Oklahoma Schools Add Bible to Curriculum, Woke Tears Ensue

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by Jeff Childers

Another state has joined the Biblical comeback. The Hill ran a very encouraging, counter-revolutionary story yesterday headlined, “‘The woke radicals will not like it’: Oklahoma releases Bible guidelines for schools.” Most of you will love this story.

On Wednesday, Oklahoma released guidance to all the state’s school districts directing them to incorporate the Bible and the Ten Commandments into public school lesson plans, a change the state’s Superintendent of Education Ryan Walters mandated last month. Since nothing is truly official anymore until it’s on Twitter/X, Superintendant Walters posted this provocative tweet yesterday:

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Why the American left allowed itself to be defined as the anti-Bible party is a mystery I will never understand. Teaching kids about the Bible’s massive historical significance should be uncontroversial, but the book apparently causes woke liberals to burst into flames.

If you’d like to see the details for yourself, the link to Walters’ tweet (above) included several sample pages from the new guidance. It focuses teachers and students on the Bible’s historical context, including themes like literary analysis, comparative ethical traditions (with other influential religious texts), historical documents and speeches, referencing Biblical sources, and critical thinking about how the Bible has influenced things like the development of Western Civilization and the civil rights movement.

Before our valued and respected secular C&C readers take umbrage, Oklahoma’s carefully written new standards also included a fulsome section on legal concerns, including forbidding the Bible from being used for religious indoctrination:

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If you feel uncomfortable with the Bible’s re-entry into public schools, I would also encourage you to reflect on the woeful state of modern public education. The Bible can’t make things any worse. And it might even help! Let’s just try it and see.

These remarkable developments restoring our traditional Judeo-Christian heritage (i.e., Old and New Testaments) are the fruits of what I am beginning, more and more, to believe could have been the most influential in a recent series of terrific Supreme Court decisions.

Two years ago, in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the Supreme Court found a high-school football coach had been illegally fired for leading his team in prayer before games. In the decision, the Court essentially overruled a sour decision by a much more liberal Court in 1971, called Lemon v. Kurtzman.

Lemon created a legal framework or test, which for some reason everybody called the “Lemon Test,” for analyzing government actions to determine whether they violated the Establishment Clause and the made-up “separation of Church and State” standard. The Lemon Test caused Christianity to drain out of public school education. But in 2022’s Kennedy case, the Supreme Court discarded the Lemon Test, returning the country to the status quo ante.

The result, which we are watching play out in real-time, is a slow red-state return to the original types of historical educational standards that, until 1971, were commonplace. So it won’t turn America into a theocracy, despite liberal paranoid fantasies like The Handmaid’s Tale.

While decisions like Loper Bright (which upended the Chevron doctrine) dominate the headlines, the Kennedy case might have the most beneficial cultural effect on future generations of Americans. Oklahoma is leading, reminding me of the profound reason it is called the ‘Sooner State,’ which frankly I have no idea. I think they just made that up. Sooner than what?

Anyway, great work, Oklahoma! This is some truly terrific progress.

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This is sure to get the Atheists Communists & Lawyers Underground(ACLU)all upset over this since the only book they will allow is I NEED A NEW BUTT and DADDIES ROOMATE

Don’t like it? Move to California.