The Alabama Legislature is worried about your soul.

So it is considering a bill that would hold education for ransom, slashing funding for school districts that don’t start their classroom days with a prayer.

Good bread, good meat, time’s wastin’ let’s eat.

HB231, sponsored by Pike Road GOP Rep. Reed Ingram and a host of disciples, is clear. Your students, no matter their faith, creed or lack thereof, must hear a prayer “consistent with Judeo-Christian values.”

Or risk losing 25% or their state funding. More than $63 million in Jeffco, for instance. Almost $100 million in Mobile. That’s $37 million in Madison County, and $34 million in Huntsville.

Can I get an amen?

So let’s just take a quiz. What prayers might meet that standard?

It is, of course, not as simple as all that. The bill, a constitutional amendment that would require a vote of the people, would withhold the money from school districts that show a pattern of refusing to comply. But the point is very real.

Freedom of religion in Alabama means “our way,” or to hell with you. Literally.

If this bill, this public piety for political purpose is passed, teachers should print that final prayer out and read it every single day in class.

Bow your heads and say it with me.

Oh Lord, help those men and women in the Alabama Legislature. They have taken food from the mouths of children, medicine from the sick and hope from the hopeless. They cast your people into prisons without mercy, rail against the poor and the immigrant. They have seen the sick and the hungry in their own land, and passed by on the other side of the street. They have done it in your name. Have mercy on their souls.

Amen.

Oh. P.S. Help us pass that damn test.

John Archibald is a two-time Pulitzer winner from a long line of preachers who wouldn’t want their kids to learn their theology from any old rando or pandering lawmaker.