State Superintendent Ryan Walters considers the initiative as a push for educational excellence, whereas critics say it violates the state’s Structure.
Oklahoma’s prime schooling official mentioned Friday that the state bought greater than 500 Bibles for AP authorities courses as a step towards offering the non secular textual content in each state classroom.
State Superintendent Ryan Walters mentioned offering Bibles in Oklahoma’s lecture rooms would offer vital historic, cultural, and literary context for U.S. college students and put the state on a path towards improved tutorial excellence.
“I will take every step possible to ensure Oklahoma students have the resources they need to fully understand American history,” he mentioned in a Nov. 14 assertion. “We are not going to change our history, and the Bible is a major 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 kids have to understand the role the Bible played in influencing American history,” he mentioned. “It’s very clear that the radical left has driven the Bible out of the classroom, which leads to a lack of understanding of American history.”
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 non secular functions and favors one faith over others through the use of 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 defend academics’ and college students’ constitutional rights, citing a case in Skiatook, a metropolis the place Bible quotes have 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 be certain 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 faculties, has confronted opposition to his Bible program.
In October, a gaggle of fogeys, academics, and ministers filed a separate lawsuit difficult Walters’s coverage to include the Bible into public college 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 “will never back down.”
Amid authorized challenges, Walters is pushing ahead together with his broader agenda, aligning the schooling division’s objectives with Trump’s “Ten Principles for Great Schools Leading to Great 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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