An Ohio nonprofit that provides off-site Bible instruction to public school students during classroom hours says it will triple its programs in Indiana this fall after new legislation forced school districts to comply.
To participating families, nondenominational LifeWise Academy programs supplement religious instruction. But critics in Indiana worry the programs spend public school resources on religion, proselytize to students of other faiths and remove children from class in a state already struggling with literacy.
LifeWise founder and CEO Joel Penton told The Associated Press that many parents want religious instruction to be part of their children’s education.
“Values of faith and the Bible are absolutely central to many families,” Penton said. “And so they want to demonstrate to their children that it is central to their lives.”
Public schools cannot promote any religion under the First Amendment, but a 1952 Supreme Court ruling centered on New York schools cleared the way for programs like LifeWise. Individual places of worship often work with schools to host programs off campus, and they are not regulated in some states.
The LDS church has been doing pretty much this same thing for a very long time. It’s why you see wards and church property adjacent to almost every public high school in the north western states. They have also ruled politics in their more populous areas.
Ex Mormon, can confirm. This was my very first thought when reading the headline. “Lol I did this as a pre-teen and teen in LA in the 90s and 00s.” This is called “seminary”, which in Mormonism does not mean what it means to other religious traditions. “Seminary” just means “scripted religious classes for bored sleepy teenagers taught by an unqualified volunteer parent every school day for 45 mins somewhere off campus before school starts.”
In Mormonism this means “studying” (aka the teacher reads you a standardized lesson plan and asks comprehension questions) the Book Of Mormon, The Pearl of Great Price, The Doctrine And Covenants, the New Testament, and the Old Testament. These five texts make up the Mormon canon.
In the time and place that I did seminary, it was not formally linked to the public school system. But in predominantly-Mormon Utah, I believe seminary was officially part of the public school curriculum in most (all?) school districts and classes were often held on-campus in school classrooms and counted towards your diploma.
So, yeah. This shit is nothing new.
I spent my high school years as a newly born again Christian in the Bible Belt, so I would’ve been the weirdo who loved something like this. This was definitely not a thing where I grew up. It is so weird to think of LA being a religious indoctrination hotbed, that is not something I expected.