A coalition of organizations dedicated to preserving religious freedom, representing dozens of residents of Oklahoma, is suing the state’s head of public education over his attempts to force schools to teach Christian-based lessons through the Bible.
Earlier this year, Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters (R) mandated that public schools had to include instruction on the Bible, a clear violation of the longheld separation of church and state standard. In late September, the State Board of Education also approved $3 million in state funding to purchase Bibles for use in public schools as part of those lessons.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Oklahoma; Americans United for Separation of Church and State; Freedom From Religion Foundation; and Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law & Justice filed a joint lawsuit last week challenging the new mandate from Walters. The organizations are representing more than 30 residents in the state, including parents, students, teachers and faith leaders, who agree that the requirements being imposed interfere with their religious freedom and rights.
The lawsuit notes that Walters’s actions violate the Oklahoma Administrative Procedures Act, as the state superintendent appeared to overreach his authority to make such requirements. According to the lawsuit:
Oklahoma public-school curricula are guided by the Oklahoma Academic Standards — a set of educational benchmarks for each grade in each subject-matter area, which must be adopted by the State Board of Education every six years and must be approved by the legislature. The [mandates from Walters] purport to rely on the 2019 Oklahoma Academic Standards for Social Studies. But those standards do not include any requirement that schools use the Bible as an instructional support or provide the teaching required by the Bible Education Mandate; indeed, the standards do not even mention the Bible or the Ten Commandments.
The lawsuit also says that the Bible “is not one of the textbooks or other instructional materials” that have been approved by the state’s Department of Public Education.
Beyond those points, the lawsuit notes that the action taken by Walters is in direct violation of the state constitution, which prohibits the use of state funds to promote a specific religion or sect.
“No public money or property shall ever be appropriated, applied, donated, or used, directly or indirectly, for the use, benefit, or support of any sect, church, denomination, or system of religion, or for the use, benefit, or support of any priest, preacher, minister, or other religious teacher or dignitary, or sectarian institution as such,” Article II Section 5 of the document states.
The lawsuit also cited another part of the state constitution — Article I Section 2 — which stipulates that “no inhabitant of the State shall ever be molested in person or property on account of his or her mode of religious worship.”
“Respondents’ planned spending on Bibles violates these clauses for several reasons,” the coalition of groups suing the state said in the lawsuit. “It would support a system of religion. It would be for items that are religious in nature. And it represents a governmental preference for one religion over another, as the state funds are to be spent on the King James Version Bible, which is a Protestant version that is different from versions typically used by Catholics and Jews.”
The challenge to Walters’s mandate seeks to have it blocked completely, urging the courts to deem it as unlawful and unconstitutional.
Walters responded to the lawsuit by whining that the state was being “bullied” by out-of-state “radical leftists,” despite the fact that the brief includes dozens of Oklahomans who want his action to be blocked. Walters also falsely asserted that the Bible was necessary in public school instruction.
“It is not possible for our students to understand American history and culture without understanding the Biblical principles from which they came,” Walters claimed.
Walters’s statement is deeply flawed, as the founding documents of the U.S. make no direct reference to the Bible. While many of the country’s founders were Christians, the teaching of biblical concepts is not necessary to explain the country’s formation at the end of the 18th century.
The Constitution, for example, never mentions God or Christianity at all, and the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights explicitly states that “no law respecting an establishment of religion” should ever be passed. While the Declaration of Independence does allude to “Nature’s God” within the missive, that terminology, at the time, was understood to mean whatever entity — religious or otherwise — was responsible for the creation of humanity and the world itself. Rather than being an assertion that a religious “God” (Christian or otherwise) played a role in the creation of the nation, as some modern-day Christians claim, the term was used to explain that all people were created equally in the eyes of nature (though in practice, the U.S. has failed to live up to that standard).
A few years after the founding of the country, the U.S. reasserted its secular roots with the passage of “The Treaty of Peace and Friendship, Signed at Tripoli,” which stated that “the United States of America [was] not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.” President John Adams, himself a Christian, approved the treaty’s passage.
Notably, Walters’s actions are decidedly Christian nationalist, as his department had placed strict requirements on what kind of Bibles could be used — including stipulating that they had to include the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Pledge of Allegiance, and other documents relevant to U.S. history.
Only one set of Bibles, promoted by singer-songwriter Lee Greenwood, fit those stringent requirements. Those Bibles sell for around $60 each, with Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, receiving a small kickback for endorsing them earlier this year. Only after public uproar came about over the requirements for what kind of Bible could be used did Walters alter the rules for selecting Bibles, allowing other options to be considered.
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