THE CITY
Susan McWilliams
O
n my first day as a college professor, I told my freshfaced students gathered in Classical Political Theory that during the portion of the course in which we studied The Bible, I would be using the Revised Standard Version. Two days later, I got an e-mail from a freshman who would prove to be one of my most talented students: “I can’t seem to find the right copy of the Bible for class,” she wrote. “I know that you said that we should get the Revised Standard Version, but all I can find is the Old Testament and the New Testament.” I teach young people who are members of the meritocratic elite. They are the kind of young people who are, and have always been, “going somewhere.” By the age of eighteen, most of them have lengthy resumes that testify to their capacities for leadership, sportsmanship, citizenship, and every other kind of impressive-ship you can think of. They are not just competent test-takers and multitaskers and application-filler-outers—although they are all of those things—but by and large they are legitimately intellectual, careful in their thinking and gifted in their writing. These are people who you can call, without exaggeration, the future leaders of America. My students are also disproportionately unchurched (and unsynagogued and unmosqued). An astonishing number of them—15 out of 38 in the last class I asked—come to college having never set foot inside a house of worship. Despite the fact that they are extraordinarily well-read, many of them have never opened a Bible and are entirely ignorant of its contents. The story I told above is a relatively amusing manifestation of that generational ignorance, but often I encounter more troubling variations on the theme of biblical illitera4