CITIZEN: What the battle over bible instruction reveals.

Every year or two, there is a dust-up in some local school district involving the relationship between church and state. When this happens, we are all treated to a few weeks of apocalyptic rhetoric warning that religious people are taking over the schools.

Our schools have lots of problems (mostly self-inflicted), but the takeover of schools by anyone’s religion is not one of them.

The latest case involves an Oldham County, Kentucky school in which a large group of local parents got together to start a release-time moral instruction program offered by an organization that offers Bible education, LifeWise Academy, which would take place off campus and would be completely voluntary. No one was required to attend.

The program is allowable under SB 19, a bill passed by Kentucky’s General Assembly earlier this year, which provides for schools to provide moral instruction programs one hour each week.

Critics have focused on the fact that the group doing the instruction is a Christian group and seeks to teach the Bible. But the legal integrity of what this group is doing is not even controversial. Such programs have repeatedly been ruled constitutional.

In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court, in the 1952 case Zorach v. Clauson, directly upheld the constitutionality of “release time” programs for religious instruction, allowing public schools to permit students to leave campus for off-campus religious education. This is likely why they have not and will not file a legal suit: because they know they can’t win.

So instead of taking the issue to court, they have satisfied themselves with making specious arguments about the relation of church and state and trying to scare people by insinuating that the program is some devious attempt by religious people to take over schools.

Opponents of programs like this one always invoke the First Amendment, even though the First Amendment says nothing about issues like the one now being argued about in Oldham County schools.

The First Amendment is not hostile to religion. Rather, it expressly recognizes religious liberty as the foundation of our system of governance. And there was a good reason for this. The establishment clause of the First Amendment simply says that the federal Congress “shall make no law respecting [i.e., having to do with, or concerning] an establishment of religion.”

This meant two things: that it couldn’t establish a national church and that it couldn’t disestablish the existing state churches in New Hampshire, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Virginia, all of which continued decades after the First Amendment was ratified. It is at least questionable whether some of these states would have even joined the union had the Constitution been written to require them to close their state churches.

Fortunately, it was not written this way, despite attempts to effectively rewrite in retrospect by some judges and anti-religious groups, it still says what it says and not what it doesn’t say.

The Constitution is clear on this, as is the current case law. So what about the salacious plot these people think they have detected to force schools to be religious?

It would be nice if we could assess the evidence of such a conspiracy, but the problem is that there isn’t any. Without such evidence, all we can do is speculate on the psychological state of those who see the religion monster lurking behind every tree.

They need either to produce evidence or seek full-time care. Alex LeBlanc, a member of the site-based decision-making committee for the school, took to the pages of the Courier Journal to condemn the district allowing the program. But his arguments did not include any compelling rational argument against the school’s decision to allow the program. He instead spent most of his time casting aspersions on LifeWise’s program, one of which was, horror of horrors, that it had supported school choice in other states.

Not surprisingly, he didn’t address LifeWise’s profound impact, which includes improved student attendance and behavior, educators recognizing the benefits for students and their own schools, and parents overwhelming recommending LifeWise to others.

The critics of the program have no problem with schools requiring children to attend them involuntarily, but a lot of problems with allowing them to attend programs parents want of their own volition.

And if your best argument against someone is that they were in favor of allowing parents to choose which schools to send their kids to, then you’re having a bad day.

Maybe the critics of the program, instead of opposing a program of moral instruction, could propose its own program. Better yet, maybe our schools could do a little soul searching and ask whether their dereliction of duty when it comes to the moral teaching of children has brought about the problem that LifeWise is now trying to solve.