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. Not as religion. And as a piece of literature, it can be 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 between Eastern Orthodox and the Modern Reformed Catholic interpretations. 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.
