drove in my rental car from homes to restaurants to schools to offices in order to interview them. I quickly found that just mentioning the word “textbook” to anybody in these parts would instantly release a flood of vehement opinion as thick as the lush trees that carpet the Appalachian hillsides.
“The books bought for our school children would teach them to lose their love of God, to honor draft dodgers and revolutionaries, and to lose their respect for their parents,” insisted the intense, dark-haired wife of a Baptist minister as I interviewed her on the front porch of her house. As a recently elected school board member, she was leading the charge against the textbooks.
A community activist was just as opinionated in the other direction. “For the first time,” she told me, “these textbooks reflect real Americanism, and I think it’s exciting. Americanism, to me, is listening to all kinds of voices, not just white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants.”
The school superintendent, who had resigned at the height of the controversy, only shook his head in disdain when I asked him what he thought. “People around here are going flaky,” he sighed. “Both poles are wrong.”
Meanwhile, ninety-six thousand copies of three hundred different textbooks had been temporarily removed from classrooms and stored in cardboard cartons at a warehouse west of Charleston. They included Scott Foresman Co.’s Galaxy series; McDougal, Littel Co.’s Man series; Allyn & Bacon Inc.’s Breakthrough series; and such classics as The Lord of the Flies, Of Human Bondage, Moby Dick, The Old Man and the Sea, Animal Farm, and Plato’s Republic.
What were people so angry about? Many said they were outraged at the “situational ethics” propounded in some of the books. One textbook included the story of a child cheating a merchant out of a penny. Students were asked, “Most people think that cheating is wrong. Do you think there is ever a time when it might be right? Tell when it is. Tell why you think it is right.” Parents seized on this as undermining the Christian values they were attempting to inculcate into their children.
“We’re trying to get our kids to do the right thing,” the parent of an elementary student told me in obvious frustration. “Then these books come along and say that sometimes the wrong thing is the right thing. We just don’t believe in that! The Ten Commandments are the Ten Commandments.”
But there was also an undercurrent of something else: an inchoate fear of the future, of change, of new ideas, of cultural transformation. I could sense a simmering frustration in people over how modernity was eroding the foundation of their faith. “Many of the protesters,” wrote the Charleston Gazette, “are demonstrating against a changing world.”
This underlying concern was crystallized for me in a conversation with a local businessman over hamburgers at a Charleston diner. When I asked him why he was so enraged over the textbooks, he reached into his pocket and took out a newspaper clipping about the textbook imbroglio.
“Listen to what Dynamics of Language tells our kids,” he said as he quoted an excerpt from the textbook: “Read the theory of divine origin and the story of the Tower of Babel as told in Genesis. Be prepared to explain one or more ways these stories could be interpreted.”
He tossed the well-worn clipping on the table in disgust. “The theory of divine origin!” he declared. “The Word of God is not a theory. Take God out of creation and what’s left? Evolution? Scientists want to teach our kids that divine origin is just a theory that stupid people