OKLAHOMA CITY, OK – On Monday, Ryan Walters, the superintendent of the Oklahoma Department of Education, opened bids for 55,000 Bibles to place in the state’s 43,000 classrooms. The bids are pretty specific: according to The Oklahoman, the Bibles “must be the King James Version; must contain the Old and New Testaments; must include copies of the Pledge of Allegiance, Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights; and must be bound in leather or leather-like material.”
One Christian bookseller looked through their inventory of 2,900 editions of the Christian holy book and found none of them met the specifications. But there are two that do: the “God Bless the USA Bible” and the “We the People Bible,” both endorsed (for a price) by former president Donald Trump.
These “Trump Bibles” retail for $60 and $90 a pop – a cost of at least $3.3 million dollars to Oklahoma’s taxpayers. (It could be worse: Walters is actually calling for $6 million.)
Former president Donald Trump holding a copy of the God Bless the USA Bible [Lee Greenwood]
Walters mandated that Oklahoma’s public schools include the Bible in their curricula for grades five through 12 two months ago. “Adherence to this mandate is compulsory,” he said in a letter to school districts. “Immediate and strict compliance is expected.”
To hear the superintendent tell it, this is strictly a matter of historical context – and to own the libs. “We’re not buying a book and pushing it because of a religion we’re pushing,” Walters said. “We’ve talked about the efforts of left-wing groups and the teachers unions to drive the Bible out of school. I believe it’s important for historical context for kids to understand the role the Bible played.”
Well, maybe. But if it’s strictly an educational element, the rollout seems suspicious. After all, you may have noticed that 55,000 is a somewhat higher number than 43,000, and of those 43,000 classrooms, only a fraction are teaching historical or literary material where the Bible might be relevant. What’s the educational purpose behind a copy of the Bible in a biology classroom, or a ceramics studio?
Walters’s call for bids gives up the game. The King James Bible is in the public domain practically everywhere in the world but the United Kingdom; thrift editions retail for a couple of bucks, and the entire edition – along with thousands of others – are freely available online. So are the government documents. If it were purely about educational goals, adding the literary and historical study of the Bible to the curriculum could be accomplished for very little, if any, additional money. But the point isn’t to teach students about the reception of a text; it’s to place a talisman of Christian triumphalism in every classroom in the state.
This isn’t about education; it’s about reinforcing a specifically MAGA version of Christianity – a gaudy version of the religion that emphasizes patriarchal masculinity, xenophobia, and American exceptionalism, all bound up in leatherette.
That Trump would get a kickback on sales of these editions of the Bible isn’t just a bonus, it’s fundamental to the project. Far from acting as a custodian of educating Oklahoma’s children, Walters is angling to become a conservative celebrity. He bragged about Trump’s support of his Bible plan (“President Trump praised our efforts,” he said. “President Trump has been the leader on this issue”) and spends $60,000 a year on a PR firm so that he can be in the national spotlight. Rumor has it he’s hoping to be in the cabinet of a second Trump administration. It doesn’t seem like it could be coincidental that the only Bible that meets his specifications is also one that’s paid Trump hundreds of thousands in royalties.
As Ryan Cooper, editor of The American Prospect observed on Bluesky, “[it] really can’t be overstated that a core pillar of MAGAism is to steal your tax dollars and give them to Donald Trump.”
The Oklahoma City National Memorial [Mark Pellegrini, Wikimedia Commons, CC 3.0]
Thankfully, there are some in Oklahoma pushing back against Walters; a dozen of the state’s largest school districts stated that they have no intention to comply with the mandate, and the state supreme court has affirmed the school boards maintain their local control. There are also lawsuits against the mandate and wide outcry from organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
“We will not be forcing our teachers to do this,” Bixby Superintendent Rob Miller said on News Nation. “As a Christian myself, the idea of diminishing the word of God to a mere classroom prop is a little repulsive to me.”
It’s a lot more repulsive than that to me. When I was a Pagan kid in elementary school, I found myself singing Christian hymns in music class and getting lectures on Christian morality from some of my teachers; some things have changed since then, but even where I live in Illinois there are public schools with portraits of Jesus on the wall or paintings of crosses in the auditorium.
When my own kid starts school in a few years, he will not be at a loss for exposure to the Christian worldview, because Americans are soaking in it. He’s not going to need to be reminded of it any further with a Trump Bible.
Disclosure: When I’m not working on The Wild Hunt, I am a staff member for a teacher’s union in Illinois.
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