She is an atheist who likes the Bible.
She said: "I think it's important for people to understand their Bible stories, not because I'm an advocate of religion - clearly, I'm not - but once again, what comes from the Bible has formed such an important part of our culture.
"It's impossible to understand Western literature without having that key of understanding the Bible stories and how Western literature builds on them and reflects them and deconstructs them and brings them back together." The Prime Minister was happy to accept the brand of "traditionalist".
Fascinating political positioning.
But does her proposition - western literature is a rewriting of Bible stories (such a protestant sunday school idea) - really stand up.
Of course, our cultural heritage has many pre- and non- Christian roots.
Homer and Virgil. Bewoulf. Irish sagas, myths, legends - much loved and used by Yeats and the Celtic twilight movement.
Of course, Milton and Dante are probably a bit tricky without some knowledge of christianity. Less so, Shakespeare. You can probably get through Hamlet, Lear, MacBeth etc without being able to recite slabs of the Bible. Joyce, Eliot many other moderns write within a Christian tradition but they draw on much more than the Bible. And besides in Joyce's Ulysses you've got Bloom, the secular Jew, giving a useful commentary on some puzzling aspects of the catholic liturgy.
Oh yes. Do Julia's bible stories help us understand Jewish novelists: Bellow, Salinger, Roth (Henry and Phillip) and so on? Perhaps the kiddies need a quick heads-up on the torah before diving into Catcher in the Rye.
And why the focus on western traditions. Why not background the kids in indigenous cultures, and major religions like Buddhism, Islam and so on.
I've got no problem with students reading the Bible, but let's not kid ourselves about it's centrality nor forget the Greek and Roman classics or the texts of other religions.
It is a bit concerning that the PM seems to have a narrow 'what I learned in sunday school' view of our cultural heritage.
In Parliament today she boasted that she could recite more of the Bible than Tony Abbott.
Welcome to our secular, multi-cultural age.
Catholics famously do not study the Bible in any depth but protestant sects do. So, I'm sure that the PM would win a bible quoting contest with Tony Abbott.
Posted by: Rote | 22 March 2011 at 02:42 PM