Preparing for College by Reading the Bible
What Students Need to Know
by Chuck Colson
August 11, 2006

Is it possible to be an educated person without knowing about the Bible? That’s the question that was posed to thirty-nine English professors at some of our leading universities. Their answers should not come as a surprise, although given our culture’s “Christophobia” and the politically correct attitudes on campuses, they probably do.

The relationship between biblical literacy and education was the subject of a survey conducted by the Bible Literacy Project. The study, whose subtitle is “What University Professors Say Incoming Students Need to Know,” found that every professor surveyed agreed with the following statement: “Regardless of a person’s faith, an educated person needs to know about the Bible.” Every professor!

By way of elaboration, Professor George P. Landow, from my alma mater, the very liberal Brown University, said, “[Without the Bible] it’s like using a dictionary with one-third of the words removed.” Professor Ulrich Knoepflmacher at Princeton said that the lack of “Bible knowledge is almost crippling in students’ ability to be sophisticated readers.”

Case in point: A preparation workbook for the Advanced Placement Literature exam lists sixty-seven biblical allusions among the 105 allusions that it recommends students know. Yet, only 8 percent of public high schools teach about the Bible even as literature. the rest