Many have had concern about fundamentalists running secondary and primary schools. The anti-academic approach to knowledge has been borne out by the University of California not accepting students from a so called 'Christian School.' The University had ruled some courses of Calvary Chapel School of Murrieta in California, US, inadequate preparation for University admission. The courses failed to provide a broad enough grounding in the subjects of biology, history, politics and religion. In August 2005, the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI), the school itself and six students took the University of California to court over this ruling. The US court system found for the University. The fundamentalists exhausted all appeals on the 20 January 2010.
Success for the fundamentalist would only come if they could prove discrimination of the basis of religion. Wisely, US courts have refused to rule on academic standards. The University need to prove that its decisions were not based on a rejection of a particular political or religious viewpoint.
The Biology textbook used by Calvary Chapel College proves that the University's concerns were justified. The textbook was Biology for Christian School Second Edition (Bob Jones University Press, 1999). Its introduction states "The people who prepared this book have tried consistently to put the Word of God first and science second" (p. vii)." It advocates creationism and even has a rejection of the 'gap' theory. Given that 'nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,' could never be to prepare a student to study Biology at a university level.
My problem with the text is that I don't think the book is even Christian! I have two reasons for this. The first is the denial of a historical grammatical approach to scripture. It has imposed some idea of that scripture that traditional Christianity refused to recognise. From the early church to Augustine to the reformer did not see the Bible as a scientific textbook. To use the cliché, "the Bible teaches how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go!" Occasionally, the church has slipped into some insane literal interpretation. A good example is Bishop Usher's syncretism when he combined it with Christianity with Hume's empirical epistemology. As science advance, Usher age of the earth looked increasingly stupid.
The other reason is related. What is the Bible and what is science? Whatever the bible is, it has never been a science textbook. Science is about drawing knowledge on how the world works. It does this by a lengthy community process and then disseminates knowledge to the wider world. This textbook confuses the roles.
It just took the US legal system four years to dismiss another fundamentalist attempt to destroy knowledge!
Dismissing the American academic, Mary Daly (16 October 1928 – 3 January 2010) is unfortunately easy. She was both a radical feminist and a lesbian separatist. Daly was right about the patriarchal underpinning of Christianity. The number of time I have heard Christians of both sex argue that women's oppression is somehow Biblical (and hence God ordained) has surprised me but would never surprise Daly. None pick the irony that the creation myths having men giving birth to women. She will never be countered as one of the great theologians but her contribution will affect how both feminists and Christians will think about gender.
