Diana Chandler, Baptist Press

The Oklahoma Supreme Court blocked on June 25 a publicly funded religious charter school that would have been the first in the U.S.

The state’s contract creating a religious charter school violates state and federal law and is unconstitutional, the court wrote, siding with Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond in his challenge to the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School (SISCVS).

Millions continue to suffer religious persecution globally, with wars and civil conflicts exacerbating already existing ills in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa, the U.S. State Department documented in its 2023 Report on International Religious Freedom.

The report on 199 countries and territories attempts to present a nonbiased overview of persecution by governments, extremists and members of society, relying on information from government officials, religious groups, nongovernmental organizations, journalists, human rights monitors, academia, media and others.

Igor Bandura remembers how Southern Baptists helped Ukrainian Baptists expand their reach after independence from Russia in 1991. He hopes for something of a repeat when the current war with Russia ends.

“When freedom came, many churches from the Southern Baptist Convention started to come, send teams, and there were partnerships between” state conventions and specific areas of Ukraine, recalls Bandura, vice president of the All-Ukrainian Union of Churches of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (Ukraine Baptist Union).

A specified Protestant version of the Ten Commandments must be displayed in all public schools in Louisiana by January 2025, the mandate of a bill Gov. Jeff Landry signed into law on June 19.