State Superintendent Ryan Walters considers the initiative as a push for educational excellence, whereas critics say it violates the state’s Structure.
Oklahoma’s high schooling official mentioned Friday that the state bought greater than 500 Bibles for AP authorities courses as a step towards offering the spiritual textual content in each state classroom.
State Superintendent Ryan Walters mentioned offering Bibles in Oklahoma’s lecture rooms would supply important historic, cultural, and literary context for U.S. college students and put the state on a path towards improved educational excellence.
“I’ll take each step attainable to make sure Oklahoma college students have the sources they should totally perceive American historical past,” he mentioned in a Nov. 14 assertion. “We aren’t going to vary our historical past, and the Bible is a significant a part of that.”
Whereas asserting his Bible program, Walters mentioned that the Bible, together with the U.S. Structure, the Declaration of Independence, and the Invoice of Rights, are foundational paperwork in U.S. historical past.
“Our children have to grasp the position the Bible performed in influencing American historical past,” he mentioned. “It’s very clear that the unconventional left has pushed the Bible out of the classroom, which results in a lack of knowledge of American historical past.”
The Bible purchases are half of a bigger effort to offer Bibles and patriotic supplies, together with the Pledge of Allegiance and U.S. founding paperwork, to each classroom in Oklahoma.
This broader initiative has drawn authorized challenges, with opponents arguing it violates the Oklahoma Structure’s prohibition on public funding for spiritual functions and favors one faith over others by utilizing a Protestant model of the Bible.
A lawsuit filed by civil rights organizations, together with the ACLU of Oklahoma and the Freedom From Faith Basis, which advocates for atheists, agnostics, and nontheists, seeks to dam the mandate. The plaintiffs additionally allege Walters and the state Board of Schooling lack authority to implement such a requirement.
New Workplace of Spiritual Liberty and Patriotism
Individually, Walters introduced on Nov. 12 the creation of a brand new Workplace of Spiritual Liberty and Patriotism on the state’s Division of Schooling.
Walters mentioned the workplace would shield academics’ and college students’ constitutional rights, citing a case in Skiatook, a metropolis the place Bible quotes had been faraway from a classroom underneath authorized menace.
He linked the workplace to President-elect Donald Trump’s “Freedom to Pray” initiative and mentioned Oklahoma would make sure that scholar and trainer’s rights to prayer are upheld.
Walters, who was elected in 2022 on a platform of opposing progressive ideologies and banning books with pornographic or sexualized content material from colleges, has confronted opposition to his Bible program.
In October, a gaggle of oldsters, academics, and ministers filed a separate lawsuit difficult Walters’s coverage to include the Bible into public faculty lesson plans for grades 5–12.
The swimsuit additionally targets Walters’s plan to spend $3 million on Bible purchases, alleging that it infringes on the state’s constitutional separation of church and state. Walters has dismissed the criticism, posting on social media platform X that he “won’t ever again down.”
Amid authorized challenges, Walters is pushing ahead along with his broader agenda, aligning the schooling division’s objectives with Trump’s “Ten Ideas for Nice Colleges Resulting in Nice Jobs” outlined within the president-elect’s Agenda 47 plan, which describes his plans for a second time period in workplace.
The Related Press contributed to this text.
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