Trump's excited about 'Bible literacy classes.' Their legality is fiercely debated.

(Image credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

published 28 January 2019

President Trump enthused on Twitter Monday morning about the prospect of biblical literacy classes in public schools, apparently inspired by a concurrent Fox & Friends segment on the subject:

The president's tweet didn't offer a lot of details, but he's likely referring to legislation under consideration in a handful of states which would either allow or require public schools to offer elective courses on the Bible as literature. A North Dakota state senate bill, for example, would require high schools to offer "One-half unit of the old testament of the Bible or the new testament of the Bible, or one-half unit of instruction covering both the old and new testaments of the Bible."

The proposals are fiercely debated on First Amendment grounds, with critics arguing the classes would violate the "establishment of religion" clause. But the courses are likely immune from court challenge so long as they focus on the Bible's historical and literary import and eschew proselytization, remaining agnostic toward the book's religious claims just as a course teaching Homer's Odyssey could not push students toward belief in Zeus.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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