Does Religion Belong In Schools?

 Should the Bible be taught in public schools?  A new law in Louisiana requires the Ten Commandments be displayed in every classroom.  Oklahoma State School Superintendent Ryan Walters is mandating that teachers include the Bible in their instruction because, he claims, the book is foundational to America’s laws and Constitution.  There is a growing chorus that educational systems already struggling to teach grammar and math add prayer and theology to the curriculum.  

But which Bible should be taught?  Jews honor the Pentateuch or Torah but reject the New Testament.  Catholic scriptures contain seven books not recognized by Protestants.  The Latter Day Saints consider the Book of Mormon an essential text that completes the revelation other Christians consider canonical.  Of course, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists have their own holy books. Who decides? 

Government has no business adjudicating these types of disputes, which is the reason the founders of our country provided for freedom of religion in the private sphere, leaving matters of faith to the individual conscience.  At the same time, they established a wholly secular constitution that makes no mention of God and whose sole reference to faith occurs in the stipulation of Article Six that no religious tests shall be required for public office.  The First Amendment to that document specifies that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, meaning that no sectarian viewpoint gets preferred treatment from the state.  As John Adams (second president of the United States and co-editor of the Declaration of Independence) affirmed in signing the Treaty of Tripoli of 1797, “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.”

Weren’t Adams and the other framers godly men?  They were characters of high principle and solid morals but not always orthodox in their personal beliefs.  Thomas Jefferson wrote his own version of the gospels, omitting any mention of the miracles recorded there. Never a communicant, Washington was lambasted from the pulpit of the Anglican church he sometimes attended for absenting himself from the eucharist.  As to Jesus, an aging Benjamin Franklin quipped, “I have some doubts as to his divinity, though it is a question I do not dogmatize on, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble.”  Are these the kinds of facts that  Superintendent Walters wants taught to the young?  

Outwardly, George Washington was careful to show respect toward believers and non-believers alike, at Mount Vernon willing to hire “Mohametans, Jews, Christians of any sect, or they may be Atheists” so long as they were honest workmen, while James Madison, father of the U.S. Constitution,  saw religious variety as the very linchpin of liberty: with a multiplicity of churches, synagogues, temples and tabernacles in the land, no one sect could dominate or oppress the others.  

Consequently, America is now the most religiously diverse nation on earth.  And thanks to the genius of its founders, who fashioned a separation between church and state, the United States has been mercifully free of the kind of violent strife that has plagued Protestants and Catholics in Ireland, Hindus and Muslims in India, and Arabs and Jews in the Middle East.  Christian Nationalists in Louisiana, Oklahoma and elsewhere want to change that by rewriting history and enshrining their own narrow beliefs as law.  

To do so would be an invitation to chaos and a  betrayal of our nation’s best ideals