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By RYAN WALTERS
Ever since I announced that Oklahoma’s public schools would incorporate the Bible into academic curricula for the upcoming school year, my plan has been met with criticism, hysteria, and vitriol from all the usual suspects — leftist union bosses, anti-religious activists, and woke politicians.
Now those forces are massing around a lawsuit to try to stop the Bible from being taught in classrooms.
Whether or not one accepts it as the inspired word of God, the Bible nonetheless is a passport to an intellectual world of goodness, beauty, and historical impact.
And this is the last thing that the radical left wants.
There is nothing unconstitutional about teaching the Bible. Its presence in government schools has been under assault by the Supreme Court for over 60 years. And it has been under the most vicious forms of political attack for the last 10 years.
Two years ago, the Supreme Court overturned what was known as the “Lemon test” for religious instruction in the classroom, a legal development that was long overdue. Whereas the court previously imposed a nonsensical, ahistorical three-part test on biblical instruction, we have now returned to a proper understanding of the First Amendment and the role of religion in public institutions.
Thoughtful educators and parents have in front of us the opportunity to start undoing the last several decades of judicial activism and return to well-rounded educational curricula. Naturally, there are still some who disagree.
The Bible, like so many other foundational pieces of literature that American students have been deprived of, is a primary source like any other. Its scores of primary sources and documents are assembled into a single anthology, to put it in academic terms. But the books contained within the Bible pervade so much of the historical and literary world that preceded the creation of this republic and the formation of the American people.
To fully understand the history of the United States and to grasp the meaning of our founding is an impossible task without a baseline understanding of the Judeo-Christian Bible.
In the first two sentences of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson lays out a summary of the American ideal — the bedrock principles of our entire existence as a country. In those sentences he makes it explicitly clear that our rights are derived from God and that the laws that supersede those of tyrants like King George III are given to us from the same transcendent source.
Twentieth-century figures ranging from Martin Luther King Jr. to Ronald Reagan invoked scripture as a driving inspiration for their work in public life.
Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech marked a pivotal moment in the history of the Civil Rights movement and of the 20th century as a whole. That speech contains references to the books of Amos, Isaiah, Psalms, and Galatians. His “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” likewise contains several direct references to scripture to make its arguments against the injustices of the system. It’s not because King just chose to use scripture as a rhetorical device. It’s because his efforts were motivated by the biblical belief that we are all made equally in the image of God and are therefore deserving of equal protection of the law and protection of society.
Reagan often pointed to the principles of Christianity and biblical truth as a source of America’s greatness. He often said, “Within the covers of the Bible are the answers for all the problems men face.” Reagan easily referred to and used both the Old and the New Testaments in his personal and public life. His long-standing use of the Bible as a source for describing the country is found in his declaration that the U.S. is “a shining city on a hill” for all the world to see.
To a student who has been denied an academic education about the Bible, those arguments will, at best, sound like a poorly translated foreign language.
With the few exceptions of those who merely oppose teaching the Bible on their principle of the so-called “separation of church and state” — a phrase that appears nowhere in either the Declaration or Constitution — the loudest and most virulent opponents of teaching the Bible academically are afraid of what happens if these texts are legitimized and given public sanction.
Those same anti-civilizational voices will claim that the Bible has no academic value. Yet at the same time, leftist politicians and union bosses are fighting more for pornographic books like “Gender Queer” and “Flamer,” which have nothing to do with education and are used solely to propagandize children into political and social conformity with the radical left.
So naturally, the leftists of the education cartel are violently opposed to allowing the Bible into the classroom; they are engaged in a form of intellectual tyranny.
This way, the radical, progressive, anti-Western worldview is kept safe from anything that might give weight, meaning, and substance to the things it wishes to belittle and destroy.
This is precisely why I look forward to this fight to defend scholarly education on the Bible in Oklahoma. Our students deserve a real education, one that puts them in direct contact with the greatness of the civilization that we have inherited and provides them with actual tools to confront challenges to it.
Just as important, our republic and our society deserve citizens who have been properly educated in this regard. Americans deserve no less.