An Oklahoma Bible Story
Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s State Superintendent of Public Instruction, who has promised that “every teacher, every classroom in the state will have a Bible in the classroom and will be teaching from the Bible in the classroom” has requested $3 million to purchase the tomes, and with very specific parameters.
The Oklahoman reports: ‘Trump Bible’ one of few that meet Walters’ criteria for Oklahoma classrooms.
Bids opened Monday for a contract to supply the state Department of Education with 55,000 Bibles. According to the bid documents, vendors must meet certain specifications: Bibles must be the King James Version; must contain the Old and New Testaments; must include copies of the Pledge of Allegiance, Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights; and must be bound in leather or leather-like material.
A salesperson at Mardel Christian & Education searched, and though they carry 2,900 Bibles, none fit the parameters.
But one Bible fits perfectly: Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the U.S.A. Bible, endorsed by former President Donald Trump and commonly referred to as the Trump Bible. They cost $60 each online, with Trump receiving fees for his endorsement.
I know enough about how state institutions have to do bids and the general request for proposal (RFP) process works to know that this is a clearly and consciously manipulated request.
On Sept. 26, Walters asked for $3 million to purchase Bibles for Oklahoma classrooms as part of his agency’s fiscal year 2026 budget request to the Oklahoma Legislature.
“We have talked about ensuring that our history courses include the role the Bible played throughout American history,” Walters said. “We’ve talked about the efforts of left-wing groups and the teachers’ unions to drive the Bible out of school. I believe it’s important for historical context for our kids to understand the role the Bible played.”
He said the request was in conjunction with $3 million the agency was already putting forth to provide Bibles in the classroom. In a discussion with the board at the meeting, Walters said he wanted to issue an RFP and wanted the King James version of the Bible.
This story is problematic dare I say, six ways from Sunday. Not only is this a clear attempt to try and funnel Oklahoma state funds to Trump, but this is an utter waste of money at that price tag. Access to the Bible is incredibly easy to obtain. It is free online in any translation you could want and I expect the Gideons (or probably almost any Christian church) would be more than happy to provide one to anyone who asked. Further, I expect that more Oklahomans households have several copies on average.
This is yet another example of why is hard to take “fiscal conservatism” seriously. There is simply no reason to spend this kind of money on items that are all in the public domain.
To be clear: there is no church/state problem with having Bibles in schools or teaching about the Bible as history, literature, or in other appropriate contexts. It is a rather consequential text. But, the trope that the Bible has been “taken out of the classroom” or that it somehow is relevant across the curriculum is always an attempt to infuse religious instruction into the public school classroom. That is utterly inappropriate and does raise church/state issues.
I always find assertions like “ensuring that our history courses include the role the Bible played throughout American history” to be a canard. It is just an attempt to do what they claim is being done by a nebulous “left”: indoctrinate their beliefs. I would note that usage of the Bible in legitimate instruction outside of consciously religious institutions, would have to treat it like any other historical work. This would include not treating it as inerrant (as many Christians do) nor as the Word of God (with all the implications that that would entail).
Without any doubt, if you study American history it is impossible to not see the influence of Christianity. The Founders, for example, clearly were mostly Christians, although frequently not of a flavor that many contemporary Evangelicals would find familiar. At a bare minimum, at least basic adherence to the faith was part of the social fabric of the time and it was not at all unusual for Christian imagery to be part of the rhetoric of the day (and for many generations thereafter).
And, further, there are key examples of the Bible being deeply part of US history. For example, many Christians in the American South used the Bible to justify slavery. I suspect that isn’t the kind of thing that Walters is concerned with. Likewise, the abolition movement was often motivated by their views of Christian compassion. I would, in fact, actively agree that it is impossible to have a full view of socio-political development without including the role of religion. But, again, a scholarly approach to the role of religion is not the same thing as “teaching from the Bible in the classroom.”
Of course if you want to teach about “the role the Bible has played” you need scholarship on that subject. The Bible itself, being a collection of texts far older than the United States, cannot, by its mere presence, teach about its role in US history (or, really, its role in much of anything).
I will add that Oklahoma is a fairly religious state. As such, it is quite likely that the teachers in public schools are Christians of one persuasion or another. The idea, therefore, that Oklahoma public schools are devoid of any hint of Christianity is absurd.
This is just he kind of thing wherein I have to ask how much better we would be if people in positions of authority used their time, efforts, and budgets to focus on their actual jobs and not ideological side projects.
My dad was a pastor in the United Methodist Church. This, of course, means that he had a depth of biblical scholarship from his time at the seminary and continuing education on the Bible throughout his career. He, in turn, taught bible study classes for every age group at each of the churches he served.
My dad was also a bleeding heart liberal. In the 18 years before my college when I heard him preach every Sunday, I never heard a sermon that denigrated homosexuality or immigration. I never heard him call for Christian dominion over the US government. Instead, he spoke of charity and grace. He called on his congregation to give of themselves to their community, especially the “least of these brothers and sisters” among us. He extolled us to do unto others as we would have done to us.
If my dad were to have taught his perspective on the historical context of the Bible in the US to school children in Oklahoma, Ryan Walters would have sent the State Police to pull him from the classroom.
But but but, the side project is how we prove our purity and devotion to the anointed one. Die, unbelieving scum!
Deism? “Link”
The Baptist denomination split over the issue in 1845, which is why Southern Baptists believe in “Bible Inerrancy” which makes slavery OK because in the Bible.
There is a large faction in the GOP for whom control of the Seven Mountains (including the Government “mountain”) is no side project.
And, BTW, one of the “mountains” that “godly Christians” are to take dominion over is religion.
@charontwo: I was including Deist as broadly included. But I recognize that we could parse it more finely.
I.e., as you noted:
I don’t think that there is any doubt the Christian rhetoric, imagery, and the like were quite dominant.
@charontwo: Indeed about the Baptist split.
But it is not just the Southern Baptists who profess biblical inerrancy–it is common across Evangelicalism writ large.
Someone tell this guy about what Thomas Jefferson did with his personal copy of the Bible (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Bible):
“Jefferson compiled…The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth…in 1820 by cutting and pasting, with a razor and glue, numerous sections from the New Testament as extractions of the doctrine of Jesus. Jefferson’s condensed composition excludes all miracles by Jesus and most mentions of the supernatural, including sections of the four gospels that contain the Resurrection and most other miracles, and passages that portray Jesus as divine.”
Yeah, let’s tell the little tykes what Old Tom did with the Good Book. Might teach them how to think for themselves.
@charontwo, @Steven L. Taylor:
Inerrancy with some wiggle room in the Ten Commandments apparently. You won’t convince me that Ryan Walter’s Trump Bible grift doesn’t violate God’s command that we not steal, not bear false witness, hold no other gods before Him, and not make false idols.
For application of a sacred, inerrant text, Evangelicals are particularly good at cherry picking the tenets that must be followed and those that are really only suggestions.
The last thing Christians ever want to see is actual teaching of the Bible as either history or literature. The Old Testament is Hebrew propaganda of very limited historical use. And as literature the Bible is a mess unless you treat each ‘book’ separately, and avoid any attempt to take it seriously as a whole. Taken as a whole it is very badly-written and makes no sense at all. Taken as ‘divinely inspired’ by an omniscient god, it paints a picture of a savage, petulant, hypocritical God, no better than the worst of Greek or Roman gods. And the salvation story is a tale told by a psychopath.
Reading the Bible helped make me an atheist.
@Steven L. Taylor: Evangelicalism is not immune to racism and bigotry. I wish it were, but I’m too smart, ignint crackery notwithstanding, to believe otherwise.*
*My apologies for not putting a CRT trigger warning at the head of this comment.
That really depends on the person in authority, doesn’t it?
Between the people who are so abjectly incompetent that their help is a hinderance, and the people who are just want to do awful things that will be their actual jobs, I can think of lots of people who would make the world a better place by focusing on side projects.
If, in a second Trump administration, RFKJr was the head of Health and Human Services, I would much rather him spend his time on literally anything other than the core parts of his job.
@Not the IT Dept.: As an extension of my comment above, Evangelicalism has not evolved into a system that encourages “the tykes”–little or otherwise–to think for themselves.
And as to “the priesthood of the believer,” just like the animals on Orwell’s farm, some believers have more priesthood than others.
I don’t know what a book containing the Old and New Testaments and “must include copies of the Pledge of Allegiance, Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights” is, but it isn’t a Bible. It would seem to cross church/state.
I trust (hah) the teachers of Oklahoma will note all three references to religion in the Constitution with the Bill of Rights: the prohibition on any religious test for office, the prohibition on any state religion, and right there at the end, right above the signatures, where it says something about this year of Our Lord…
The detailed beliefs of the Founders are irrelevant. They were born in a Christian culture, therefore they are Christians for the political purposes of the holy rollers. As are you and I, whether we wish to be or not. (How do we start a fight between the Dominionist and the Integralists? Short of their winning, in which case each will declare jihad against the other.)
Saw a good one yesterday attached to our daily phone bank instructions, a still of GrouchoMarx and his usual foil, Margaret Dumont.
Dumont – I believe Donald J. Trump was sent by God.
Groucho – Why? Did He run out of locust?
QFT!! Gus with the blistering slap shot from his own defensive zone, again.
GOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!
Not just the holy rollers. Ask the communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Native Americans… The list is really endless and started before Roger Williams was beaten and left for dead on outskirts of Salem (IIRC) for not being Congregationalist.
There’s no contradiction (or even hypocrisy) there. They aren’t opposed to indoctrination; they are opposed to liberal principles. The problem with liberal indoctrination isn’t that it’s brainwashing of the defenseless; it’s that it’s the wrong brainwashing. Much like how the Pilgrims (and Puritans) weren’t seeking “religious freedom” — they were seeking to impose their version of Christianity on everyone else, and didn’t have the numbers to do it in the Old Country. The last thing they wanted was for people to be free to follow whatever religion they preferred.
IMO, a doctrine of Biblical Errancy would be much more accurate.
If we’re really wanting to teach from the books that inspired the Founding Fathers better drag up the Corpus Iuris Civilis and the writings of Melanchthon.
Even Canon Law isn’t mainly from the Bible. It’s repurposed Roman Law.
I recall reading somewhere that prior to the Second Great Awakening, regular church attendance in the colonies was around 26%, and the idea that they were particularly religious is revisionist history created to justify things like manifest destiny and American exceptionalism.
When they say “every classroom will teach from the Bible” I find myself wondering how the Bible will be worked into thing like math classes…
@Michael Reynolds:
Revelations is bonkers crazy.
We’re it me, I’d foreshadow that shit in chapter one.
The Bible, as written, is just piss poor narrative. Be good to one another. Kill Caaninites. Sacrifice your son to an angry god. Treat others as you would wish to be treated. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
It’s confusing.
The first half is bloated and meandering. Yaweh is a bad-ass god. Fear him.
Then a new dude shows up. The lore is mangled. He seems pretty cool.
If Trump wins Walter’s bid to be Secretary of the Dept of Education will be successful. That guy truly understands Trump. He “get$” it.
@Stormy Dragon:
@DrDaveT:
Ah, but it’s not brainwashing if it’s true. And remember that for them, true men’s true to the faith.
I think I may have mentioned before, I went to a Church of England School from age 9 to 11, for the very good reason that it was a couple of hundred yards down the road from our house.
And did Religious Education course at CSE level and got a Grade 1 in the exams at age 16.
This affected my inclination to agnosticism not one bit.
When someone suggested I might consider confirmation, I replied something like “Can I be a confirmed Anglican agnostic?”
On being told of my response, my father chuckled and said something along the lines of “Keeping up the family tradition.”
(There’s apostate Catholics and Presbyterians in the family tree; us Farren’s being a rather truculent kindred.)
Historically, the Catholic Church seems on the whole to have been quite happy when the demise of Latin literacy rendered the Bible relatively inaccessible to the laity.
“They’ll only go getting it wrong.”
Protestants, of course, begged to differ. 😉
Perhaps mistakenly.
The Bible is a fascinating compilation of all sorts of material; but as manual for personal life, let alone social organisation, is rather wanting.
See the enormous effort both rabbinic Judaism, and medieval Christianity, had to put into convoluted exegis of the texts to formulate canonical laws.
And why, despite that, medieval Christendom largely functioned on the basis of Latin and/or Germanic legal principles. And theology often based on Platonic/Aristotelian foundations (waves Thomas Aquinas-ly)
(See also Dante. Also Milton. etc)
In short: this would bother me not at all in the UK, where the Church Established exists, and religious services remain a (sorta) mandatory part of school activity.
It is, of course, a wholly different case in the US, where it’s pretty obviously a contravention of your Constitution.
@de stijl:
Not just that, but even comparing the Abrahamic/Mosaic/pre-exile/post-exile/Prophetic/late Judean bits of the OT it’s pretty obvious there’s some massive retconning going on.
Not to mention that a lot of later Christians looked at Revelations and thought: wtf?
See eg Martin Luther.
And the whole “St Paul as a source of divine wisdom” is a bit iffy.
Then you get to late Roman/medieval Christianity, where a whole pile of doctrine (the Catholic magisterium, essentially) is worked up by the “Fathers of the Church” on the basis of exegesis and (frankly) personal preference, and existing Greco-Roman philosophy and law.
And that in turn cherry-picks gospels, apostolic scripture, and Old Testament, more or less as convenient to the ends aimed at.
See the whole sorry saga of Christian heresy/orthodoxy cat-fights from Constantine’s conversion onward.
@Stormy Dragon:
Well, there’s always that passage in Daniel that describes the rim of a particular basin as having a diameter of 3 cubits and a circumference of 10 cubits, implying that pi = 3.33333… IIRC the official inerrantist position is that the inner diameter was 3, and the outer circumference was 10. It was a thick basin.
I have read a number of Elaine Pagels books and one factoid I recall from them is back when the Canon was adopted, most of the bishops were opposed to Revelation (not Revelations).
But there was a bishop named Ireneus who was such a big swinging dick who wanted it in, so in it went.
ETA: The OT is not the same as the Hebrew Bible, the OT rearranges the sequence of the later books to fit better with Christianity. There is also some editing of which books are included.
I don’t know everything about every sect of Christianity, but I am not aware of any that have canonical teachings about bible binding.
@charontwo:
If you look at the history of the canon and the early Church, most of the “Gnostic Gospels” were both obviously a-historical, and also often rather silly.
But there are some that nearly made the cut, eg the “The Shepherd of Hermas” etc.
And the whole issue of accepting St Paul as divinely inspired got sidelined very early on.
Much of what is today accepted as Christian doctrine derives successively from the “Fathers of the Church” (above all, St Augustine), the “traditions” of the Christian Roman Empire, medieval European Christendom, scholastic philosophy, and the Reformation/counter-Reformation theology, that uncovering what the Christians of the first couple of centuries believed is no easy task.
Especially as a lot of the earliest of them seem to have considered themselves as Jewish.
The “gentilisation” of Christianity is a very interesting subject; and related, the massive accommodation to Greco-Roman law, philosophy and social structure.
Providing only one copy per classroom seems wholly inadequate. Do we really want the kiddies to fight over whose turn it is to read the Good Book? Besides, $3 million isn’t going to be much use to a man with the expenses of Donald Trump.
Surely the state should buy a Trump Bible for every student.
This should be the only example ever needed until the end of time to prove EAIAC is a thing.
Pledge and Declaration in the same binding as the bible? Get that trash outta here.
Funny how this doofus wouldn’t like it if the Jefferson Bible [Thomas, the Founder] was the thing being taught. For those of you not up on your bible trivia, Jesus was just a nice guy in the Jefferson Bible.. none of this trinity business.
@Ken_L:
Especially when his RO(non)I on the project so far has been about $300k.
He really should start collecting cans from roadsides and such. It would return more.
@Ken_L: “Surely the state should buy a Trump Bible for every student.”
That’s Communism! And Socialism!
The state should force every parent to buy a Trump Bible for each of their children.
That’s Democracy!
Does the God Bless the USA Bible endorsed by former President Trump include the apocrypha books?
This is such a well-rounded post. Great job covering all angles.