Christian lobbying group pushes for Bible reading in public schools

Originally posted on IdahoEdNews.org on November 21, 2024

The Idaho Family Policy Center is preparing to introduce a bill that would require public schools to read the Bible. 

“School-sponsored Bible reading brings God back into schools,” said Blaine Conzatti, president for the Christian lobbying group. “We believe that having the Bible read in classrooms helps inculcate students, the rising generation, with the virtue and morality that’s necessary to sustain our constitutional, republican system of government, as our founding fathers believed.”

The bill would mandate that public school students hear about 20 verses of the King James Bible each school day, culminating in a “cover-to-cover” reading over a decade, Conzatti said. Bible verses would be recited “without instruction or comment” under the proposed law. 

Educators and students would be able to opt-out of the requirement, Conzatti said. And he doesn’t believe that non-Christian students will feel pressured to participate or that they will be ostracized if they don’t. 

“We’ve seen parental opt-out work well with things like sexual education or sexuality education in the past,” he said. “Schools have procedures in place to provide reasonable accommodations to those students, so I don’t anticipate that being a problem.”

The Idaho Statesman first reported on the Bible-reading proposal.

Conzatti declined to share a draft of the legislation, and he declined to say whether a lawmaker plans to sponsor it.

The Idaho Family Policy Center is circulating a petition advocating for Bibles in public schools. Conzatti said he expects to collect several thousand signatures before the legislative session in January. 

The proposal comes amid a string of similar moves to incorporate Christian doctrine and symbols in public education within Republican-led states. 

Oklahoma’s state superintendent recently ordered public schools to use the Bible in lessons, and Texas is considering a new curriculum that includes the Bible. Louisiana this year required that public schools post the Ten Commandments in classrooms. A federal court has temporarily blocked that law from taking effect amid a lawsuit.

Conzatti is confident that the Idaho proposal would pass constitutional muster — despite legal precedent that bars sectarian books in public school curriculum. 

The U.S. Supreme Court in the 1960s ruled that school-sponsored prayer and Bible reading endorsed a particular religion and violated the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution. 

And the Idaho Constitution forbids laws that give “preference…to any religious denomination,” and prohibits “sectarian or religious tenets or doctrines” from being taught in public schools. A federal court in 1964 declared unenforceable an existing Idaho law that requires public schools to read the Bible. 

But the U.S. Supreme Court in recent years has chipped away at this precedent. The conservative-majority court established a new test for weighing church-state entanglements that uses history and tradition as a yardstick, abandoning the “Lemon” test, which considered whether a statute’s primary purpose is secular, among other questions. 

The Idaho Family Policy Center found that Bible-reading in schools is rooted in history and tradition, both nationally and in Idaho, Conzatti said. And the proposed bill’s specific provisions will sidestep the Idaho Constitution’s ban on teaching sectarian doctrine. 

“Requiring the passages to be read without instruction or comment, of course, makes this legislation constitutionally defensible under our state constitution,” he said. “It’s consistent with the history and tradition of our state.”

State Superintendent Debbie Critchfield has not been contacted about the proposed bill, spokesman Scott Graf said Thursday.

“Without seeing a bill and how it addresses certain considerations, it would be difficult to comment on the proposal,” he said by email.