I am not really back, but I never really went away. You can expect to hear from me more regularly sometime in the near future, but today I have to respond to something in the news.

Before the Biden-Trump debate stole all the bandwidth, a seemingly minor story crawled across the bottom of our TV screens.

Oklahoma Schools Superintendent Ryan Walters orders schools to teach the Bible.

This is not new, as I can tell you from personal experience.

I was in high school in the mid sixties, in a small town in Oklahoma. Once a year a local evangelist named Reverend Heck was invited to our school. No, that was really his name. For an hour, the auditorium was turned into a church. Attendance was mandatory; respectful silence was also mandatory. No one complained; no one mentioned the constitution. No one asked to be excused. We all knew that the weight of community opinion would fall upon us if we did.

If you are not a fundamentalist Christian, or if you are Buddhist, Muslim, Jew or other non-Christian, I don’t need to convince you that this was not right.

On the other hand, if you are a Christian and you think that Superintendent Walters might have the right idea, you are the person I want to talk to.

Let us reason together. (Isaiah 1:18)

My childhood world consisted of two tiny communities, populations of 121 and about 300, with a consolidated school. There were five churches in the two communities, all Christian, all more or less fundamentalist. Belief that dancing was a sin was so strong that there were no proms. Do you have the picture?

Now fast forward to my adulthood. For twenty-seven years I taught middle school in a small community of a couple of thousand people. The composition of my new community was roughly half Mexican-American Catholics and half White Mormons. This community was in California, not Oklahoma, but I know it well, so I plan to use it in my comparisons.

Superintendent Walters wants the Bible to be taught. Let’s see how that would work.

If my California community were in Oklahoma, would Walters also call for the teaching of the Book of Mormon? He calls the Bible a historical text; the book of Mormon has been around since 1830, just under two hundred years. That’s just 42 years less than the Constitution. You can’t get more American than a Holy Book which was found (or ghost written, you decide) here in the U.S.A.

My childhood community would not stand for Mormonism being taught in the schools. They barely tolerated Catholics.

Speaking of Catholics, how would Superintendent Walters teach Matthew 16:18? It says (King James Version, according to my father the only version authorized by God for speakers of English):

And I say unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church: and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

It’s in the Bible, and if you are part of a Bible Church, you have to believe it. But what does it really mean?

To Catholics, it means that Peter (a name meaning rock) was the first Pope and that Jesus appointed him in this verse. By extension only Catholics are true to God’s teaching.

See how well that goes over in my old home town. Or teach it the opposite way, and see how that goes over in Catholic Oklahoma.

Those are the first two problems that come to mind, but there are hundreds of differing opinions among Christians, even in Oklahoma. Most of the people I knew as a child thought that those holding other opinions had been deluded by the Devil. And those other people probably thought the same about my people.

Be careful what you ask for. God may be on somebody’s side, but is it yours? Are you absolutely sure? Do you want to bet your freedom to worship as you please on it?

There is one more thing to consider. How much do you trust the government?

Not much, you say; that’s what I thought. So why do you think they are going to get this right? That they will teach the Bible as you think it should be taught, not as some (insert the group you hate the most) would do it?

Good luck, friends. If you go down this road, you’re going to need it.

Once you have the Bible being taught in school, it won’t be long before the courts insist on fairness. You might find your children being taught Christianity, probably by religious liberals, on Monday and Wednesday while the rest of the week they are being taught the Koran, the Mahabharata, the I Ching, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Daozang, the Gathas, the Mahayana Sutras . . .

And so forth. The list is very long.

There is an alternative. Accept the first amendment. Accept that all those other people who aren’t as smart as you are, have the right to go to the Devil in their own way. Accept that the only way to ensure your freedom is to let them have theirs – all outside of the schools.

It has worked for 248 years.