Fox’s Stuart Varney Pushes Back on Official’s Desire To Teach The Bible in Schools: ‘Something I Think The Supreme Court Ruled Against’

Fox Business Network’ Stuart Varney pushed back on an Oklahoma official’s desire to “teach from the Bible” in schools by pointing out the U.S. Supreme Court’s past decisions citing the First Amendment establishment clause.

Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, said putting the Bible in schools would help students “understand our nation’s history.”

“Instead of allowing Biden and the unions to inject their ideology through graphic pornography like Gender Queer and Flamer, we want the Constitution, we want the Bible in our schools, where kids understand our nation’s history and what makes this country great,” Walters said on Varney & Co.

“So, you actually want to put — not put the Bible in schools but teach from the Bible in schools, which is something, which I think the Supreme Court ruled against many years ago,” Varney countered.

Varney was referring to the 1962 Engel v. Vitale ruling against prayer in public schools, or the 1963 Schempp decision, where the court ruled 8-1 that Bible reading and prayer in public schools was unconstitutional. In both cases, the court cited the establishment clause of the First Amendment, prohibiting Congress from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion.”

“Well, yes, sir. And we need to look at this,” Walters said. “The reality is, the Bible is a foundational document in our country’s history. Read the Founders, read their letters; listen to what these men and women said about why founding a country with the freedom of religion, the free exercise of religion, was so important.”

In 2022, the conservative court began to reverse course by ruling in favor of a public school football coach who wanted to pray with his team. A Los Angeles Times editorial said that with the ruling, “the U.S. Supreme Court threw out 60 years of legal precedent, leaving the nation’s schools in the untenable position of having little recourse to protect students from religious coercion on campus.”

Walters also recently came under fire for saying that the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre was not inherently about race.

“But to say it was inherent in that because of their skin is where I say, ‘That’s critical race theory.’ You’re saying that a race defines a person, I reject that,” Walters said.