One hundred years ago, on July 21, 1925, high school science teacher John Scopes was convicted for violating the Butler Act, a Tennessee law that prohibited public school teachers from teaching evolution. While this conviction was later overturned due to a technicality, the Tennessee Supreme Court upheld the legality of the act. 42 years later, in 1967, the Tennessee Legislature repealed the Butler Act, and in 1968, in the United States Supreme Court case Epperson v. Arkansas, the Supreme Court ruled that a state cannot prohibit the teaching of evolution within public schools.
This ruling was based on the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which prohibits the U.S. government from establishing a religion. Establishment is defined today as promoting and/or inhibiting religion.
Based on the laws above, I think it would be safe to assume that public schools should refrain from promoting or criticizing any religion. However, that’s where Oklahoma’s state superintendent Ryan Walters disagreed. In 2024, Walters directed every teacher in Oklahoma public schools to keep a copy of the Bible in their classrooms and teach using the ideas and messages of the bible. He explained that his goals with this initiative were to bring Bibles back into the education of every student, as he feels that the separation of church and state is a ridiculous concept. While the Oklahoma Supreme Court temporarily blocked Walters from demanding teachers use Bibles to teach in their classrooms, he is still planning on proceeding with his initiative for the following school year.
The issue with these attempts to push the bible back in as students’ main source of education is that the freedom to choose and believe in one’s preferred religion gets diminished. It is an essential part of our democracy that people may choose where they religiously align. Mandating that all public school teachers teach and promote only one religious text is a clear violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment in the Constitution.
Religion is not something to be forced upon a person. If you feel strongly about a religious path, you can walk down the path as far as you would like. It does not entitle you to demand that others trail down that same path with you. This idea is not only applicable to the government and in schooling, but is also a general philosophy that has recently been ignored by certain religious zealots who are adamant that everyone in our world must follow a certain religion.
