General Perspectives
From the Supreme Court to polls of the American people, the Bible needs to be studied.

Only 15% of the U.S. population reads the Bible daily. Only 20% read the Bible once a week. -- George Gallup, Jr., and D. Michael Lindsey, Surveying the Religious Landscape, Morehouse, 1999.

25 million American children have never heard an adult personally read a single verse of scripture to them.

53 million American children attend 100,000 public schools. 92% receive no Bible teaching or instruction during the public school day. -- Source: George Gallup Poll, New York, NY

While President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson was elected the first president of the Washington, D.C. public school board, which used the Bible as a reading text in the classroom.

There was a secular study done by the American Political Science Review on the political documents of the Founding Era, which was 1760-1805. This study found that 94% of the documents that went into the Founding Era were based on the Bible, and of that 34% of the contents were direct quotations from the Bible.

It certainly may be said that the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities. Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment.-- U.S. Supreme Court, 1963