The Bible in Public Schools? Oklahoma Pushes Boundaries of Long Tradition

The Bible has been present in American classrooms to some extent since the founding of the public school system in the 19th century.

But the Oklahoma state superintendent’s announcement Thursday that all public schools in the state must teach the Bible represented a major effort to expand his role and provide a Christian historical perspective to most students. Schools have become the site of a series of moral and cultural conflicts, and conservative Christians are asserting their political power even as they decline as a share of the U.S. population.

“In Oklahoma, we are very proud to lead the country in pushing back on the leftists who are trying to rewrite history and say, no, we will teach from the Bible,” the superintendent, Ryan Walters, said in an interview Friday.

Mr. Walters, a conservative Christian and former history teacher, said the mandate would focus on fifth through 12th grades, with an emphasis on the Bible’s influence on history and literature, areas where the Bible has historically been accepted in public education.

For example, he said the Bible could be used in a lesson to understand the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, which states that all men are “endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights,” or in a study of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ which includes references to Jesus and his teachings.

But he went further, saying the Bible would also be woven into subjects such as maths and science, where students could explore its influence on leading thinkers and ideas. Biblical education could also be offered in younger grades, if appropriate.

Mr. Walters, a Republican, said every teacher in Oklahoma was expected to have a copy of the Bible in the classroom.

Mr. Walters made the announcement a week after Louisiana became the first state to require public schools to post the Ten Commandments in every classroom, prompting immediate legal action and condemnation from those who saw it as a violation of the separation of church and state.

In Oklahoma, the directive directs schools to include the Bible, “which includes the Ten Commandments,” in education.

Republicans and conservative Christians have increasingly sought to bring prayer and religious texts into public schools as they push back against what they see as an encroaching liberal orthodoxy in public education, particularly on issues of race and gender identity. They seek a return to an era when Christians were a clear majority in America and the Bible was a far less contested presence in classrooms.

“People like Superintendent Walters are not wrong when they say that the Bible has historically been the most widely used textbook in the United States,” said Adam Laats, an education historian at Binghamton University and a former high school teacher.

He said that in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Bible was believed to be “the center of all education: reading, writing, arithmetic and basic Christian morality.” But as the country’s demographics developed in the late 19th and 20th centuries, Professor Laats said, there was less consensus on the idea that moral education should have a Christian character.

That led to decades of legal wrangling and cultural conflict over the role of religion in public schools.

Those disputes culminated in a series of landmark Supreme Court cases, including a 1963 ruling that mandatory Bible reading or prayer in public schools was unconstitutional. According to Dr. Laats, about half of school districts at the time included some form of devotional Bible reading.

Many conservative Christians saw this statement as a ban on God in schools, and it became an enduring symbol of what they saw as a broader moral decay and societal chaos.

Today, several states, primarily in the South, offer Bible studies as an elective in public schools, says Mark A. Chancey, a professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University.

In Texas, electives that involve the study of the Old or New Testament and its impact are limited to high school students. About 1,200 students were enrolled in such courses this school year out of the state’s more than five million students, according to state data.

Dr. Chancey, who has analyzed Bible curricula in Texas, said the teaching varied widely. Some courses are academically rigorous, without promoting a particular religious viewpoint. But more, he said, are “closer to Sunday school than public school.”

Oklahoma has a similar law that allows elective Bible courses for high school students, but legal experts say Mr. Walters’ mandate takes the state in a new direction by requiring the Bible more broadly and integrating it into the course.

“This curriculum mandate would teach religion to children in public schools whether their parents want it or not,” said Joseph Thai, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Oklahoma.

He said the mandate could end up as a “test case” that could reach the Supreme Court.

The court, which secured a 6-3 conservative supermajority under former President Donald Trump, has increasingly embraced the role of religion in public life, including in schools.

In 2022, days after the right to abortion was overturned under Roe v. Wade, the court issued a decision siding with a high school football coach who prayed at the 50-yard line after games. That view was rejected an important First Amendment precedent from 1971 and appeared to be taking a new approach: “Basically, if there is no government coercion, then the government can accommodate and in some cases even promote religion,” Mr Thai said.

Mr. Walters, who attends a Protestant church affiliated with the Church of Christ, said he would have no preference for any particular version of the Bible. And he said that the book, unlike other religious texts such as the Koran, played a unique role in America’s founding and culture.

“I don’t know how you teach history, I don’t know how you teach English, without the best-selling book in American history as part of that curriculum,” he said.