Guest OP-ED by Clayton Wood
One afternoon in the 1990s, my literature professor confidently told our class that Petrarch had invented the language of romantic longing in Western poetry using “conceit.”
I was confused and asked if she was saying it in sonnet verse form. She said, “No, he’s the first in the literary world.”
We were both almost stunned. When I quoted the Song of Solomon, she said she had never read it before.
As far as I know, she was not hostile to Christianity. She was a little embarrassed. She was a very smart person and an overall good teacher.
She simply had never been given the book.
Let’s think about what that means.
Petrarch was not writing for people who had never read the Bible. He thought they were. Any educated reader of his age would have recognized the image immediately. garden. vineyard. Gazelle. Lily. A love stronger than death.
Petrarch refined the language. He didn’t invent it.
The conceit worked because his readers already knew the original melody.
My professor was just as intelligent as Petrarch’s readers. She simply inherited an education that forgot the books they knew.
Somewhere between the fourteenth century and today, Petrarch succeeded in producing graduates who knew less about the fundamentals of Western civilization than he expected his generally educated readers to know.
That’s not progress.
It’s amnesia.
We have raised a generation that loves literature, but we can’t follow the map because we have removed the legends.
That should surprise us.
In fact, many people celebrate it.
Texas wants kids to read the Bible. People are furious.
The Texas State Board of Education has approved a reading curriculum that includes Bible stories and verses for millions of public school students.
The accusations began before the voting was complete.
Theocracy. Christian nationalism. separation of church and state.
As a constitutional lawyer for decades, I’ve seen people bring up constitutional rules that don’t exist.
During that time, I wrote letters that I never needed.
No, a girl cannot be prohibited from bringing a Bible to school.
No, students do not waive their First Amendment rights when they walk through the school building doors.
No, students do not need government permission to voluntarily gather around the flagpole to pray before school.
No, a teacher answering honest questions about Christianity does not violate the Constitution.
Many times I have met teachers and administrators who truly believe these things are illegal. Many professed to be Christians. They weren’t trying to persecute anyone. They simply absorbed constitutional myths.
It may be one of the most successful myths in modern American history. Millions of Americans came to believe that religious freedom required public ignorance about Christianity.
That was never the case.
This phrase is not in the constitution
There is no mention of separation of church and state in the Constitution.
Every American should know that.
It comes from an 1802 letter written by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptists in Connecticut. Baptists feared that the federal government would establish a national denomination and interfere with their churches. Jefferson assured them that this was not possible. His famous walls protected the church from the state. There was no need for the nation to say that Christianity did not shape America.
These are two completely different ideas.
Here’s another thing most Americans don’t know.
The language they cite to remove the Bible from public life does not appear in our Constitution. However, explicit constitutional language separating church and state did appear in the Soviet Union’s constitution. Article 52 of the 1977 Soviet Constitution mandated separation of church and state and strict separation of schools and churches.
The Soviet Union knew exactly what they were doing. Remove the transcendental foundation. Replace with state. Control what you teach your children about the world they live in.
When Americans reach for the Bible in an attempt to remove it from public life, they are borrowing from Moscow, not Philadelphia.
Jefferson’s Wall was built to protect the church from the state. It was never built to remove the Bible from American life.
What Jefferson Actually Incorporated into Schools
In 1805, Thomas Jefferson served on the Board of Education in Washington, DC. The Bible and Isaac Watts’ hymns were some of the texts used to teach children how to read.
The man most often sued to keep Bibles out of schools helped oversee the school system’s use of the Bible.
Early American public schools did not treat the Bible as contraband. They treated it as an essential literary and moral basis for educated people. The New England Primer was no different. It wasn’t because the government was establishing a sect. Because the Founders understood that self-government required a morally and historically literate citizenry.
What the Founders Actually Said
Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, one of the greatest constitutional scholars in American history, argued that Christianity was essential to the moral foundation of the republic.
John Adams wrote that our Constitution was designed only for a moral and religious people and is woefully inadequate for the government of other nations. He also wrote that the general principles on which the Founders achieved independence were the general principles of Christianity.
These were not indistinct voices. They were among the principal architects of the American Republic.
The writers you love cannot be understood without it
The Bible is the most influential literary work in the history of the Western world. It’s not a dedication claim. It’s historical.
Consider the writers who most profoundly shaped English literature. John Donne’s Holy Sonnets is one of the language’s most transcendent poems, written from within a Biblical imagination so perfect that to separate faith from poetry is like separating salt from the sea. Christopher Marlowe was writing before the King James Version of the Bible existed, and he already had a picture of the moral world of the Bible. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s best works are full of guilt, grace, and a longing for salvation. Percy Bysshe Shelley spent his life arguing with a God who couldn’t stop talking to him. Milton built an entire epic on the third chapter of Genesis.
Next is Dostoyevsky. Tolstoy. Dickens. Elliot. Faulkner. Flannery O’Connor. Steinbeck.
They thought you knew Eden. Exodus. David. prophets. cross. revival. Prodigal son. Good Samaritan. language of sacrifice. language of salvation. The language of grace.
You can read their words. You can’t fully enter their world.
My professor was not suffering from a mental or imaginative breakdown. She simply inherited a book-forgetting education that every educated reader of Petrarch’s world already knew. The moment I read the Song of Solomon, she recognized it immediately.
Knowledge had not disappeared. It simply had never been given to her.
That recognition is something we withhold from millions of children. That’s not education. It is cultural amnesia disguised as neutrality.
what we are actually losing
As a Baptist, I believe deeply in religious freedom. The government cannot make someone a Christian. Faith is not forced.
But defending religious freedom is not the same as pretending that Christianity has contributed nothing to the civilization we have inherited.
They are fundamentally different ideas. People protect their freedom. The other erases memory.
Civilizations don’t just collapse because we forget how to build. They forget why they were built and collapse.
People who are angry about Texas aren’t just arguing about the curriculum. They debate whether children should know about the books that shaped our laws, literature, language, and civilization.
I still remember that professor.
She was intelligent. She knew the truth the moment she saw it. Knowledge had not disappeared. It was simply never given to her.
We are trying to do the same for millions more children.
A civilization cannot remain strong if it forgets the books that taught it how to read.
Clayton Wood is a pastor and attorney in Knoxville, Tennessee.
