By Jim Brown
January 4, 2007

(AgapePress) - A constitutional attorney is countering efforts in Michigan to undermine a widely used curriculum for teaching the Bible in public schools.

The state director of a group called Michigan Atheists is reportedly challenging the constitutionality of a two-semester Bible elective course for high school students that is being considered by a curriculum committee in Howell Public Schools. The course is called "The Bible as History and Literature" and is produced by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, or NCBCPS.

The Council claims that 93 percent of the schools that have been approached about implementing the Bible course curriculum have voted in favor of doing so, resulting in more than 370 school districts in 37 states that are currently using the curriculum. But according to information attributed to Arlene Marie with Michigan Atheists in a New Year's Day article published in the Detroit News, courts in four of those states -- Kansas, Missouri, Texas, and Illinois -- have declared the curriculum unconstitutional.

Steve Crampton is chief counsel for the Center for Law & Policy (CLP), the legal arm of the Mississippi-based American Family Association. He also serves on the NCBCPS board of directors and advisory board. The attorney says Marie's allegations are "flatly untrue," and states unequivocally that the elective course meets all constitutional requirements.

Steve Crampton

"[A]mong other things, we [the CLP] serve as the litigation counsel for the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools and have for several years; so I can speak from firsthand knowledge," says Crampton. "Not only is [the report] not true, but we've never even been threatened with litigation along these lines. I don't know where she got her information."

The attorney adds that he is "very disturbed" that somebody in a leadership role in a statewide office "would have so little regard for the truth."

Crampton explains his group's course of action in light of the report. "We are at present investigating our legal options in the event a retraction is not promptly printed," he says. And a retraction, he adds, is necessary because "it could be the death of the National Council's growth nationwide for this to be out there, unretracted and picked up and reprinted and retold from school to school …."

The dvisory board of the NCBCPS [PDF] includes several high-profile Christian leaders, including Dr. D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries, Mr. David Barton of WallBuilders, and author and Bible teacher Anne Graham Lotz.

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