Walters' Misguided Understanding Of Religious Liberty

The Tulsa World’s story “Ryan Walters seeks to intervene in lawsuit challenging state-funded religious school” [11.9.23] quotes Walters as saying:

“This lawsuit is misguided in that it discriminates against some Oklahomans due to their faith … Rather than enshrine atheism as a state-sponsored religion, we are blessed that our Constitution guarantees religious liberty. I will never back down in the fight to uphold religious liberty in our state.”

Walters’ understanding of both the Oklahoma Constitution and religious liberty is misguided.

Provisions requiring that public education be neutral in matters of religion neither enshrines atheism nor exhibits hostility to religion. 

Instead, these provisions serve to respect and safeguard liberty of conscience in matters of religion.

The historical record regarding the wording of Oklahoma’s Constitution makes their framer’s intentions clear.

At the beginning of the Oklahoma Constitutional Convention in 1906 the delegates elected the principal chief of the Muskogee Creek nation president and appointed the executive officers of the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Seminoles and another Muskogee delegate as vice presidents of the convention.

These men were the leaders of the tribal governments that were abolished in 1906, in accord with the provisions of the Curtis Act of 1898, as Indian Territory was being dissolved and Native Americans became U.S. citizens and subject to federal law. All of them had previous experience in writing a constitution.

In 1905 and under the name of the State of Sequoyah, the Native American tribes in Oklahoma held a convention to draft a constitution for Indian Territory to apply for statehood separate from Oklahoma Territory. The tribes held a referendum on the Sequoyah Constitution in Indian Territory, where it received overwhelming support.

Then they sent a delegation of leaders to Washington, DC to petition for statehood. Congress, however, refused to divide Oklahoma into two separate states.

Many provisions in the Sequoyah Constitution were adopted in Oklahoma’s Constitution. Foremost among them were provisions that these Native American leaders drafted on religious liberty.

Far from enshrining atheism, the Preamble of the Sequoyah Constitution began with the words, “Invoking the blessing of Almighty God” and Section 4 of that Constitution states:

All men have the natural and indefeasible right to worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences. No person shall, on account of his religious opinions, be rendered ineligible to any office of trust or profit under this State, or be disqualified from testifying, or from serving as a juror. No human authority can control or interfere with the rights of conscience. No person ought by any law, to be molested in his person or estate on account of his religious persuasion or profession; but this liberty of conscience shall not be so construed as to excuse acts of licentiousness, nor to justify practices inconsistent with the good order, peace, or safety of this State, or with the rights of others.

Though this language was not included in the Oklahoma Constitution, it makes clear that the tribal leaders serving on both the Sequoyah and Oklahoma Constitutional Conventions were not enshrining atheism or exhibiting hostility to religion.

All the tribal leaders had experienced genuine discrimination against their own religious beliefs. Their intention was to prevent such discrimination.

The reverence with which most of the tribes held the buffalo was central to their spirituality and way of life. All of them had witnessed the senseless slaughter of buffaloes to the point of extinction by men of a different faiths who had nothing to lose and much to gain from killing buffalo. In the end, few buffalo were left for tribes to hold a religious ceremony, sacrifice a sacred bull, and pray for the return of the buffaloes.

Most egregious to the tribal leaders was the method the federal government used to assimilate their children to the white man’s culture and religion. Every one of them had seen children forcibly removed from their families and housed in federally funded boarding schools run by religious authorities who had little or no respect for the conscientious convictions of Native Americans.

That is why tribal leaders held firm on placing clauses in the Oklahoma Constitution ensuring that public schools “be free from sectarian control” and that “No public money or property shall ever be appropriated, applied, donated, or used, directly or indirectly, for the use, benefit, or support of any sect, church, denomination, or system of religion.”

Some of this language was in the Sequoyah Constitution which was much more explicit in separating religion and government than either the Oklahoma Constitution or the U.S. Constitution.

Tribal leaders explicated how government neutrality in regard to religion could have prevented discrimination against religious beliefs that differed from those of the predominant culture. 

Unfortunately, this is precisely what Walters’ misguided interpretation of our Constitution and one-sided understanding of religious liberty does not appear to comprehend.

Editor’s Note: Prescott, a member of the Oklahoma Observer Advisory Board, was a plaintiff in a lawsuit opposing public funding for St. Isidore of Seville Virtual Charter School.