Funny how Republicans running red states have done a 180 on indoctrination of students in public schools — as long as it’s Bible-based indoctrination. Ohio appears on the verge of following Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, and others in turning public schools into officially sanctioned Sunday schools with religious messages and mandates. The intensifying GOP push to incorporate more religion in public education is clearly an effort to indoctrinate students with preeminently Christian beliefs.
The same right-wingers who were apoplectic over the faux outrage of flaming liberal public-school teachers indoctrinating impressionable youngsters with “woke” curriculums now think indoctrinating those same students on the one true way should be mandatory. Republican-sponsored legislation in the Ohio House (H.B. 445) and Ohio Senate (S.B. 293) would require public school districts in the state to remove students during school hours for religious instruction off school property.
It is a small but hugely significant change in current Ohio law that covers religious release time policy. Now school districts may allow the exodus of students in the middle of the school day for off campus religious education — or not. Under state law, students cannot skip core subjects for Bible study but can blow off other classes in music, art, theatre, physical education or library and lunch periods if permitted by the district.
Some public schools have decided that a well-rounded education also depends on students attending classes not considered “core” or browsing for books in libraries or testing social skills over lunch. Districts choose not to disrupt already tight academic schedules with students leaving the building for ill-timed religious activities. But that local district control over released time for religious instruction (RTRI) policy would be rescinded by the Republican bills gaining traction in the lame duck session.
That would set a dangerous precedent of state government essentially promoting religious programs in public education by mandating that districts provide “the opportunity for religious instruction” on top of the full day of instruction public school teachers are expected to deliver. Secular public schools should not be the new religious battleground, but that’s what they’ve become in Republican-ruled states pushing Christianity into what ought to be religiously neutral environments.
Statehouse fundamentalists in Ohio — led by state Rep. Gary Click, the Fremont pastor who engineered the successful override of the governor’s veto on legislation targeting gender-affirming care for trans youth — are on an evangelical crusade to introduce indoctrination to public school kids with religious right dogma. They want state law to support their brand of indoctrination even if the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution does not.
It mandates religious neutrality in public schools, places where students and families of all faiths and beliefs are welcomed and nurtured. What is being proposed in Ohio is not about freedom of religion or honoring parents’ prerogatives to raise their children in a certain faith or no faith. Click’s bill and its companion measure in the Senate want to strip districts of the right to refuse questionable programs or to make their own policies about excusing students during school for extracurricular religious instruction.
The biggest lobbyist campaigning for passage of H.B. 445 and S.B. 293 is Joel Penton, the founder and CEO of a rapidly growing religious right empire. It is aligned with the Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council, both Project 2025 signatories, as well as Turning Point USA. His LifeWise Academy, an Ohio-based nonprofit, is on a mission to put God back in public schools nationwide. It expects to reach over 600 districts in 30 states this school year, including 169 school districts in Ohio.
The only thing standing in the way of LifeWise proselytizing their version of Christianity to more “unchurched” K-12 public school students in Ohio are school districts with the power to say no. Penton needs mandatory access to public school districts enacted into state law so he can blanket his “mission field” in public education with biblical indoctrination and districts will be forced to accommodate.
LifeWise Academy presents itself as a benign, character-building, Jesus-loves-you religious education option with no obligation by anyone to participate. But it actively recruits children in public elementary schools, middle schools and high schools with parental permission to go along for the ride. Then academy staff teach a literal interpretation of the Bible with correlating lessons of moral certitude about the sinfulness of, say, same-sex relationships and gender identity outside the Christian right worldview.
To be clear, Penton and his growing ministry to convert public school students to biblical orthodoxy have an absolute right to believe what they believe and to evangelize all they want. But the First Amendment that established the freedom of religion also established the freedom from religion and what LifeWise and its Republican allies in the General Assembly are doing is testing the church-state divide in public schools by requiring districts to release students for religious instruction.
It’s the same pattern in a slate of recent actions in other red states requiring Trump Bibles in every public-school classroom with educators ordered to teach it, requiring students to watch a prayer video, requiring copies of the Ten Commandments in every classroom, requiring religious chaplains as school counselors, requiring Bible-based curriculums in grade schools.
This isn’t religious liberty, it’s religious coercion. Ohio is poised to follow suit.
Marilou Johanek is a veteran Ohio print and broadcast journalist who has covered state and national politics as a longtime newspaper editorial writer and columnist.
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