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The King James Bible and the

Politics of Religious Education:
Secular State and Sacred
Scripture
a
Liam Gearon
a
Harris Manchester College , University of Oxford ,
Oxford , UK
Published online: 06 Feb 2013.

To cite this article: Liam Gearon (2013) The King James Bible and the Politics
of Religious Education: Secular State and Sacred Scripture, Religious Education:
The official journal of the Religious Education Association, 108:1, 9-27, DOI:
10.1080/00344087.2013.747838

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 THE KING JAMES BIBLE AND THE POLITICS
OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION: SECULAR STATE
AND SACRED SCRIPTURE

Liam Gearon
Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Abstract

This article provides an outline historical–educational analysis of

the King James Bible from its 1611 publication through to its four-
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hundredth anniversary commemoration in 2011. With particular fo-

cus on England, the article traces the educational impact of the King
James Bible and charts, in the country of its origin, its progressive
decline in religious education. It is argued that state involvement in
English religious education (from 1870 onward) must be held partly
responsible for this chronic and now acute waning of the Bible’s
wider educational influence.

The four-hundredth anniversary of the King James Bible (2011) was

marked by a plethora of accounts charting its historical origins, recep-
tion and impact across the four centuries since its publication in 1611
(Hamlin and Jones 2010; Bragg 2011; Campbell 2011; Nicolson 2011;
Wilson 2011; see also McGrath 2002). Bragg’s is the only such volume
to provide a full-length chapter on its educational impact. Bragg is cor-
rect in claiming that for the first three centuries of its history the King
James Bible was “the prime educating force in the English-speaking
world”: “People learned to read in order to read the Bible and they
learned to read by being taught through the Bible itself” (Bragg 2011,
261). In this article, I outline the bare parameters of this extraordinary
ascent, and, in the very country of its origin, chart a progressive de-
cline in pedagogical presence. Here I argue that state involvement in
English religious education (from 1870 onward) is, perhaps ironically,
responsible for a waning of the Bible’s educational and possibly even
its wider influence.

THE KING JAMES BIBLE AND EDUCATION: THE EARLY

CENTURIES

The King James Bible was arguably a high point in the En-
glish Reformation. The most famous of all English translations, the
Religious Education Copyright 
C The Religious Education Association

Vol. 108 No. 1 January–February ISSN: 0034-4087 print

DOI: 10.1080/00344087.2013.747838

9
 10 KING JAMES BIBLE AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

King James Bible arose from a curiously repressive early Reformation

history: for a time longer than any Protestant inclined European nation
vernacular versions of the Bible were illegal. William Tyndale a promi-
nent English translator of the New Testament (1526) saw repression
of his translation efforts, suffered persecution, enforced exile and, in
1536, eventual execution (MacCulloch 2009, 626–627). But Lutheran
and Calvinist theological influence in England heightened demand
for English Bibles. Tyndale may have been executed in 1536, but
two years later Coverdale’s translation, Henry VIII’s “Great Bible” of
1538, was, if not officially authorized, at least ordered for distribution
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to all English churches. However, before he became King James I of

England, it was as King James VI of Scotland, and with the May 1601
conference of presbyters that he laid the foundations for a translation
known variously as the Authorized Version, the King James Version
or the King James Bible.
After acceding to the English throne in 1603, the newly crowned
King James I of England and Scotland undertook the first and without
doubt the most significant ecclesiastical act of his reign: the January
1604 conference at Hampton Court (a former residence of Henry
VIII), at which King James successfully proposed a new translation
of the Bible. Drawing on Tyndale’s 1526 English New Testament, it
was intended to supersede other English Protestant translations. This
included the 1538 Great Bible (named more for its physical size than
literary stature), the 1560 Reformed Geneva Bible (translated by En-
glish exiles during the reign of Queen Mary I), and the 1668 Bishops’
Bible from the reign of Elizabeth I. Yet, with this is in mind, it is nev-
ertheless a commonplace among biblical scholars to acknowledge that
much of Tyndale’s originally repressed 1526 translation is replicated
in the 1611 King James Bible (for example Daniell 2000).
King James I’s Hampton Court conference was as much a mat-
ter of secular as ecclesiastical politics. The conference was held in a
time of crisis in English Protestant Christianity: between those who
saw the Church of England as authentically “catholic” and Reformed
Protestants who still saw it retaining doctrines and ecclesiology too
reminiscent of the corruption of Christianity’s primitive authentic-
ity. Like their Calvinist European counterparts, English Reformed
Protestants—who became attached to the originally pejorative nomen-
clature of Puritan—were committed to returning their own English
church to this primitive authenticity. The Hampton Court conference
was in part King James’ response to a Puritan Millenary Petition which
aimed finally to rid the Church of England of Catholic influence. Given
 LIAM GEARON 11

King James’ Scottish Presbyterian upbringing, English Puritans envis-

aged it perfect timing for the Millenary Petition. The Hampton Court
Conference sought compromise, and unified, in political and ecclesio-
logical terms, a divided Church. The collaborative work of translation
left no time for factionalism (Campbell 2010, 32–34, 47–64).
The episcopal, “catholic” faction was led by Richard Bancroft
(Bishop of London), the Puritans by John Rainolds (President of
Corpus Christi College, Oxford). The six Companies of Transla-
tors dividing their labours as follows: the First Westminster Com-
pany, directed by Lancelot Andrewes (Dean of Westminster), trans-
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lated: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua,

Judges, Ruth, I Samuel, II Samuel, I Kings, and II Kings; the First
Cambridge Company, directed by Edward Lively (Regius Professor
of Hebrew at Cambridge), translated: I Chronicles, II Chronicles,
Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song
of Solomon; the First Oxford Company, directed by John Harding
(Regius Professor of Hebrew, President, Magdalen College, Oxford),
translated: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea,
Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah,
Haggai and Malachi; the Second Cambridge Company, directed by
John Duport (Rector of Fulham) translated: the Apocrypha; the Sec-
ond Oxford Company, directed by Thomas Ravis (Dean of Christ
Church) translated: the Gospels, Acts of the Apostles and Revela-
tion; the Second Westminster Company, directed by William Barlow
(Prebendary of Westminster) translated: the New Testament Epis-
tles (www.kingjamstrust.org.uk; Bragg 2011; Campbell 2011; Nicolson
2011; Wilson 2011).
Although the role of tradition continued to divide the Anglican
Church (see Avis 2002), the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura
had unexpected educational benefits, engendering not only Protes-
tant unity in England (at least until the Civil War) but a new literacy.
There is an educational logic here. If God’s revelation was known
through his Word, reading God’s Word became critical to salvation,
even if such reading was in itself of course no guarantee of salvation.
The theology of sola scriptura assisted not only national literacy: the
emergence of British Empire ensured a growing international literacy
through reading the Bible (Bragg 2011, 259–270, 271–286).
Such a cultural milieu contributed not only to basic literacy but the
heights of literary achievement. Milton’s Paradise Lost and Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress are two obvious 17th-century works of English lit-
erary genius. Both illustrate the cultural as well as theological legacy
 12 KING JAMES BIBLE AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

of the King James Bible. However, for these authors—Milton and

Bunyan—theology was as paramount a concern as literature. The
new literacy, and the greater availability of books, would also widen
the reading of texts challenging of scriptural authority in the very
century of the King James Bible, the 17th. As MacCulloch (2009,
769 ff) has convincingly argued, the elements at least of the 18th-
century Enlightenment were in place by the end of the 17th century.
England then was now open to texts far beyond the Bible, a pro-
cess that had begun with Renaissance humanism and by the 17th
century wide knowledge of Greek and Latin literature, philosophy,
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and science. The problem of classical learning and Christian educa-

tion was of course an old one, far predating those faced by Chris-
tian educators in Renaissance, Reformation, or early Enlightenment.
Augustine’s late 4th-century Confessions is permeated, for example,
with personal reflection on a classical education that he rejects for a
Christian conversion; in Augustine’s early 5th-century work, On Chris-
tian Teaching, tensions between classical and Christian sources are a
direct problem of Christian apologetics as well as pedagogy (Augustine
2008; 2009).
In 17th-century England, though, it would be new developments
in the natural sciences and political philosophy that would exert great
influence on and tensions with Christian thought. These would es-
pecially impact on the certainties of biblical revelation, which all the
translators of the King James Bible would have held in common. The
founding of the Royal Society was critical in the ascendancy of the
new scientific culture. Isaac Newton was its most famous 17th-century
member, and eventual president. Newton was grammar school edu-
cated and the breadth of classical, mathematical, and scientific knowl-
edge he gained at Grantham show wide educational currents, even in
a land where schooling was as yet far from universal. Newton’s educa-
tion was certainly not limited to the Bible, although his knowledge of
it was extensive, and to his last days his interest in the prophetic
books of Daniel and of Revelation never abated (Ackroyd 2006,
15–24).
In political philosophy the Puritans as non-conformists themselves
supported liberty of conscience, what we would call freedom of reli-
gion (although Milton would not have extended this to atheists and
idolaters). Given his broadly Reformed (technically Arminian) the-
ology, Milton’s surprisingly liberal political perspective is evident
in his Areopagitica. Responding to the Licensing Order of 1643,
Milton’s 1644 publication alludes to Paul’s address to the Athenians in
 LIAM GEARON 13

Acts 17:18–34, the setting in around 355 BC of Isocrates’ Areopagitic

Discourse. Milton’s Areopagitica, originally addressed to Parliament,
combines scriptural sources from the King James Bible to justify
freedom of publication and (up to a point) liberty of thought and
conscience. Such liberal politics (based on individual rights and free-
doms) would affect the secular transformation of society and ultimate
decline of a biblically oriented Protestant Christian hegemony in
England. If many of these effects were unintentional, such liberal
thinking soon took conscious educational as well as political form, and,
greatly influenced by Milton, no thinker helped unify 17th-century
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political–educational thinking than John Locke.

Educated at Westminster School, John Locke towers as the politi-
cal philosopher of his age. Locke wrote his Letter Concerning Tolera-
tion in 1693, in the aftermath of the English Bill of Rights (1689). The
letter contained his “thoughts about the mutual toleration of Chris-
tians in their different professions of religion” in which he esteems
“toleration to be the chief characteristic mark of the true Church.” It
is the King James Bible he cites. What is striking is that one of the
17th century’s leading political thinkers consistently uses the Bible to
support a philosophical argument (Locke 2009; see also Morgan 2005,
682).
His political works (Essay on Toleration and Two Treatises Con-
cerning Government) share with his educational writings (Some
Thoughts concerning Education) the backdrop of religious and po-
litical conflict particularly the English Civil War (Axtel 1968, 49–68).
Locke’s political and educational writings thus provide critical 17th-
century grounding for the 18th-century Enlightenment in England
(Axtel 1968). Locke frames a new liberality in education, including an
openness to science (see Axtel 1968, 69–87, on Locke and scientific
education) based on tolerance, both political and religious. Locke’s
modest titled Some Thoughts Concerning Education thus embodies
a tolerant, non-partisan liberal political outlook in pedagogical terms,
mindful that education should be responsive to “the child’s natu-
ral genius and constitution,” which “God has stamped” (Locke 2009,
179–199; also Axtel 1968). So, although (in the 17th century) the
worldview of the King James Bible unified Locke’s political and ed-
ucational philosophy, the new liberality would ground philosophies
of individual and political autonomy in the subsequent 18th-century
Enlightenment.
Yet even at the end of the 17th century, that is, less than a hun-
dred years after the publication of the King James translation, signs
 14 KING JAMES BIBLE AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

of a growing autonomy from biblical authority were evident. In 1698,

with specific aims of fostering such a worldview, at a time of emer-
gent Empire, the Society for the Promoting of Christian Knowledge
(SPCK) was created to undergird Christian missionary with the King
James Bible at its core, to “counteract the growth of vice and im-
morality” and the “gross ignorance of the principles of the Christian
religion” (http://www.spck.org.uk/about-spck/history/).
The dictum of autonomy would now reach the beginning of an ed-
ucational ascendancy that permeates the majority of Western liberal
education systems. It was epitomized on the continent by the En-
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lightenment’s great figurehead, Immanuel Kant. Kant’s (1784) pithy

definition of Enlightenment thus showed a barely concealed sense
of (intellectual, moral, rational) release from revelation and religious
authority: “If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pas-
tor to serve as my conscience . . . I need not exert myself at all”
(http://www.sas.upenn.edu/∼mgamer/Etexts/kant.html). Such ideas
may not have been unthinkable a century earlier but they would rarely
have been so publicly stated, although even Kant is not so brazen as
to identify “the book” as the Bible.
The late 18th-century Enlightenment had of course revolution-
ary political consequences, notable in France, Britain, and America,
although as Himmelfarb (2005) has shown in often distinctive ways.
For Britain one of the direct consequences was loss of her Ameri-
can colonies. But the fact of their having been such colonial territory
meant the King James Bible was not dependent on the country of its
origin for its survival. And there was a time when this was the case.
So, in 1611, the year of the King James Bible, the English-speaking
population was around four million, yet English was a language in
the main used by its indigenous speakers (Mulvey 2011, 1ff). If it had
remained in England, the King James Bible would not, self-evidently,
have exerted the worldwide influence it did. New World migrations
of English Puritans in the first decades of the 1600s spread the King
James Version to America. The irony is not lost to one author: “It is
one of the strangest historical paradoxes that the King James Bible
whose whole purpose had been nation-building in the service of a
ceremonial and Episcopal church, should become the guiding text of
Puritan America” (Nicolson 2011, 230).
If the 18th century saw a loss of Britain’s American colonies,
loss of wider colonial influence was temporary, for the 19th would
be the zenith of British Empire in Africa, Asia, Australia, and the
Pacific. Empire was opportune for expansionist Christian missionary
 LIAM GEARON 15

activity throughout the 19th century. The Bible Society was founded
in England in 1804 precisely to serve such opportunity. It provided the
greatest single distribution of biblical literature, and simultaneously
(though secondary to mission) the greatest single source of material for
enhancing basic education. As a result, the King James Bible facilitated
the spread not only of Protestant Christianity but the English language.
An adverse effect of this was, as postcolonial critics remind us, an
historical association of Christian mission with exploitative imperialism
(Harlow and Carter 1999), and specifically interpretations of the Bible
itself as a book of colonization (e.g., Sugirtharajah 1998).
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In England, secular influences were growing as powerfully from

industrialisation as Enlightenment. In an era in which Marx and En-
gels would chart of the appalling conditions of the new urban working
class, in 1811 the SPCK founded the National Society for the Promo-
tion of the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established
Church to establish primary schools in England and Wales, celebrat-
ing its two-hundredth anniversary in the year the King James Bible
commemorated its four hundredth. The Reformed or non-conformist
British and Foreign School Society (founded 1808) was undertak-
ing parallel work. With the 1829 Act of Emancipation, the Catholic
Church also regained rights to establish churches and schools in
England. Theological differences were never set aside in this period
but the Bible was the educational core of cross-denominational school
building.
In England and abroad, then, Christian church provision for edu-
cation long predates the state’s (Gillard 2011; Wilson 2011). What in
European or American terms is remarkably late, the 1870 Education
Act made elementary education compulsory. Although little thought
went into its aims or form, this state provision included religious ed-
ucation. From here on in begins the story of a curious decline in the
fortunes of the King James Bible in English education, dateable to the
year of the 1870 Education Act itself.

THE KING JAMES BIBLE AND STATE RELIGIOUS

EDUCATION

The year of a landmark Education Act in England, 1870 was

also the year in which one Bishop Wilberforce instigated revision
of the King James Bible, a project that would result in the Revised
Standard Version (Campbell 2011, 215). The timing and context is
 16 KING JAMES BIBLE AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

interesting. Ten years earlier, following publication of Darwin’s On the

Origin of Species the same Bishop Wilberforce had engaged (and by all
accounts lost) a high profile Oxford debate on evolution with “Darwin’s
Bulldog,” Thomas Huxley. The loss of this debate, which centered
on the enduring significance of biblical revelation, arguably spurred
Wilberforce into revising and creating a more accessible translation
than the King James. It was at the least recognition that re-translation
was necessary so its enduring truths could be accessible to a world in
which scientific speculation such as Darwin’s had now obviously wide
appeal (Darwin 2008 [1876]).
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Yet it was also a year of some conciliation. For, also in 1870,

Thomas Huxley offered expansive praise for the King James Bible,
which he had so successfully challenged a decade earlier in the Oxford
debate. Huxley’s paper was on the theme of the new School Boards,
created by the 1870 Education Act. His essay praised the geographical,
historical, and literary qualities, as well as educational merit of the
King James Bible (Huxley 1870). We note of course that Huxley’s was
a secular, cultural heritage not theological defense. This secularizing of
the Bible’s merits (a trend T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis would later attack)
cannot be overstated. By 1870 it is a mark of secularist confidence that
Huxley could praise the King James Bible without even scientific
colleagues thinking he took seriously the truth of the Bible, even if he
admired the language of its telling.
It is something of a cliché to characterize Darwin’s 1859 publi-
cation of the On the Origin of Species as a landmark challenge to
biblical revelation. It is a familiar story. It provoked immediate and
very public debate, as in the clash between Huxley and Wilberforce.
Subsequent accommodation and conflict within science and religion
debates frequently center on evolutionary theory and biblical accounts
of creation. Darwin is seen here as a neutral scientific figure dispas-
sionately uncovering the laws of nature, leaving others to comment
on how such science might affect religious belief. Certainly on publi-
cation of On the Origin of Species or the subsequent The Descent of
Man, Darwin, a subject of much complacent ecclesiastical mockery,
tended to avoid personal contributions to public controversy. It was
after all Huxley and not Darwin who was present at the 1860 Oxford
debate (Darwin 2008 [1876]).
However in Darwin’s later years his autobiographical writings
(from the 1870s) provide more forthright, little cited expression of
his views on religion:
 LIAM GEARON 17

Whilst on board the Beagle I was quite orthodox, & I remember being
heartily laughed at by several of the officers (though themselves orthodox)
for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of moral-
ity. I suppose it was the novelty of the argument that amused them. But
I had gradually come by this time (i.e. 1836 to 1839) to see the Old Tes-
tament, from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of
Babel, the rain-bow as a sign &c &c, from its attributing to God the feelings
of a vengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the
Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian.

His attacks on religion are then directed specifically to Christianity:

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The question then continually arose before my mind & would not be ban-
ished. . . . By further reflecting that the clearest evidence would be requi-
site to make any sane man believe in the miracles by which Christianity is
supported—that the more we know of the men at that time were ignorant &
credulous to a degree almost incomprehensible to us—that the Gospels can-
not be proved to have been written simultaneously with the events—that
they differ in many important details, far too important as it seemed to
me to be admitted as he usual inaccuracies of eye-witnesses—by such
reflections as these, which I give not as having the least novelty or value,
but as they influence me, I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a
divine revelation.

“I found,” he writes, “it more and more difficult, with free scope given
to my imagination to invent evidence which would suffice to convince
me:”

Thus disbelief crept upon me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete.
The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, & have never since doubted even
for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see
how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so, the plain language
of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, & this would
include my Father, Brother & almost all my friends, will be everlastingly
punished. (Darwin 2008 [1876], 391–392)

He adds, with undoubtedly intended irony, “And this is a damnable

doctrine.” The Bible was not part of a narrowly conceived religious
education but an integral part of education. Darwin was opposing an
entire worldview, not a minor aspect of the school curriculum.
This context of skepticism remains important today. Richard
Dawkins and the new atheists cite Darwinian theory or variations
of it, more than any other to challenge biblical revelation (Dawkins
 18 KING JAMES BIBLE AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

2006; 2007). The Darwinian context was and remains important his-
torically in order to understand the 1870s context in which religious
education was introduced in England. It was already part of an episte-
mological battle, part of a much wider cumulative 19th-century assault
on Christianity, from Feuerbach to Marx, and, in the early 20th cen-
tury, by reductionist thinkers such Durkheim and Freud (Pals 2008).
So, it was into this ferocious intellectual cauldron that teachers of the
newly established, state provided religious education were expected
to contend.
At a time when few teachers had anything like university level ed-
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ucation teachers, growing numbers of new church colleges for teacher

education helped to raise standards of training for new teachers. And
at least within the context of a Christian school, ethos, doctrine, re-
ligious authority, and revelation had some prima facie justification.
And the 1870 Education Act did not diminish but accelerate Chris-
tian churches’ provisions for schools in England. Indeed in the two
decades following the Act the number of children attending church
schools doubled to two million (Gillard 2011), a “dual system,” with
state and church education existing together. In terms of religious ed-
ucation, for many decades it meant ecumenical cooperation. But the
“tradition of Christian instruction established in nineteenth century
Anglican and Nonconformist elementary day schools was maintained
in nondenominational form in secular ‘board’ and ‘county’ schools
after 1870 and 1902.” Here “[d]isputes between the churches pre-
vented it developing beyond a dry, factual study of the Bible.” With
improved ecumenical relations between the churches in the inter-
war years, Bates comments: “Negotiations between the churches
and the LEAs [Local Education Authorities] to solve the problems
of the ‘dual system’ after the 1918 Education Act resulted in the
churches having the major say in determining the official content
of religious teaching in the rapidly expanding state school sector”
(Bates 1994, 6–7).
Religious education continued to be distinguished by a clause
named after its proponent, the Liberal MP William Cowper-Temple,
his clause in section 14 of the Act stated: “No religious catechism or
religious formulary which is distinctive of any particular denomination
shall be taught in the school” (Gillard 2011; Copley 2008). The clause is
understandable in the context of state provision of religious education
where pupils would be from many denominations or none.
However, the issue of how state religious education can provide
aims, objectives, a general rationale and justification is something
 LIAM GEARON 19

which the subject had not resolved, and arguably has never quite
resolved in its (to date) 140-year history. Even in 1870, if religious
education would mean biblical education, and if the religious educa-
tion was to be non-denominational, which Bible was to be used? The
King James Bible had not yet become the Revised Standard Version,
but how acceptable would this be Catholic children? Given that most
Catholic children were increasingly educated in Catholic elementary
schools, the King James Bible would have been the common choice.
But then the problem of how to teach the Bible beyond simply read-
ing it was clearly not a consideration to the series of legislators who,
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over subsequent decades, continued to retain the Cowper-Temple

clause and, under this banner, inadvertently concealed the mounting
difficulties for Bible teaching.
The problems of biblical teaching (text, interpretation) and the
wider aims of religious education did not disappear; to such an extent
that The Spens Report on Secondary Education (1938) devoted an
entire chapter (V) to “Scripture.” Spens addresses scriptural knowl-
edge: “There are three main departments into which Biblical study in
schools is likely to fall: the religious ideas and experiences of Israel,
of which the record is to be found in the Old Testament, the life and
teaching of Jesus Christ, and the beginning of the Christian church.”
There is optimism among the Report writers:

We believe that there is a wide and genuine recognition of the value and
importance of religious instruction and the teaching of Scripture in schools,
and that the time is favourable for a fresh consideration of the place that they
should occupy in the education of boys and girls of secondary school age. The
subject has been hitherto admittedly difficult and sometimes controversial.
No kind of religious instruction can fail to raise issues relating to the meaning
of life and to human destiny which in the world outside the school are the
subject of profound disagreement.

The problem remains “largely . . . of finding an approach to the sub-

ject which can enlist the disinterested enthusiasm and give scope to
the professional ability of teachers who may differ widely in their per-
sonal convictions.” But the Report writers “believe that the present
temper of public opinion is such that the educational issues involved
in the teaching of Scripture may be faced fairly on their own merits,
and that they are no longer obscured by past controversy.” In what
sense the Bible is no longer “obscured by past controversy” is unclear.
There were certainly many future controversies confronting it.
 20 KING JAMES BIBLE AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

Spens consciously rejects a cultural heritage argument, its jus-

tification, that is, as part of English language, literature, culture, or
history:

It is often maintained that the study of the Bible should have a place in the
curriculum for its literary value alone. We do not wish to underestimate
that value. The English Bible is one of the glories of the literary heritage
bequeathed to the English-speaking peoples. For that reason there is much
to be said in favour of the inclusion of portions of the Bible in the syllabus
of English literature. But it is also true that no boy or girl can be counted
as properly educated unless he or she has been made aware of the fact
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of the existence of a religious interpretation of life. The traditional form

which that interpretation has taken in this country is Christian, and the
principal justification for giving a place in the curriculum to the study of
the Scriptures is that the Bible is the classic book of Christianity and forms
the basis of the structure of Christian faith and worship. The content of
the Bible has, therefore, inevitably its own dignity and associations. It can
neither be treated merely as a part of English literature, nor can it be merged
in the general study of history . . . (Spens 1938, 206–217; cf. Hamlin and
Jones 2010)

Yet the undercurrent of the Report is that the wider public were less
and less likely to take the Bible seriously as scripture, had dismissed
it as revelation, saw in biblical truth merely allegory and ethical guid-
ance devoid of saving doctrine, although they could accept the Bible’s
literary merits.

THE KING JAMES BIBLE AND THE POLITICS OF

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

The 1944 Education Act was a landmark for religious education

in England that postponed the real decline of Bible teaching in En-
glish schools. What is invariably forgotten is that the framework for
religious education now becomes not simply non-denominational but
secular. The latter word appears repeatedly in the Act. Albeit the sec-
tion headed “secular instruction” is seemingly in contrast to “religious
instruction,” the former effectively frames the latter. Yet despite Spens
and the secularism of English religious education legislation, in the
decades that followed the 1944 Education, local agreed syllabuses (the
legal framework for state religious education in England) followed a
broadly biblical orientation advocated by Spens in terms of content
(Copley 2004; Thompson 2004). Then the decline in the Bible in state
religious education would begin in earnest.
 LIAM GEARON 21

The 1960s and 1970s in religious education thus demonstrated a

concern with sociological and psychological theory, the very reduc-
tionist frameworks that sought not simply to account for but to explain
away religion per se. Such approaches were applied to religious edu-
cation. Harold Loukes (1961; 1963), Ronald Goldman (1964; 1965),
and Edwin Cox (1971) followed this line in their analysis of the role of
the Bible in religious education. Their collective argument was that,
bearing in mind their psychological development and the sociological
condition children lacked, to use the Loukes/Goldman term, “readi-
ness for religion.” It is opportune to recall Callum Brown’s (2009)
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observation that, though long in gestation, these mid-20th-century

decades were the true beginning of “the death of Christian Britain.”
Using a seemingly benign child-centered methodology and outlook,
these religious education researchers particularly targeted the Bible
as inappropriate for children (Hyde 1990). Child-centered education
was deemed to need to meet the children’s needs in preparing for adult
life, and such education increasingly took the curricula center stage.
Religious education in English schools increasingly became aligned
to Personal and Social Education. On the basis of a few influential
researchers, Bible teaching declined. Readiness for religion research
provided a readymade excuse for educators already ill-equipped to
teach the Bible to jettison it from the curriculum.
These child-centered approaches were subsequently and rightly
seen as lacking content. They were themselves then marginalized. The
real defining moment for religious education—in England furthering
the beginning of the end for Bible teaching—came with an approach
to the study of religion in schools we find in a 1969 edition of this jour-
nal. In “The Comparative Study of Religions and the Schools,” volume
64 of Religious Education, Ninian Smart states: “I am deeply commit-
ted to the secular principle in state education. That is, I am skeptical
as to whether the present pattern of religious education in England,
which assumes that for those who do not contract out on grounds of
conscience, etc., the content of religious education shall be Christian,
is right or viable” (Smart 1969a, 26). The Schools’ Council Work-
ing Paper No. 36 (1971), based on Smart’s “phenomenology” (Smart
1969b) soon began to shape religious education into the teaching of
world religions.
Bates (1994) identifies a twofold tension:

The first, associated with F H Hilliard and the Durham Report (1970),
sees the purpose of religious education as primarily to teach Christianity,
 22 KING JAMES BIBLE AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

the religion of English culture, and to practise its worship but with some
separate and subordinate reference to other religions; the second, associated
with Ninian Smart and Schools’ Council Working Paper No. 36 (1971),
argues for the empathetic study of the world’s major religions with a view to
gaining a critical understanding of religion as a global phenomenon. (Bates
1996, 85)

Such charges arose in an increasingly diverse society. Religious plu-

rality and the teaching of world religions in schools would now come
to dominate the raison d’être of religious education. Thus in 1985 an
official British inquiry into the Education of Children from Ethnic Mi-
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nority Groups, chaired by Lord Swann, published Education for All.

As Barnes (2001) commented—also in this journal and thirty years
after Smart’s paper—the Swann Report included a substantial section
on the role of religion in schools and came down “decisively in favour
of a nondogmatic, nondenominational, phenomenological approach
to religious education” (Barnes 2001, 445).
The Swann Report, along with the Schools’ Council (1971) and
Smart’s (1969a; 1969b) approach to the study of religion, shaped the
1988 Education Reform Act. This was the most significant education
act since 1944. Its implication for religious education was substantive.
Part 8 (l) Section 3 reads: “Any agreed syllabus which after this section
comes into force is adopted or deemed to be adopted . . . shall reflect
the fact that the religious traditions in Great Britain are in the main
Christian whilst taking account of the teaching and practices of the
other principal religions represented in Great Britain” (Gillard 2011;
Copley 2008).
Despite this considerable shift away from the Bible to teaching
world religions, the charge was still levelled that this Act was in some
way reactionary. In “Christianity, culture and other religions,” Bates
(1994) argued that “the major impetus for such study came not from
secularism but from late 19th- and early 20th-century liberal Protes-
tantism, influenced by philosophical idealism which saw all religions
as deriving from humanity’s common religious experience.” Further,
claimed Bates, although the 1988 Act recognizes the teaching of world
religions, it was “inspired by reactionary thinking out of keeping with
the ethos and needs of a multicultural society” (Bates 1996, 85). This
is a selective reading of history. For liberal Protestant theology was it-
self a product of Enlightenment, and those liberal secularizing forces
detailed above from the early 17th century onward. Wright (2007)
identifies this as “liberal nurture.” Barnes characterizes it as a clear
“misrepresentation of British religious education.” The late Terence
 LIAM GEARON 23

Copley (2005) put it more strongly as “indoctrination” into liberal

secular values by state maintained religious education.
In maintained state schools it is this phenomenological approach
that would predominate in English religious education, and does so
to the present, a trend charted by many (Barnes 2006; Copley 2008;
Felderhof et al. 2007; Thompson 2004; Wright 2007). The teaching
of the Bible now took a minor part in the wider context of teach-
ing world religions. Limited curricula time meant expanded content
would irrevocably marginalize what had been core.
This pattern was consolidated by the Schools’ Curriculum and
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Assessment Authority (SCAA 1994; later the Qualifications and Cur-

riculum Authority) Model Syllabuses, later reiterated in Religious Ed-
ucation Guidance in English Schools (QCA 2010). Research on school
materials for teaching world religions—Buddhism, Christianity, Hin-
duism, Islam, Judaism, and Sikhism—makes now only marginal ref-
erences to the Bible (Jackson et al. 2010). At the King James Bible’s
four-hundredth anniversary, the Bible as a significant statutory el-
ement in religious education has all but disappeared: where it ex-
ists, it does so as snippets of text to illustrate moral or ethical is-
sues. Resultantly, the one tradition with which school inspectors
in England found serious weaknesses in teaching was Christianity
(Ofsted 2010).
Much of this has provided for rearguard action. Terence Copley’s
Biblos initiative showed a profound, personal, and professional com-
mitment to the teaching of the Bible. However, its method, if it was
seeking to re-establish Bible teaching, was flawed. The Biblos project
began, as the 1960s and 1970s researchers had, on attitudes of children
to the Bible (Copley 2008; Copley et al. 2001; 2004). Freathy (2006)
found that “being female, in Year 6 and attending a place of wor-
ship very often are factors associated with the most positive attitudes
towards the Bible, while being male, in Year 9 and never attending
a place of worship are associated with the least positive attitudes”
(Freathy 2006, 327). In all it tells us little that can be generalized.
It is not teaching from a priori or first principles: while pupil views
and attitudes are important, what other subject would begin by asking
pupils what they thought of their subject as a means of curriculum de-
sign? Although teaching, naturally, needs to engage, such an approach
would be unimaginable in history or literature, and unthinkable in the
sciences.
The King James Bible Trust reports that “School advisers at
the London Diocesan Board for Schools have produced a scheme
 24 KING JAMES BIBLE AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

of work on the King James Bible for Key Stages 1, 2 and 3. The
scheme has been sent out to all 150 Church of England schools
and academies in the Diocese of London.” This is a small frac-
tion of schools across England. Further, the Trust reports that,
“The Bible in Literacy www.bibleinliteracy.org is an educational re-
source . . . supplied to more than 190 schools within the UK so far”
(http://www.kingjamesbibletrust.org). Yet, the Department for Ed-
ucation reports that in 2010 “there were around 8.1 million pupils
(headcount) in all schools in England” (http://www.education.gov.uk/
rsgateway/DB/SFR/s000925/index.shtml). It does not take rigorous
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statistical analysis to see the impact of the King James Bible in En-
glish schools today as negligible.
Freathy suggests that “[m]ore generally, knowledge of how to
transform young people’s social and cultural valuation of the Bible
will be of interest to all those who recognise the Bible to be a foun-
dational text of western civilisation” (Freathy 2006, 337). For all this
rhetoric (the cultural argument, as has been intimated since Spens, is
a threadbare defense), the reality of religious education departments
in England, is that many do not even use the Bible in religious edu-
cation. Some departments may not even own multiple copies of the
Bible. The notion of the King James Bible as a national text is for all
intents and purposes dead in English religious education.

CONCLUSION

The pedagogical disarray of religious education in England is

mapped by Grimmitt (2000) in an important record of how religious
education content away from the Bible transformed the subject’s ped-
agogy, leaving little or no consensus. The acute problems identified
by the Spens Report half a century earlier have become chronic. Ten
years after Grimmitt’s edited collection on pedagogies of religious
education there is arguably an emergent consensus: that of narrowly
defined political goals highlighting religious education’s contribution
to social and community cohesion (Grimmitt 2010).
This is mirrored in developments across Europe through the pri-
oritising of religious education’s potential to contribute to democratic
goals especially in developing tolerance and reducing conflict; for ex-
ample, in the largest ever funded project of the European Commission
on religion and education, the Religion and Education Dialogue or
Conflict Project (REDCo) (Weisse 2011; Jackson 2011). The following
 LIAM GEARON 25

extract is from a recent editorial of the British Journal of Religious Ed-

ucation, reporting on a 2009 presentation given at the European Par-
liament, which “while acknowledging contextual differences between
and within the participant countries, attempt a generic summary of
project findings” concludes:

• Students wish for peaceful coexistence across differences, and be-

lieve this to be possible
• For students peaceful coexistence depends on knowledge about
each other’s religions and worldviews and sharing common interests
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as well as doing things together . . .

• Most students would like the state-funded school to be a place
for learning about different religions/worldviews, rather than for
instruction into a particular religion/worldview. (Jackson 2011,
107–108, emphasis in original)

The biblical text that shaped this same European continent has
entirely left the religious education foreground. In this context there
are even hints of religious education embodying a new civil religion,
more than reminiscent of civil religion in Rousseau’s (1968 [1762])
Social Contract, made explicit in Jackson and O’Grady’s (2007) “Re-
ligions and Education in England: Social Plurality, Civil Religion and
Religious Education Pedagogy.” The guiding texts of English religious
education are those of secular state rather than sacred scripture. This
raises questions of the extent to which religious education is a contrib-
utory factor in rather than a bastion against secularization, the nuances
of which debate I discuss elsewhere (Gearon 2012).
The Company of Translators of the King James Bible would have
regarded such developments with utter dismay. Anglican and non-
conformist translators alike would have regarded such state involve-
ment in religious education as a questionable source of doctrinal er-
ror, at worst a threat to salvation. Yet it is of course also possible
to add another layer of interpretation. In line with the theology of
those Christian traditions who disavow too close an association of
church and state—see recent post-Christendom commentary (e.g.,
Murray 2004)—did the King James Bible itself hold the seed of
its own educational demise, enabling the state to intrude on reli-
gious education in the way that it clearly has in England? The title
of the King James Bible is marked after all by an integral relation-
ship between secular state and sacred scripture. But the path of this
necessarily cursory historical overview is a potential warning of what
 26 KING JAMES BIBLE AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

happens when the state shapes the contours, the politics of religious
education.

Liam Gearon is Senior Research Fellow at Harris Manchester College,

University of Oxford, where he holds the University Lectureship in Religious
Education. E-mail: liam.gearon@education.ox.ac.uk

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