CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. -- An East Tennessee family suing to stop Bible classes in the public elementary schools of Dayton, the town made famous by the "Scopes Monkey Trial," asked a federal judge Tuesday to make a ruling without a trial.
U.S. District Judge R. Allen Edgar said following a one-hour hearing that he would decide on the request for summary judgment before a scheduled Feb. 19 trial.
The suing family is identified in court records only as Rhea County residents with children who have been subjected to the "Bible Education Ministry" program taught in elementary schools. They are plaintiffs along with Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation Inc.
Rhea County school superintendent Sue Porter said after the hearing that the biweekly, 30-minute Bible classes for about 800 K-5 students in the three elementary schools have been taught for 51 years.
"My hope is we will be able to have a full trial ... to explain the full extent that character education is built in," Porter said.
Alvin Harris, an attorney for the anonymous family, asked the judge to rule that the Bible classes taught by students from Bryan College, a private Christian college in Dayton, violate the constitutional prohibition against religious instruction in public schools.
An attorney for the public school system, Mike Evans, said rulings in other cases can't be totally relied on by the court because Rhea County and Dayton have a unique religious history as home of the Scopes trial. He said religion is "part of the fabric of the community."
"The Bible has a very high historic perspective in Rhea County," Evans said.
Evans said community standards should determine what is proper for school classrooms. He said students in Utah are likely being taught on occasion from the Book of Mormon, students in New York taught about Jewish traditions and students in Baltimore about lacrosse.
"There are secular reasons for this," Evans said.
Edgar said lesson plans for the Bible classes resemble "what I was taught in Sunday school and church as a youngster."
Evans said such a comparison shouldn't matter.
"I go to court and church and learn the same lessons my old basketball coach taught me," Evans told the judge.
Evans said the family should disclose their identity and tell the judge how their children have been harmed by attending the Bible classes.
Bruce Wilkey of Signal Mountain, who attended the hearing and handed out Freedom From Religion Foundation newspapers afterward to reporters, said the family suing the school system deserves to be anonymous, to avoid what he described as a "social stigma."
Wilkey said courts have ruled for decades that what Rhea County schools are doing is unconstitutional.
"It's a shame that it has taken 50 years," Wilkey said.
John Mincey, chairman of the Rhea County school board, said no students have asked to be excused from the classes.
"We don't even know if they are in Rhea County schools," he said of the plaintiffs. "If we are harming anybody they haven't opted out of the classes."
The school officials' insurance company has previously advised them that they should modify the Bible classes by either making them elective or holding them after school.
In 1925, John T. Scopes, a Dayton teacher accused of teaching evolution, was tried in Dayton. Scopes was convicted and fined $100, but his conviction was thrown out by the Tennessee Supreme Court on a technicality. The trial later became the subject of the play and movie, "Inherit the Wind."
Bryan College was founded in 1930 in Dayton, about 35 miles north of Chattanooga, and named for William Jennings Bryan -- the orator who defended Tennessee's ban on teaching evolution in the celebrated trial.