Scott Kamps
* Part 1 of a 2-part column
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote, “To defend a country, you need an army; to defend a free society, you need schools.” It’s important to add that those schools need to be able to teach the truth with clarity.
Several positive developments in education are afoot in our culture presently:
* The abolition (defunding) of the Department of Education (hampering the influence of radical leftism);
* Empowering parents with school choice;
* Returning prayer and the Bible to government/public schools.
The latter improvement is worth further consideration. Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters has recently required schools to incorporate the Bible into lesson plans for students in grades 5-12. A video of him praying will be played in every classroom in Oklahoma. In the video, he acknowledges the religious liberty of students to not pray, or to join as he then prays for our nation, its leaders – including Trump – and the students.
I may have reservations about some of Walters’ tactics, but I commend him for jumping feet first into the battle for our culture. In subsequent articles about Walters and his “mandates,” many legacy media outlets continue fear mongering, describing him and others like him with scare words like “Christian Nationists” who seek to impose religion on everyone and “erode the long cherished American principle of separation of church and state.”
Their scaremonger tactics – while extremely common – are immensely unhelpful in national controversies.
It is natural for this debate to consider the well-known “wall of separation between church and state.” This mantra is so familiar to modern Americans that many think it’s in the Constitution, but the phrase comes from a private 1802 letter President Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptist Association. It’s nowhere in the Constitution, and previous Chief Justice William Rehnquist referred to it as “a metaphor based on bad history.”
This began to clarify the controversy, which was exhibited clearly at pop-culture level when CNN’s Pam Brown interviewed Walters. Much of the 10-minute interview is them talking past each other: he gave talking points about woke teacher unions/liberals who want to take the Bible out of schools and put in “Gender Queer” and “Flamer.” She, on her part, failed to recognize the unique role of the Bible in American history –even arguing the Bible has pornography in it (eventually admitting the Bible isn’t on the same par as the porn the left promotes in schools). She also misused a John Adams quote from the Treaty of Tripoli that the left often makes much out of, ignoring his voluminous writings contradicting what they say his quote means.
Walters clearly interprets the efforts to stop prayer and the Bible in schools as attacking religious liberty, saying, “The Constitution is crystal clear on religious liberty.” Obviously believing that having prayer and the Bible in public schools is a violation of the first amendment, she retorted, “First of all, the Constitution is not crystal clear on that” – exhibiting the most common tactic to promote the values on the left: confusion instead of clarity.
Scott Kamps writes a bi-weekly column for The Graham Star. He can be reached via email, thestableguy@frontier.com.