SOUL FOOD:

Rose Molina approached the podium with a pink, leather-bound Bible clutched in one hand. She held the book up and shook it slightly.

That book, she told those in the room, is required reading for her daughter this summer. I got the impression she was angry but in the next breath she said she thinks it’s fine.

Her daughter is a student at Huntington Beach High School, the same school where Molina teaches economics. This summer, her daughter is enrolled in an English Honors 3 Bible as Literature unit, taught by Amy Wilson, which is intended to prepare students to read books like John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden.”

The required biblical readings are extensive. Molina rapidly read off most of them to the Huntington Beach Union High School district board members during a board meeting July 22.

The readings span from Genesis into the Christian New Testament. They encompass more than 125 chapters in 15 books as well as Psalm 23 and the entire books of Ecclesiastes, Matthew, Luke and Ephesians.

If Stephen Prothero’s revelations in his book “Religious Literary” are correct, I’d venture to guess this is more biblical reading than most Americans tend do in a lifetime. Wilson’s students will become familiar with dozens of biblical stories, from the (perhaps) familiar flood in Noah’s time to the (I suspect) more obscure oath of Jephthah.

Molina and a handful of others spoke before a vote by the board to decide whether to approve a Bible as Literature elective for the district. The issue had been brought up to board members for more than a year.

It was clear from the onset of the meeting that the board had had enough of it. I fully expected members to can the idea regardless of anything that might be said during the time allotted for the public to argue for or against the issue.

And can it they did, 4-1. Only member Matthew Harper voted for it.

It was Harper who originally dragged the specter of such an elective into their midst. The rest of the board had tried to fend it off from its inception last April, when Walter Schulte of Westminster first headed up a group that lobbied for it as an action item of the board’s agenda.

The board tried to toss this hot potato to the district’s curriculum committee. But that committee also wanted nothing to do with it.

Susan Henry, then board president, first insisted that only a board majority could place the issue on the agenda for action. But fellow board member Michael Simmons told her that only a second to the motion would suffice.

To say this issue is charged with emotion and partialities is an understatement. Those who followed Molina in speaking about the proposed elective continued to make that clear.

Henry fretted about equal access demands from other faiths should the board approve the elective. Board member Brian Garland waxed on about the possible value of comparative literature courses toward assuaging faith-based conflicts, while viewing the Bible as Literature course as something more akin to a stick in the eye of our pluralist community.

Stephanie Campbell of Costa Mesa, president of the Orange County chapter of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, came armed with a definition of literature that framed literature as “an imagination work.”

Never mind that you are not likely to find that definition in a dictionary. Campbell suggested we may not want to teach the Bible as an imaginative work. As did Campbell’s, much of the discourse at the Tuesday night meeting struck me as melodramatic hand ringing. Molina kept to the practical.

Molina, who describes herself as “not religious in way, shape or form,” does not argue about the need for students to grasp the allusions in order to understand the literature that uses them. For her, the issue is one of priorities, she later told me.

The district long ago cut driver education and more recently has scrapped traffic and safety, and health classes for sophomores, juniors and seniors. Geography is currently offered only as an elective for freshmen.

“They got rid of the wood shop recently, and our school’s going to lose its auto shop this year except for a part-time position,” Molina said. “There are a lot of classes that have been eliminated that should be brought back before we look at something like Bible as Literature.”

Add to that the moneysaving measure that now requires juniors and seniors in the district to take only five instead of the six classes required in other school districts nearby. That’s why, Molina said, you see high school students out of school so early. Too early for their own good, in her opinion.

“Most crime, most teenage pregnancy, most use of illegal drugs occurs between the hours of 3 and 5,” Molina said.

“I think that’s criminal that this district doesn’t require juniors and seniors to take six classes [in order] to save money,” she said.

She thinks what Schulte and his supporters seek in a Bible as Literature elective is already met in units like the one her daughter is taking with Wilson. Or in standard American literature courses, she said, where the teacher explains biblical allusions as they arise.

As for the push for by Schulte and others for a Bible as Literature elective, she says, “Definitely, I think they have an agenda.”

Rabbi Rebecca Yaël Schorr, associate rabbi of Congregation B’nai Tzedek in Fountain Valley, agrees. She raised some thoughtful — if, for me, ultimately unconvincing — points.

In the three minutes she had to address school district board members, Schorr said she believes “with perfect faith that the Bible does not belong in our public schools.”

She took on three arguments previously offered for the elective: the idea that it would have a positive influence on the moral development of our youths; the notion that it could build bridges among adherents of differing faiths; the view that biblical literacy is part of cultural literacy.

It will take another column to tell you what she thinks of the arguments, and to tell you where and why I disagree.

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at [email protected].