Bible

OKLAHOMA CITY — Oklahoma’s new public schools superintendent announced Wednesday he is rescinding a mandate from his predecessor that forced schools to incorporate the Bible into lesson plans for students.

Superintendent Lindel Fields said in a statement he has “no plans to distribute Bibles or a Biblical character education curriculum in classrooms.” The directive last year from former Superintendent Ryan Walters drew immediate condemnation from civil rights groups and prompted a lawsuit from a group of parents, teachers and religious leaders that is pending before the Oklahoma Supreme Court. It was to have applied to students in grades 5 through 12.

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt appointed Fields to the superintendent’s post after Walters resigned last month to take a job in the private sector.

Jacki Phelps, an attorney for the Oklahoma State Department of Education, said she intends to notify the court of the agency’s plan to rescind the mandate and seek a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

Many schools districts across the state had decided not to comply with the Bible mandate.

A spokeswoman for the state education department, Tara Thompson, said Fields believes the decision on whether the Bible should be incorporated into classroom instruction is one best left up to individual districts and that spending money on Bibles is not the best use of taxpayer resources.

Walters in March had announced plans to team up with country music singer Lee Greenwood seeking donations to get Bibles into classrooms after a legislative panel rejected his $3 million request to fund the effort. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit challenging the Bible mandate did not immediately comment.

Walters, a far-right Republican, made fighting “woke ideology”, banning certain books from school libraries and getting rid of “radical leftists” who he claims were indoctrinating children in classrooms a focal point of his administration. Since his election in 2020, he imposed a number of mandates on public schools and worked to develop new social studies standards for K-12 public school students that included teaching about conspiracy theories related to the 2020 presidential election. Those standards have been put on hold while a lawsuit challenging them moves forward.

Thompson said the agency plans to review all of Walters’ mandates, including a requirement that applicants from teacher jobs coming from California and New York take an ideology exam, to determine if those may also be rescinded.

“We need to review all of those mandates and provide clarity to schools moving forward,” she said.

Murphy writes for the Associated Press.

Pete Hegseth, widely considered the least qualified Defense secretary in American history, is hardly anyone’s version of the ideal Christian husband and father.

Only 45 years old, he’s been married three times.

His first marriage — to his high school sweetheart — lasted a mere four years, deteriorating after Hegseth admitted to multiple extramarital affairs.

A couple of years later, he married his second wife, with whom he had three children. During that marriage, he fathered a child with a Fox News producer who eventually became his third wife.

He paid off a woman who accused him of sexual assault (he denies the assault). He routinely passed out drunk at family gatherings and misbehaved in public when inebriated, according to numerous witnesses. His own mother once accused him of being “an abuser of women,” though she later retracted her claims when Hegseth was facing Senate confirmation.

Still, the Senate’s Republican majority, cowed by President Trump, confirmed his appointment. Hegseth has two qualities that Trump prizes above all others. He is blindly loyal to the president, and he looks good on TV.

After his installation, Hegseth proceeded to fire top military brass who happened to be Black or women or both. He has restored the names of Confederate generals to Army bases (Bragg and Benning). His petty “anti-woke” crusade led him to strip the name of the assassinated gay rights leader Harvey Milk, a former Naval officer who served honorably, from a Navy ship. And he has considered doing the same to a ship named in honor of the abolitionist and Civil War hero Harriet Tubman. He has said that women do not belong in combat roles, and has kicked out transgender soldiers, cruelly stripping them of the pensions they earned for their service.

In March, he shared classified information about an impending American airstrike in Yemen on an unsecured Signal group chat that included his wife, on purpose, and the editor of the Atlantic, by accident.

He is, in short, the least serious man ever to lead this nation’s armed forces.

As if all that weren’t dispiriting enough, Hegseth is now in bed (metaphorically) with a crusading Christian nationalist.

Earlier this month, Hegseth made waves when he reposted on social media a CNN interview with Douglas Wilson, the pastor and theocrat who is working hard to turn the clock back on the rights of every American who is not white, Christian and male.

In the interview, Wilson expounded on his patriarchal, misogynistic, authoritarian and homophobic views.

Women, he said, should serve as “chief executive of the home” and should not have the right to vote. (Their men can do that for them.) Gay marriage and gay sex should be outlawed once again. “We know that sodomy is worse than slavery by how God responds to it,” he told CNN’s Pamela Brown. (Slavery is “unbiblical,” he avowed, though he did bizarrely defend it once, writing in 1990 a pamphlet that “slavery produced in the South a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before the War or since.”)

When a new outpost of his church opened in Washington, D.C ., in July, Hegseth and his family were among the worshippers. CNN described Hegseth’s presence as “a major achievement” for Wilson.

“All of Christ for All of Life,” wrote Hegseth as he endorsed and reposted the interview. That is the motto of Wilson’s expanding universe, which includes his Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, the center of his Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a network of more than 100 churches on four continents, parochial schools, a college, a publishing house and media platforms. “All of Christ for All of Life” is a shorthand for the belief that Christian doctrines should shape every part of life — including government, culture and education.

Wilson is a prolific author of books with titles such as “Her Hand in Marriage,” “Federal Husband,” and “Reforming Marriage.” His book “Fidelity” teaches “what it means to be a one-woman man.” Doubtful it has crossed Hegseth’s desk.

“God hates divorce,” writes Wilson in one of his books.

Given the way sexual pleasure is celebrated in the Old and New Testaments, Wilson has a peculiarly dim view of sex. I mean, how many weddings have been graced with recitations from the Song of Solomon, with its thinly disguised allusions to pleasurable sexual intimacy? (“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine.”)

Wilson’s world is considerably less sensual.

“A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants,” he writes in “Fidelity.” “A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” Mutual sexual pleasure seems out of the question: “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party.” Ugh.

There is nothing particularly new here; Wilson’s ideology is just another version of patriarchal figures using religion to fight back against the equality movements of the late 19th and 20th centuries. They are basically the hatemongers of the Westboro Baptist Church dressed up in respectable clothing.

“Some people may conflate Christian nationalism and Christianity because they both use the symbols and language of Christianity, such as a Bible, a cross and worship songs,” says the group Christians Against Christian Nationalism on its website. “But Christian nationalism uses the veneer of Christianity to advance its own aims — to point to a political figure, party or ideology instead of Jesus.”

What you have in people like Hegseth and Wilson are authoritarian men who hide behind their religion to execute the most unchristian of agendas.

God may hate divorce, but from my reading of the Bible, God hates hypocrisy even more.

Bluesky: @rabcarian
Threads: @rabcarian

It’s the 249th birthday of the United States. And as Americans begin to prepare for our nation’s grand semiquincentennial celebration next year, it is worth reengaging with the document whose enactment marks our national birthday: the Declaration of Independence.

The declaration is sometimes championed by right-libertarians and left-liberals alike as a paean to individualism and a refutation of communitarianism of any kind. As one X user put it on Thursday: “The 4th of July represents the triumph of American individualism over the tribalistic collectivism of Europe.”

But this is anything but the case.

We will turn to lead draftsman Thomas Jefferson’s famous words about “self-evident” truths in a moment. But first consider the majority of the text of the declaration: a stirring enumeration of specific grievances by the American colonists against the British crown. In the declaration’s own words: “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”

One might read these words in a vacuum and conclude that the declaration indeed commenced a revolution in the true sense of the term: a seismic act of rebellion, however noble or righteous, to overthrow the established political order. And true enough, that may well have been the subjective intention of Jefferson, a political liberal and devotee of the European Enlightenment.

But the declaration also attracted many other signers. And some of those signers, such as the more conservative John Adams, took a more favorable view of the incipient America’s inherited traditions and customs. These men thought that King George III had vitiated their rights as Englishmen under the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Bill of Rights that passed Parliament the following year.

It is for this reason that Edmund Burke, the famed conservative British statesman best known for his strident opposition to the French Revolution, was known to be sympathetic to the colonists’ cause. As my Edmund Burke Foundation colleague Ofir Haivry argued in a 2020 American Affairs essay, it is likely that these more conservative declaration signers, such as Adams, shared Burke’s own view that “the Americans had an established national character and political culture”; and “the Americans in 1776 rebelled in an attempt to defend and restore these traditions.”

The American founding is complex; the founders themselves were intellectually heterodox. But suffice it to say the founding was not a simplistic renouncement of the “tribalistic collectivism” of Britain. There is of course some truth to those who would emphasize the revolutionary nature of the minutemen and soldiers of George Washington’s Continental Army. But a more historically sound overall conception is that 1776 commenced a process to restore and improve upon the colonists’ inherited political order. The final result was the U.S. Constitution of 1787.

Let’s next consider the most famous line of the declaration: the proclamation that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” We ought to take this claim at face value: Many of the declaration’s signers did hold such genuine, moral human equality to be self-evident.

But is such a claim self-evident to everyone — at all times, in all places and within all cultures?

The obvious answer is that it is not. Genuine, moral human equality is certainly not self-evident to Taliban-supporting Islamic extremist goat herders in Afghanistan. It has not been self-evident to any number of sub-Saharan African warlords of recent decades. Nor is it self-evident to the atheists of the Chinese Communist Party politburo, who brutally oppress non-Han Chinese ethnic minorities such as the Uyghur Muslims of Xinjiang.

Rather, the only reason that Jefferson — and Locke in England a century prior — could confidently assert such moral “self-evidence” is because they were living and thinking within a certain overarching milieu. And that milieu is Western civilization’s biblical inheritance — and, specifically, the world-transforming claim in Genesis 1:27, toward the very beginning of the Bible, that “God created man in His image; in the image of God He created him.”

It is very difficult — perhaps impossible — to see how the declaration of 1776, the 14th Amendment of 1868, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or any other American moral ode to or legal codification of equality, would have been possible absent the strong biblical undergird that has characterized our nation since the colonial era.

Political and biblical inheritance are thus far more responsible for the modern-day United States than revolution, liberal rationalism or hyper-individualism.

Adams famously said that Independence Day “ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” Indeed, each year we should all celebrate this great nation we are blessed to call home. But let’s also not mistake what it is we are actually celebrating.

Josh Hammer’s latest book is “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.” This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate. @josh_hammer

WILLIAMSTOWN, Ky. — As a colossal manifestation of the biblical Noah’s Ark rises incongruously from the countryside of northern Kentucky, Ken Ham gives the presentation he’s often repeated.

The ark stretches 1½ football fields long — “the biggest free-standing timber-frame structure in the world,” Ham says. It holds three massive decks with wooden cages, food storage urns, life-size animal models and other exhibits.

It’s all designed to try to persuade visitors that the biblical story was literally true — that an ancient Noah really could have built such a sophisticated ship. That Noah and a handful of family members really could have sustained thousands of animals for months, floating above a global flood that drowned everyone else in the wicked world.

“That’s what we wanted to do through many of the exhibits, to show the feasibility of the ark,” says Ham, the organizer behind the Ark Encounter theme park and related attractions.

And with that, he furthers his goal to assert that the entire Book of Genesis should be interpreted as written — that humans were created by God’s fiat on the sixth day of creation on an Earth that is only 6,000 years old.

All this defies the overwhelming consensus of modern scientists — that the Earth developed over billions of years in “deep time” and that humans and other living things evolved over millions of years from earlier species.

But Ham wants to succeed where he believes William Jennings Bryan failed.

Bryan — a populist secretary of State, congressman, three-time presidential hopeful and fundamentalist champion — helped the prosecution in the famous Scopes monkey trial, which took place 100 years ago this July in Dayton, Tenn.

Bryan’s side won in court — gaining the conviction of public schoolteacher John Scopes for violating state law against teaching human evolution. But Bryan was widely seen as suffering a humiliating defeat in public opinion, with his sputtering attempts to explain the Bible’s fanciful miracles and enigmas.

‘The history in the Bible is true’

For Ham, Bryan’s problem was not that he defended the Bible. It’s that he didn’t defend it well enough, interpreting parts of it metaphorically rather than literally.

“It showed people around the world that Christians don’t really believe the Bible — they can’t answer questions to defend the Christian faith,” Ham says.

“We want you to know that we’ve got answers,” Ham adds, speaking in the accent of his native Australia.

Ham is founder and chief executive of Answers in Genesis, which opened the Ark Encounter in 2016. The Christian theme park includes a zoo, zip lines and other attractions surrounding the ark.

Nearly a decade earlier, Answers in Genesis opened a Creation Museum in nearby Petersburg, Ky., where exhibits similarly try to make the case for a literal interpretation of the biblical creation narrative. Visitors are greeted with a diorama depicting children and dinosaurs interacting peacefully in the Garden of Eden.

The group also produces books, podcasts, videos and homeschooling curricula.

“The main message of both attractions is basically this: The history in the Bible is true,” Ham says. “That’s why the message of the Gospel based on that history is true.”

A commonly held belief

If Ham is the most prominent torchbearer for creationism today, he’s hardly alone.

Polls generally show that somewhere between 1 in 6 and 1 in 3 Americans hold beliefs consistent with young-Earth creationism, depending on how the question is asked. A 2024 Gallup poll found that 37% of U.S. adults agreed that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.”

That percentage is down a little, but not dramatically, from its mid-40s level between the 1980s and 2012. Rates are higher among religious and politically conservative respondents.

“Scopes lost, but the public sense was that the fundamentalists lost” and were dwindling away, says William Vance Trollinger Jr., a professor of history and religious studies at the University of Dayton in Ohio.

But the reach of Answers in Genesis demonstrates that “a significant subset of Americans hold to young-Earth creationism,” says Trollinger, co-author with his wife, English professor Susan Trollinger, of the 2016 book “Righting America at the Creation Museum.”

Leading science organizations say it’s crucial to teach evolution and old-Earth geology. Evolution is “one of the most securely established of scientific facts,” says the National Academy of Sciences. The Geological Society of America states: “Evolution and the directly related concept of deep time are essential parts of science curricula.”

The issue has been repeatedly legislated and litigated since the Scopes trial. Tennessee repealed its anti-evolution law in 1967. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1968 that a similar Arkansas law was an unconstitutional promotion of religion, and in 1987 it overturned a Louisiana law requiring that creationism be taught alongside evolution. A federal court in 2005 similarly forbade a Pennsylvania school district to present “intelligent design,” a different approach to creationism that argues life is too complex to have evolved by chance.

Bill Nye, the alarmed guy

Some lawmakers have recently revived the issue. The North Dakota Legislature this year debated a bill that would have allowed public school teaching on intelligent design. A new West Virginia law vaguely allows teachers to answer student questions about “scientific theories of how the universe and/or life came to exist.”

The Scopes trial set a template for today’s culture-war battles, with efforts to expand vouchers for attendees of private schools, including Christian ones teaching creationism; and to introduce Bible-infused lessons and Ten Commandments displays in public schools.

Such efforts alarm science educators such as Bill Nye, the television “Science Guy,” whose 2014 debate with Ham was billed as “Scopes II” and has generated millions of video views online.

“What you get out of religion, as I understand it, is this wonderful sense of community,” Nye says. “Community is very much part of the human experience. But the Earth is not 4,000 years old. To teach that idea to children with any backing — be it religious or these remarkable ideas that humans are not related to, for example, chimpanzees or bonobos — is breathtaking. It’s silly. And so we fight this fight.”

Nye notes that the evidence is overwhelming, ranging from fossil layers to the distribution of species. “There are trees older than Mr. Ham thinks the world is,” he adds.

Varying religious views

One weekday in March, visitors milled about the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum, which draw an estimated 1.5 million visits per year (including duplicate visits).

“We are church-going, Bible-believing Christians,” says Louise van Niekerk of Ontario, Canada, who traveled with her family to the Creation Museum. She’s concerned that her four children are faced with a public school curriculum permeated with evolution.

The Creation Museum, Van Niekerk says, “is encouraging a robust alternate worldview from what they’re being taught.”

Many religious groups accommodate evolution, though.

Gallup’s survey found that among Americans who believe in evolution, more say it happened with God’s guidance (34%) than without it (24%). In the Roman Catholic Church, popes have shown openness to evolution while insisting that the human soul is a divine creation. Many liberal Protestants and even some evangelicals have accepted at least parts of evolutionary theory.

But among many evangelicals, creationist belief is strong.

The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest evangelical body, has promoted creationist beliefs in its publications. The Assemblies of God asserts that Adam and Eve were historical people. Some evangelical schools, such as Bryan’s namesake college in Tennessee, affirm creationist beliefs in their doctrinal statements.

A wider debate

Just as Ham says the creation story is important to defend a larger truth about the Christian Gospel, critics say more is at stake than just the human origin story.

The Trollingers wrote that the Answers in Genesis enterprise is an “arsenal in the culture war.” They say it aligns with Christian nationalism, promoting conservative views in theology, family and gender roles, and casting doubt on other areas of scientific consensus, such as human-made climate change.

Nye, too, says the message fits into a more general and ominous anti-science movement. “Nobody is talking about climate change right now,” he laments.

Exhibits promote a “vengeful and violent” God, says Susan Trollinger, noting the cross on the ark’s large door, which analogizes that just as the wicked perished in the flood, those without Christ face eternal hellfire.

And there are more parallels to 1925.

Bryan had declaimed, “How can teachers tell students that they came from monkeys and not expect them to act like monkeys?” The Creation Museum, which depicts violence, drugs and other social ills as resulting from belief in evolution, is “Bryan’s social message on steroids,” wrote Edward Larson in a 2020 afterword to “Summer for the Gods,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Scopes trial.

More attractions planned

The protests that initially greeted the museum and ark projects, from secularist groups who considered them embarrassments to Kentucky, have ebbed.

When the state initially denied a tourism tax rebate for the Ark Encounter because of its religious nature, a federal court overturned that ruling. Representing Ham’s group was a Louisiana lawyer named Mike Johnson — now speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

And Ham’s massive ministry charges forward. Expansion is next, with Answers in Genesis attractions planned for Pigeon Forge, Tenn., and Branson, Mo. — tourist hubs offering more opportunities to promote creationism to the masses.

Todd Bigelow, visiting the Ark Encounter from Mesa, Ariz., says he believes that the exhibit vividly evoked the safety that Noah and his family must have felt. It helped him appreciate “the opportunities God gives us to live the life we have, and hopefully make good choices and repent when we need to,” he says.

“I think,” Bigelow adds, “God and science can go hand in hand.”

Smith writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Dylan Lovan contributed to this report.

OKLAHOMA CITY — Oklahoma high school students studying U.S. history learn about the Industrial Revolution, women’s suffrage and America’s expanding role in international affairs.

Beginning next school year, they will also learn about false conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 presidential election.

Oklahoma’s new social studies standards for K-12 public school students, already infused with references to the Bible and nationalist themes, were revised at the direction of state schools Supt. Ryan Walters. The Republican official has spent much of his first term in office lauding President Trump, feuding with teachers unions and local school superintendents, and trying to end what he describes as “wokeness” in public schools.

“The left has been pushing left-wing indoctrination in the classroom,” Walters said. “We’re moving it back to actually understanding history … and I’m unapologetic about that.”

The previous standard for studying the 2020 election merely said, “Examine issues related to the election of 2020 and its outcome.” The new version is more expansive: “Identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results by looking at graphs and other information, including the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters, and the unprecedented contradiction of ‘bellwether county’ trends.”

The new standard raised red flags even among Walters’ fellow Republicans, including the governor and legislative leaders. They were concerned that several last-minute changes, including the language about the 2020 election and a provision stating the source of the COVID-19 virus was a Chinese lab — a theory never proven — were added just hours before the state school board voted on them.

A group of parents and educators has filed a lawsuit asking a judge to reject the standards, arguing that they were not reviewed properly and that they “represent a distorted view of social studies that intentionally favors an outdated and blatantly biased perspective.”

Grassroots pressure on lawmakers

While many Oklahoma teachers have expressed outrage at the change in the standards, others say they leave room for an effective teacher to instruct students about the results of the 2020 election without misinforming them.

Aaron Baker, who has taught U.S. government in high schools in Oklahoma City for more than a decade, said he’s most concerned about teachers in rural, conservative parts of the state who might feel encouraged to impose their own beliefs on students.

“If someone is welcoming the influence of these far-right organizations in our standards and is interested in inserting more of Christianity into our practices as teachers, then they’ve become emboldened,” Baker said. “For me, that is the major concern.”

Leaders in the Republican-led Oklahoma Legislature introduced a resolution to reject the standards, but there wasn’t enough GOP support to pass it.

Part of that hesitation probably stemmed from a flurry of last-minute opposition organized by pro-Trump conservative groups such as Moms for Liberty, which has a large presence in Oklahoma and threatened to back primary opponents against lawmakers who reject the standards.

“In the last few election cycles, grassroots conservative organizations have flipped seats across Oklahoma by holding weak Republicans accountable,” the group wrote in a letter signed by several other conservative groups and GOP activists. “If you choose to side with the liberal media and make backroom deals with Democrats to block conservative reform, you will be next.”

Claims that changes ‘encourage critical thinking’

After a group of parents, educators and other Oklahoma school officials worked to develop the new social studies standards, Walters assembled an executive committee consisting mostly of out-of-state pundits from conservative think tanks to revise them. He said he wanted to focus more on American “exceptionalism” and incorporate the Bible as an instructional resource.

Among those Walters appointed to the review committee are Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and a key figure on its Project 2025 project, a blueprint for a conservative administration largely reflected in Trump policies; and Dennis Prager, a radio talk show host who founded Prager U, a conservative nonprofit that offers “pro-American” educational materials for children that critics decry as lacking in objectivity and accuracy.

In a statement to the Associated Press, Walters defended teaching students about “unprecedented and historically significant” elements of the 2020 presidential election.

“The standards do not instruct students on what to believe; rather, they encourage critical thinking by inviting students to examine real events, review publicly available information, and come to their own conclusions,” he said.

Recounts, reviews and audits in the battleground states where Trump contested his election loss all confirmed Democrat Joe Biden’s victory, and Trump lost dozens of court cases challenging the results.

Critics say Walters’ new standard is filled with misleading phrasing that seeks to steer the discussion in a particular direction.

Democrats characterized it as another political ploy by Walters, widely viewed as a potential candidate for governor in 2026, at the expense of schoolchildren.

“It’s harmful posturing and political theater that our kids do not need to be subjected to,” said state Sen. Mark Mann, a Democrat from Oklahoma City who previously served on the school board for one of the state’s largest districts.

Concerns about politicizing school standards

National experts on education standards also expressed alarm, noting that Oklahoma has historically ranked highly among the states for its standards.

Brendan Gillis, the director of teaching and learning at the American Historical Assn. who oversaw a research project that analyzed standards in all 50 states, said Oklahoma’s social studies standards had been “quite good” until the latest version.

In addition to concerns about election misinformation, Gillis said, “there was also a lot of biblical content that was sort of shoehorned in throughout the existing standards.”

He said a lot of the references to Christianity and the Bible misinterpreted the history of the country’s founding and lacked historical nuance.

David Griffith, a research director at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative-leaning education think tank, said he was not aware of any other states that have tried to promote election misinformation in their curriculum standards.

He called the new standards an “unfortunate” departure from Oklahoma’s traditionally strong social studies standards.

“It is just inappropriate to promote conspiracy theories about the election in standards,” he said.

Murphy writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Christina A. Cassidy in Atlanta contributed to this report.