Weekend Plug-in 🔌

Editor’s note: Every Friday, “Weekend Plug-in” meets readers at the intersection of faith and news. Subscribe now to get this column delivered straight to your inbox. Got feedback or ideas? Email Bobby Ross Jr. at therossnews@gmail.com.

GREENVILLE, S.C. — Jeffery L. Williams found Jesus through his public middle school.

Now the pastor of Golden View Baptist Church in Fountain Inn, South Carolina, Williams grew up in an unchurched household. As an elementary school student, he lived with his single mother and two brothers in a low-income housing project.

“Mom raised us in the hood, in the ghetto,” said Williams, who will celebrate his 39th birthday next week. “And then she moved us out of the projects … trying to get us a better life.”

That move landed Williams at Greenville’s Tanglewood Middle School, where the preteen boy heard about a weekly “released time” Bible education program that bused students off campus during regular school hours.

“I came into released time by happenstance, thinking that it was like a free period,” he recalled. “And Mom signed me up for it. The impact it had on my life? It changed my life actually. ”

Religion in public schools keeps making national headlines — from Louisiana requiring that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every classroom to Oklahoma’s top education official ordering schools to incorporate the Bible into lessons. 

Add to that expanding school voucher programs, which are pumping billions in taxpayer dollars into religious schools across the U.S. and blurring the line between public education and religion.

Released time classes — in which students are released during the school day for a short period, with parental consent, to receive religious instruction — are less well known.

But they, too, have gained legislative attention recently.

Oklahoma’s governor, Kevin Stitt, signed one such bill last month, requiring local school boards to create guidelines for off-site religious instruction. Lawmakers introduced similar bills in Ohio, Nebraska, Georgia and Mississippi.

Christian released time classes serve an estimated 350,000 students in 32 states, according to School Ministries, a released time advocacy and support group based in Columbia, South Carolina.

However, it’s not just the Bible that can be taught during released time. 

The off-campus approach to religious instruction of public school students is prevalent among Mormons as well as some Jewish and Muslim groups, as I first noted in a 2013 story. 

In Oklahoma, the Satanic Temple opposed the bill signed by Stitt but said it’s “prepared to ensure our members' children receive the same opportunities as those participating in other religion's programs.”

Decades ago, religious instruction occurred on public school grounds themselves, Charles C. Haynes, director of the Religious Freedom Education Program in Washington, D.C., told me for my previous story.

“Kids would go to a class taught by a religious leader, depending on their choice,” Haynes said. “It might be a priest, minister or rabbi. That was not uncommon in American public schools for a period of time.”

But in 1948 — in the case McCollum v. Board of Education — the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that religious groups and school officials had cooperated unconstitutionally to provide religious instruction.

“Here not only are the State’s tax-supported public school buildings used for the dissemination of religious doctrines,” Justice Hugo Black wrote. “The State also affords sectarian groups an invaluable aid in that it helps provide pupils for their religion classes through use of the state’s compulsory public school machinery. This is not separation of Church and State.”

Four years later, however, the 1952 case Zorach v. Clauson set the legal precedent that still governs released time.

In that case, the high court ruled specifically on the constitutionality of off-campus, released time programs, emphasizing the difference between schools supporting religious indoctrination and merely accommodating children’s religious needs.

“We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being,” Justice William O. Douglas wrote in the landmark decision. “When the State encourages religious instruction or cooperates with religious authorities by adjusting the schedule of public events to sectarian needs, it then follows the best of our traditions, for it then respects the religious nature of our people and accommodates the public services to their spiritual needs.”

The decision allows schools to permit released time, but it does not require them to do so, legal experts said.

I first talked to Lori Windham, vice president and senior counsel at religious liberty law firm Becket, about released time in 2013. In that interview, she emphasized, “It’s important that public school officials understand that these programs are perfectly constitutional. They should not feel that they need to avoid or resist these programs.”

She also noted, “Although there are restrictions, public schools are not a faith-free zone. To paraphrase a famous case, religious students don’t shed their rights at the schoolhouse gate.”

When I contacted Windham this week, she reiterated those earlier statements.

“That’s all still true, and if anything, it’s more true today than it was then,” she told me.

I asked what she meant.

“The Supreme Court approved released time back in the 1950s when you had a very separationist Supreme Court that was really policing the boundaries of religion in schools,” Windham said. “Now we have courts who recognize that religious expression in schools is OK.”

Windham cited the case of Joe Kennedy, a Washington state high school football coach who last year won the right to kneel on the field for postgame prayer.

“In that decision, the Supreme Court acknowledged that private religious expression is perfectly fine,” she said, “and schools have to take notice of that.”

While disputes over hanging the Ten Commandments on classroom walls or making the Bible a primary source in history classes generate a ton of attention, released time typically does not.

“I think it’s mostly because it’s a lot less controversial,” said Ken Breivik, national executive director of School Ministries. “Ever since the 1950s, the Supreme Court has said it’s legal, provided you do three things.”

Those three things: The instruction must be off school grounds. It can’t use any governmental funding. And each student must receive parental permission.

“That parental permission one is pretty huge,” Breivik said. “If you’re against this, you’re basically saying that parents should not have the right to make decisions related to their kids in terms of religious education. And that’s just not something that even people that dislike Christianity are necessarily willing to do.”

Breivik is clear about why he has devoted more than two decades to promoting released time Bible classes.

“It’s pretty simple,” he said. “If there was a better way to reach the next generation with the gospel, I’d be doing that. I just haven’t seen anything that has the impact of this.”

Christian Learning Centers of Greenville County — the program that introduced future pastor Williams to the Bible a quarter-century ago — has ministered to more than 22,000 students since 1997, according to its founding CEO, Janice Butler.

The nonprofit owns buses that transport students between schools and nearby churches that host the program. In addition, Christian Learning Centers has launched a for-credit high school elective course online.

More than 2,400 past and current students, including Williams, have professed their faith in Jesus as a result of the Greenville County program, Butler said.

“I get so excited every day when I take a step out,” the CEO said, “knowing that kids are closer to being in the Word of God and knowing more about him during the public school day.” 

Williams participated in released time Bible classes all three years of middle school.

In his teen years, he felt the calling to become a pastor, he said. Through his influence, his mother and brothers also became Christians.

Now Williams’ 13-year-old son, Noah, the oldest of four brothers, is a middle school student. He, like his father before him, studies the Bible during released time.

The pastor thanks God for the program.

“It caused me to come to know who Christ was,” Williams said. “And it also gave me the opportunity to accept the call upon my life.”

Inside The Godbeat

Kelsey Dallas, assistant managing editor focused on religion at the Deseret News, produces a weekly newsletter called “State of Faith.”

I really enjoy reading it — and not just because she occasionally mentions my stories.

Dallas recently won first place in the newsletter category of the Utah Society of Professional Journalists’ contest.

Congrats, my friend!

The Final Plug

My Christian Chronicle colleague Cheryl Mann Bacon did a great story earlier this year on a flood of insurance cancellations wreaking financial challenges for churches in Texas, Louisiana and beyond.

Religion News Service’s Bob Smietana has a nice follow-up to Cheryl’s piece this week, delving into “How a perfect storm sent church insurance rates skyrocketing.”

Smietana credited Christianity Today’s Kate Shellnutt — who recently reported on a Canadian megachurch putting its ministry on pause after an insurer pulled its abuse coverage — with inspiring him to move ahead with his story.

Happy Friday, everyone! Enjoy the weekend.

Bobby Ross Jr. writes the Weekend Plug-in column for Religion Unplugged and serves as editor-in-chief of The Christian Chronicle. A former religion writer for The Associated Press and The Oklahoman, Ross has reported from all 50 states and 18 nations. He has covered religion since 1999.