My 7-year-old son came home from his PUBLIC school the other day with a book about Noah's Ark (did I mention he goes to a public school?). I asked him where he got it from and he said he got it from the "surprise box" in his classroom. The surprise box is a box full of toys donated by parents that the kids can choose from when they've done something good.
Obviously, I didn't make a huge deal out of this because he is only 7 after all, and it is just a book. But I was very bothered by the fact that another parent felt it was appropriate to donate this, and more bothered by my personal knowledge that this is just the way it is in our town. There is an assumption that that's ok because everyone here believes in the Bible, right? If I tried to donate a book about Islam or Atheism or something, there would be a huge to-do, but Bible stories are a non-issue because everyone "around here" teaches their children from the Bible. So it's just something parents don't have to think about at all.
My son and I read the book together and played with the little figurines that popped out of the book. I explained to him that this was a story from the Bible, which has a lot of good stories, but they're just that: stories.
Stories. Parables. Soliloquies. You're going to hell. Keep it up.
ReplyDeleteChristianity is so normalized in so much of the country that I don't think it even occurs to some people that there are non-Christians in their midst. Its wrong, of course, but that seems to be the way people conduct themselves.
ReplyDeleteSo true (both about the fact that I'm going to hell and that Christianity is so normalized).
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