The year is 2024 and Oklahoma has just passed a law stating that public schools must teach the Bible in the classroom. What the legislators who passed this law failed to realize is that many of the teachers who will be teaching that text are not Christians. Some are atheist, some others are Jewish, still others are Muslim, and even others are Baha'i, Sikh, and a million other faiths. The other thing the legislators failed to realize is that public schools don't have a "religion" class.

So by 2025, many of the people who favored that law began to see the inevitable outcome. Yes, the Bible was being taught - as literature, and by people who are openly critical of its theological implications because of their own faiths. What it's not being taught as is as religion. And as a piece of literature, the Bible can be endlessly and critically examined. By the end of the 2025 school year, hundreds of thousands of parents were surprised and shocked to discover that their children had many questions about this "Bible" text that they had been studying in school. Questions they were not prepared to answer. Questions their spiritual leaders labeled as blasphemy.

By 2026, a growing grass roots movement spearheaded by these parents passes a new federal law. The Bible must not only be taught in all schools - it must be taught correctly. The law outlines how exactly the Bible should be interpreted, how those interpretations should be learned in the classroom, and how those interpretations should be tested. Furthermore, it contains punishments for any teacher found teaching a different interpretation of the text of the Bible.

By 2029, these new laws have been amended several times, as Christians from many different denominations find themselves suddenly unhappy with the specific interpretations of various parts of the biblical text. Catholics, being by far the largest group, have pushed many of these alterations through, making it illegal to teach, for instance, the idea that the Pope is not the embodiment of God on Earth, or the idea that during communion, the bread and wine do not literally transform into the flesh and blood of Jesus. This has made many Protestant parents extremely upset, and they have begun pulling their children out of public school. This however has not helped, as the government now has final say on every aspect of when, where, and how the Bible must be taught - even during home schooling.

By the year 2032, the U.S. government now has total control over all interpretive religious decisions. All forms of protestantism are now illegal, including Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, etc. The current legal battle is over whether it's right to teach that any woman who is on her period and shows her face in the city limits should be literally stoned to death, or merely given an equivalent punishment to public stoning.

Step by step, year by year, Christians voted away their ability to interpret their own region. They have gotten exactly what they always wanted, and they hate it.

@Lana Kentucky tried something similar a while back, I think? They introduced a senior elective called "Biblical literacy" which sounded really objectionable from a separation-of-church-and-state standpoint, but about which I ended up feeling fairly ambivalent.

It was neither religious instruction nor a critical literature class - the idea behind it was that our culture is chock-full of references to the Bible, so educated adults ought to be able to recognize them, even if they don't believe the Bible is the word of God. For example, one should understand that "pieces of silver" carries connotations of betrayal, the same way they know that "Et tu, <name>?" does after they study Shakespeare.

@Lana  
100% plausible and likely

I've always said that merging the church and state is worse for both of them. See Holy Eoman Empire.

@Lana

Greater that 38,000 'Christian' sects today. And NOT ONE was formed because the body of the schism agreed with the main!

Religion started as a placeholder for the unknown, a lieutenancy of belief. It has become a refuge for the ease of stupidity.

@Lana *taps sign* no writing history before it happens.
@hp sorry I could never get the hang of Thursdays
@Lana I find this a horribly believable future, except I’m pretty sure some flavor of Protestants would win the battle.

@Lana

Interestingly, the word Protestant comes from the word protest. The reason Protestant churches originated was largely in protest to the political power the Pope and papal clerics held over the people of Europe.

@Lana During my final year at UC Berkeley, when I had filled all my requirements and could take fun classes I took a class on The Torah as Literature.

It was really interesting - although I was hobbled, being the only person in the room who could not read at least one of the original languages.

And it was most definitely not religious at all - except in the sense of looking at historical and mythological sources.