By Jonathan Allen
(Reuters) -The Oklahoma Department of Education is rescinding a 2024 directive that required teachers to have the Christian Bible in every classroom and incorporate it into their lessons, which had been challenged as unconstitutional.
The directive was the brainchild of Ryan Walters, who resigned as the U.S. state’s superintendent of public instruction last month. The Oklahoma Supreme Court had halted the effort while teachers and parents from various religious backgrounds challenged it in a lawsuit against Walters that argued the Bible mandate violated the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on state sponsorship of religion.
The Oklahoma Constitution goes further, stipulating that public schools and spending must be nonsectarian, and not benefit “any sect, church, denomination, or system of religion.”
The state’s main teachers union had also criticized the effort, saying that local school districts and teachers decide which books are in classrooms, not the state.
The court gave the new superintendent, Lindel Fields, two weeks to say whether he wanted to continue to defend the directive; he told the court a day later, on Wednesday, that he did not.
“We plan to file a motion to dismiss, and have no plans to distribute Bibles or a Biblical character education curriculum in classrooms,” Fields said in a statement.
Walters, who is Christian and had called the Old and New Testaments “foundational documents” of Western civilization, was also criticized by fellow Republicans in the state legislature, who said they had not authorized funding for buying Bibles.
Walters said in a statement on social media he was disappointed in the decision. “The war on Christianity is real,” he said.
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
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