Note: This piece was originally published at our Substack newsletter A Public Witness and is drawn from this week’s episode of Dangerous Dogma. If you prefer, you can listen to that audio podcast version of this piece (or watch a video version).
On Tuesday (Feb. 25), a session of the Oklahoma Senate transformed into a spontaneous Bible study. Or perhaps more of a Bible study cosplay demonstrating how not to read the Bible, specifically how not to read the Book of Proverbs. Before we get to the problem, let’s set the stage.
State Sen. Dave Rader, a Republican in Tulsa who is also the former longtime head football coach at the University of Tulsa, introduced a bill to ban public schools from using corporal punishment against children with disabilities. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1977 that schools could use corporal punishment and left it to the states to establish rules for its use or to ban it.
In 2017, Oklahoma lawmakers passed a ban on using corporal punishment on children with “significant cognitive disabilities.” Federal statistics showed that 20% of the corporal punishment incidents at that time were against children with disabilities, though only some were then protected by the 2017 legislation. That law came about after a state lawmaker learned that his deaf nephew had been “whacked” by a teacher who was upset he had not listened to her command to stop doing something — even though the deaf child had not heard the command and did not understand why he had been hit.
Oklahoma Capitol in Oklahoma City. (Caleb Long/Creative Commons)
During the COVID-19 pandemic year of 2020-2021, the Oklahoma Department of Education expanded the ban on corporal punishment to bar its use against any children with disabilities, not just those with the most significant disabilities. However, since it is just a department rule, it can easily be rescinded. Thus, Sen. Rader wants to codify that ban to ensure it remains in place to protect any student covered by the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Among the disabilities he wants added to the list and thus shield children from receiving corporal punishment in schools are autism, deafness, visual impairment, and intellectual disability.
An effort for such a ban last year passed the state Senate but then died in the House. At the time, Rader praised his fellow senators for having “recognized that there is no need for schools to use corporal punishment to discipline disabled students.” He added, “The support of fellow senators for backing this important bill that protects some of our most vulnerable children is most appreciated.”
With a new legislative session, Rader is again pushing such a bill, which is an important step — although I would support a full ban to prevent school teachers or officials from using corporal punishment on any student. Rader’s legislation, Senate Bill 364, came to the Senate floor yesterday for discussion. And that’s when another senator got confused and thought he was in a Bible study.
As a Dog Returns to Its Vomit…
Republican Sen. Shane Jett, a Southern Baptist, has been one of the most outspoken critics of the legislation to ban the use of corporal punishment against children with disabilities. During discussion of the bill on the Senate floor on Tuesday, he repeatedly pressed Sen. Rader to justify the bill in light of some Bible verses.
“How does the author of this bill,” Jett asked, “align this legislation that unilaterally takes away parents’ ability to collaborate with the school to exercise corporal punishment — and again, that is not beating! It’s disingenuous to say corporal punishment is beating a child. It’s certainly not hitting him in the face with a fist as my Twitter feed will light up later. How does the author of this bill align this legislation with Proverbs 22:15 that says, ‘Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline drives it far from him’?”
Rader, a Southern Baptist deacon and Sunday School teacher, wasn’t going to — as Proverbs 26:4 teaches — “answer a fool according to his folly.” Rejecting the premise that the bill should align with Jett’s interpretation of a Bible verse, Rader instead offered a little hermeneutical lesson about what that “rod of discipline” meant. He noted that there in Oklahoma they could witness how “the handlers of pigs use a rod to discipline their pigs. And they tap them on either side to make sure the pig goes in there on the straight line, stay narrow if you want to, go where they’re supposed to go. That’s the rod we’re talking about.”
“Because, you know, there are going to be times when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, and we won’t have to fear evil because ‘your rod and your staff comfort me,’” Rader added.
Angered by the response, Jett then compared his fellow Southern Baptist Republican to Satan before turning to another proverb.
“I recall that Satan quoted Scriptures on the temptation of Christ,” Jett said. “We should rightly divide the word of truth. Let’s take a look at Proverbs 23:13-14. How does the author align this bill that prohibits parents from using every tool that is legal and appropriate in conjunction with the public schools, how do you line it with Proverbs 23:13-14 that says, ‘Do not withhold discipline from your child. If you punish them with a rod, they will not die’? That’s not a tap on either side of a shoulder like a pig. ‘Punish them with a rod and save them from death.’ How does the author, Mr. President, align with this Scripture and this legislation?”
Jett’s reference back to Satan questioning Jesus by quoting Scripture was ironic because if we take the passage literally it would best apply to Jett. After all, he was the one first quoting Scripture as he asked questions of Rader. I’m not suggesting Jett is like Satan, I’m just noting the logical flaw in his self-righteous attack on his fellow senator.
Screengrab as Oklahoma Sen. Shane Jett speaks during a Feb. 25, 2025, session in Oklahoma City.
Rader, for his part, didn’t take the bait and again refused to justify his bill according to a literalistic reading of a couple of verses from the Book of Proverbs. Instead, he encouraged his colleague to join him in going to meet teachers who work with children with disabilities so Jett could see how they use other ways of guiding and disciplining those children.
“What we’re saying in this bill is: If there are special needs, then there will be special discipline,” Rader explained. And we’re saying, in our state we just don’t think it should be corporal punishment. That’s what this law says.”
Unsatisfied, Jett repeated his effort to force a theological defense of this secular bill.
“My question remains: How does the author of this bill rectify or bring congruent with Proverbs 23:13 that says, ‘Do not withhold discipline from a child. If you punish them with a rod, they will not die. Punish them with a rod and save them from death’? And the author cited that they heard different. But in Scripture it’s uniformly applied to everyone,” Jett said. “Is there a different application of salvation if you have a hearing aid? There’s a difference for you if you have eyeglasses it’s different for you?”
“Here’s another one: Proverbs, 29:17. ‘Discipline your children, and they will give you peace; and they’ll bring you delight, delights that you desire,’” Jett added. “How do we rectify a fundamental philosophical departure from Western culture and civilization to this ideology that says you cannot apply discipline and we’re doing it unilaterally from this body in defiance of parental rights or parental role? How do you justify that?
Rader simply responded, “Thank you for the question. I answered it previously.” The debate then moved on to more substantive discussions about the bill and it passed the Senate 31-16.
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…So a Fool Repeats His Folly
Sen. Jett made two significant problems with his line of questioning. First, he’s clearly working from a position of Christian Nationalism. That is, he believes that Oklahoma’s lawmakers should govern and vote according to his interpretation of the Bible. But that’s not the oath of office he or the rest of the senators took. His job is not to codify his religion but to serve all of the people of his state.
The second problem is he does not seem to understand how to read and interpret the Book of Proverbs. That’s ironic, since he’s literally trying to codify his interpretation of the Bible, even though it’s one that serious Bible scholars reject. Jett’s problem is he does not understand the genre of the Book of Proverbs. That book is not a bunch of absolute commands from God. Rather, it’s a collection of wisdom sayings, of things that are generally true.
Conservative Old Testament scholar Tremper Longman III explained this well in his book How to Read Proverbs. Longman noted that the various proverbs in the book are not always true. As an example, he pointed to Proverbs 10:1. A wise child brings joy to a father; a foolish child brings grief to a mother. While it is generally true that parents will delight in wise children and be distraught by foolish ones, that is not always true.
“We can all think of many instances when we might question this assertion,” Longman wrote. “Imagine an abusive, alcoholic father, or a self-absorbed mother who neglects her children. Are the lines of authority between parent and child so dominant that it does not matter what selfish, destructive impulses a parent has, the mother or the father has to be pleased no matter what? Of course not. It is clear that the father and mother are understood to be wise themselves. Their desires would be for the good of the child and for the furtherance of wisdom. This proverb is not insisting on an absolute law; it is rather putting forward a generally true principle that depends on the right time and circumstance.”
“To read a proverb as if it were always true in every circumstance is to commit a serious error: We call it the error of genre misidentification,” Longman added. “The proverb form, no matter the cultural background, presupposes the right circumstance for its proper application.”
That’s the mistake Sen. Jett made. He literally argued that Proverb 23:13-14 applies to all children. But it’s not always true. There are some children who have literally died from being punished with a rod. More significantly, there are children who have been punished with a rod and then still turned out to be undisciplined individuals or who died from foolish mistakes or who died from a disease or an accident. The proverbs that Jett quoted are literally not always true, but he insists on reading them as if they are and demanding the State of Oklahoma codify his inaccurate interpretation. And if someone disagrees, he suggests they are like Satan or, as he argued last year, that they are “defying Scripture.”
While the bill did again pass the Senate, it remains to be seen if it can become law this year. The invoking of Proverbs has helped kill the bill in the House the last couple of years. As Republican Rep. John Talley, an ordained minister who has pushed this legislation, noted in 2023, he thought it failed in part because “several people were a little nervous about voting for it because they thought they were voting against the Bible.”
So let’s be clear: The Book of Proverbs does not mandate that public schools use corporal punishment against children. The Book of Proverbs does not mandate that school teachers use a rod to beat the backside of autistic children or those with other disabilities. To read the text so literally is to not take it seriously according to its own genre and the intentions of its own authors. Oklahoma lawmakers like Sen. Jett who quote the Book of Proverbs to justify their Christian Nationalistic politics do violence against Scripture to justify doing violence against the least of these.
As a public witness,
Brian Kaylor
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