Oldham County school board stops theocratic expansion at classroom door | Opinion
Bravo to the Oldham County school board, which on Wednesday voted 5-0 to stop efforts to turn our society into a theocracy.
According to reporter Valarie Honeycutt Spears, the board unanimously stopped an attempt to stop a proposal to offer off-campus Bible classes from an Ohio-based nonprofit known as LifeWise. According to media reports, Lifewise is planning proposals in at least 45 of Kentucky’s 171 school districts.
Board members said it would be disruptive to the school day when it could be offered in after-school clubs.
“I don’t care if it was the National Wildlife Federation that wanted to come educate kids about ducks, I don’t think it belongs during the school day,” said board member Suzanne Hundley. She said clubs meet before and after school and, “I don’t see the difference in this.”
The Bowling Green Independent school board already voted down LifeWise. This apparently angered the Kentucky chapter of the Family Foundation enough that they got involved with urging districts to accept the offer.
“LifeWise is an Ohio-based Christian non-profit that provides off-campus Bible classes to students during the school day. Over 1,000 schools across 34 states allow students to participate in a LifeWise program during school hours. LifeWise organizes a local team to provide the programming, transportation, and staff without receiving any taxpayer funding,” Family Foundation leaders said in a release.
While Oldham board members discussed logistical problems and the heavy-handed arm of government, they are to be commended for standing their very strong ground of keeping a high, hard wall between church and state.
This all started last spring when Kentucky’s General Assembly passed Senate Bill 19 from Sen. Rick Girdler, R-Somerset, which created a process for local school districts to allow off-campus moral instruction, including Bible classes.
Optional is optional and school boards can very easily say no to this. There are so many obvious reasons, but we’ll lay out just a few for the people who think freedom of religion is the ability to trample on everyone else’s religious liberties.
Whatever would Kentuckians say if there was an optional school hour choice to go to Quran-based programming? Or to study Hindu Vedas or the Torah of Judaism? That would make it more fair, and more interesting, but that’s not what’s on the table here.
Religion is a personal choice made by parents for their children. We have many, many churches in this state that offer many, many services, resources, classes and education.
Looking at our society these days, our children need every bit of school they can get. They need more history to understand concepts like freedom from religion. They need better reading skills to parse what is true and what is not, and they need science so they can understand why vaccines prevent deadly diseases.
Many of the people who founded this country — Puritans, Huguenots, Quakers — did so to escape religious persecution in the Old World. That’s why the Founding Fathers were so explicit about not having a state-mandated religion, but a country where everyone was free to worship as they wish.
The people surrounding Trump have made it very clear they wish otherwise, and programs like Lifewise Academy are simply the thin end of the wedge to get the door wide open.
We are all so exhausted by the constant warfare on our democracy by the Trump administration, it’s hard to know where to look.
Is it U.S. troops being sent to invade U.S. cities? Is it blowing up a boat full of people just for fun? Is it the Supreme Court deciding that race can’t be used in college admission, but can be when masked ICE officers pull children away from their parents in the middle of the night? Or the fact the Trump family is now $3.4 billion richer, thanks to the open corruption being peddled at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?
People are free to send their children to church schools, and to churches themselves. For at least a little longer, this nation is a democracy, not a theocracy, and does not need to become one, little by little, with programs like these.
This story was originally published October 9, 2025 at 12:48 PM.
