Hobby Lobby president pushes Bible curriculum in Oklahoma City schools

Associated Press

OKLAHOMA CITY

The president of a crafts-store chain who says the federal government has no business ordering him which health care options to offer his employees has no problem telling local governments what they should be teaching in their schools.

Steve Green, president of Hobby Lobby, has persuaded the Mustang School District in suburban Oklahoma City to incorporate the Bible into its curriculum as an elective, beginning this fall. His purpose, sometimes more clearly stated than others, is for students to learn the text and put America on a righteous course.

“This nation is in danger because of its ignorance of what God has taught,” Green said last year to the National Bible Association, announcing his plan for the high-school course. “There are lessons from the past that we can learn from, the dangers of ignorance of this book. We need to know it, and if we don’t know it, our future is going to be very scary.”

Green, a member of the evangelical Council Road Baptist Church in Bethany, Okla., believes the Bible is literally true and that he is obligated to share the Gospel.

The 500-plus Hobby Lobby stores are closed Sundays because Green believes the Sabbath is a day of rest and everyone should be able to go to church. The company also has led a high-profile fight against a portion of the nation’s new health care law to the U.S. Supreme Court, saying a requirement that it provide certain types of birth control to employees violates their personal religious freedom. The Supreme Court heard arguments in March and a decision is expected next month.

Green told the Mustang school board last fall that the one-year trial of the Bible curriculum developed by the Green Scholars Initiative wasn’t intended to proselytize or “go down denominational, religious-type roads,” and persuaded the board that the plan would pass any constitutional challenges.

But in front of a different audience, it’s clear the intent is to teach the Bible for its moral principles, not an aid to illuminate subjects from archaeology to zoology, as the course was billed. While the curriculum includes topics such as the religious influence on art, it also notes the consequences when people disobey God.

The director of the Green Scholars Initiative, Jerry Pattengale, told The Associated Press by email last month that Green wasn’t connected to the curriculum, other than being on the board of the Green-backed Museum of the Bible, which provides source material. But last year, after corresponding with Green about the program, Mustang’s superintendent billed it to his board as a curriculum “that Hobby Lobby and its president, Steve Green is putting out.”

Green declined interview requests from The Associated Press. Pattengale said the goal is to place the Bible course in thousands of schools by 2017.

Last year, before the National Bible Association, a group that encourages the nation’s leaders to read the Bible, Green said his goals for a high- school curriculum were to show that the Bible is true and that its impact, “whether [upon] our government, education, science, art, literature, family . when we apply it to our lives in all aspects of our life, that it has been good.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma and other groups have received complaints from the public, given Green’s remarks about the need for greater religious influence in society, but has not sued.