Coomer said she just finished reading the Bible, from Genesis through Revelation, outside of school, and then started all over again. But that's not what happens in the classroom. In Steenbergen's Bible class, the students hardly read the Bible at all.

There is no classroom set of Bibles for every student, no encouragement to download a Bible app on their smartphones. He never assigns chapters or verses to read. Instead, he said, he summarizes biblical stories for them and focuses class time on highlighting connections between the Bible and modern life.

During one class this spring, he spent most of the hour-and-a-half period on a game in which students guessed which theme from the Gospel of Matthew or which blessing from the Beatitudes that Steenbergen meant to connect to when he played clips from country songs and Disney movies.

His consistent message throughout the game was that students should draw moral lessons from the Gospels.