Oklahoma wants to buy Bible-based "character lessons" for elementary schools
Ryan Walters is soliciting bids for Bible-based materials to be used in public elementary schools
This newsletter is free, but it’s only able to sustain itself due to the support I receive from a small percentage of regular readers. Would you please consider becoming one of those supporters? You can use the button below to subscribe to Substack or use my usual Patreon page!
For well over a year now, Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, has used his power to shove Christianity into the classroom. Most famously, he insisted every classroom needed a Bible, tailored that demand so that only Donald Trump-endorsed bibles met the criteria, got sued over the entire escapade, quietly dropped that plan, then went ahead and purchased 500 Trump bibles for use in Advanced Placement Government classes. (The lawsuit is ongoing.)
For his next trick, the Christian Nationalist wants to spend taxpayer dollars on Bible-based “character lessons” for use in public elementary schools.
According to a new solicitation from Oklahoma’s Department of Education, first reported by Oklahoma Watch’s Jennifer Palmer, the state is taking bids from companies that can provide “supplemental instructional materials that effectively integrate the Bible and character education into elementary-level social studies curriculum.”
Bidding is open only to companies that have a track record of working with government entities—Sorry, Satanists, you can’t apply!—and the winner must ship the materials directly to “every school district in the State of Oklahoma” within 56 days of being awarded the contract.
The guidelines are very specific about how this material has to come from the Bible:
Materials should contain age-appropriate biblical content, provide simple explanations that are easily understandable for elementary age students, and demonstrate how biblical figures and stories have influenced historical events and cultural practices in the United States.
The goal, the solicitation says, is to teach children “core virtues such as honesty, respect, responsibility, and compassion,” four values that are routinely ignored by the entire Republican Party.
There’s obviously a larger agenda here. It’s easy to teach those same values in secular terms, using historical and mythological figures. Other religions also promote similar ideas. But Walters’ office demands that only Christian mythology can be used to promote these principles. It’s obvious promotion of religion—his religion.
Even if there are ways for Bible characters to show compassion and responsibility, like something you’d find in a Sunday School class, the implication is that you can’t have these morals without the Bible. That’s really what this is all about. It’s to send a message that you must have God to be good, and that the Christian God is the only acceptable God, and that anyone who rejects that is an inherently bad person.
It’s unclear how many sets of material the state will buy and, therefore, how much they’re willing to spend on this crusade. When local outlet News 4 asked Walters’ office about that, along with asking why this was needed at all, Walters didn’t respond.
But the Oklahoma Constitution is very clear that public money cannot be used to promote religion, which means this proposal by itself is arguably a constitutional violation.
“This [Request For Proposal] seems to be another constitutional violation,” said Alex Luchenitser, an attorney for Americans United for Separation of Church and State and one of the attorneys representing Oklahomans in the Bible lawsuit.
“It seeks to inject the Bible into public school curricula, and only refers to the Bible and doesn’t refer to any other religious texts, so it’s clearly a move to push Christianity,” he said.
This doesn’t come out of nowhere, though.
The RFP is a continuation of something Walters pushed back in December when he released the new standards for public school social studies classes, Walters bragged about how his standards “mention the Bible and its historical impact over 40 times” and that his goal was to put “the Bible and the historical impact of Christianity back in school.”
Among the many troubling descriptions in those standards was one that said second graders had to be taught “stories from Christianity that influenced the American colonists, Founders, and culture, including the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth (e.g., the “Golden Rule,” the Sermon on the Mount).”
As I said at the time, this was just repeating the lies of Christian pseudo-historian David Barton. Many of the Founders, and certainly the foundational documents of the country, were not influenced by Christianity. And the Golden Rule was not a Jesus Original™.
The same guidelines said that U.S. Government students had to describe how the Constitution “was influenced by religion, morality, and the Bible as a frequently cited authority by America's founders.” And first graders had to explain the meaning of “In God we trust” and “the importance of religion to American people.”
It was bullshit at the time—and those standards have yet to be approved by the Board of Education—but Walters is now trying to enforce those guidelines by literally taking bids to supply the materials to promote his Christian propaganda.
(Interesting side note: Oklahoma Watch’s Palmer points out that Gov. Kevin Stitt, who has waged a cold war on Walters despite being a MAGA cultist himself, recently replaced three Board of Education members, most likely to impede Walters’ agenda.)
Sam Grover, an attorney and Senior Counsel for the Freedom From Religion Foundation, told me this was “another blatant constitutional violation.” FFRF is one of the groups that sued Walters over the previous Trump Bible directive, and he said they would roll this newer request into their current lawsuit:
The new RFP falls squarely within the activity that we are already challenging through our lawsuit. We plan to address this new RFP in an upcoming court filing.
For now, though, bidding on the Bible materials is expected to end on March 20.
I'm a lot older than Walters and at least as well educated. I never took a class that involved the Bible from kindergarten through graduate school. He's attempting to put a book 'back' where it never was in the first place for the overwhelming majority of public school students. Religious extremists like Walters will always see their particular brand of supernatural nonsense as the solution to every question, while remaining oblivious to the fact his state that ranks near the bottom in education is, overwhelmingly, the work product of believers.
OT
Lest we forget: A very Happy 42nd Birthday to Hemant Mehta.