Texas’ Bible Curriculum Revives Debate Over Religion In Public Schools
(ANALYSIS) Should America restrict the study of the Bible to the church and home and forbid it in public schools? Or is some biblical material basic cultural information high school graduates should know, regardless of personal beliefs? If so, what are appropriate Bible passages for public classrooms?
Those questions are raised with the June 26 Texas State Board of Education decision to require all public school literature classes in grades 1 through 12 to learn about 10 Old Testament and five New Testament passages among 185 required readings. Students will have the right to opt out if biblical material violates conscience.
Texas trains a tenth of the nation’s schoolchildren and the reading list includes many familiar school selections: “Stuart Little” and “The Cat in the Hat,” “Julius Caesar” and “Hamlet,” “Great Expectations” and “Animal Farm,” speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., poetry of Dante and Eliot, the diary of Anne Frank and “Night,” Elie Wiesel’s powerful Holocaust memoir. Oddly omitted is the popular “To Kill a Mockingbird” with its themes of race relations and justice. Ideology emerges with Ayn Rand lauding untrammeled capitalism and Margaret Thatcher eulogizing Ronald Reagan.
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Predictably, the new Texas Bible mandates, said to be unique among the states, are one of those social issues that rouse intense partisan debate. The board’s Republican majority approved the new curriculum in a 9-5 vote, while inclusion of the Bible is opposed by many Democrats and liberals. Christian clergy are similarly divided; most Jewish leaders are strongly negative; and critics note the omission of Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim texts.
President Rachel Laser of Americans United insists that “public schools should not force children to read Bible stories,” accusing politicians of “pushing Christianity on public schoolchildren.” Karen Swallow Prior, an evangelical literary scholar formerly at Liberty University and Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, says “teaching key passages from the Bible is an excellent idea” if the purpose is truly cultural. But she’s opposed if this seeks “to elevate one religion over another” or is “a ham-fisted attempt to advance a Christian nationalist agenda.”
The central objection concerns the Constitution’s ban on government “establishment of religion.” That clause led the U.S. Supreme Court to outlaw daily ceremonial Bible readings in its 1963 Abington v. Schempp ruling, written by Justice Tom Clark, a Texas Democrat and Presbyterian. The court by 8-1 agreed with Unitarian and atheistic petitioners that Maryland and Pennsylvania readings had a “devotional” character that was “in effect a religious observance.” One factor was that Bible readings accompanied student recitations of the Lord’s Prayer, also outlawed.
However, Abington added this admonition: “It might well be said that one's education is not complete without a study of comparative religion or the history of religion and its relationship to the advancement of civilization. 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,” violates the Constitution.
Is the Texas plan properly “secular” and “objective”? Though opponents allege Christian bias, Texas does carefully omit the central New Testament belief in Jesus as the authoritative Messiah, Son of God and Savior from sin. Here are the scriptures Texas will mandate:
— 1st grade: A children’s version of Noah’s ark and the flood.
— 2nd grade: Israel’s future King David kills the giant Goliath.
— 3rd grade: The prophet Daniel upholds his faith and survives the lions’ den.
— 4th grade: Luke 14:7-11, Jesus’s wedding feast parable (“every one who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted”).
— 5th grade: God confronts Moses at the burning bush (Exodus 3), and Israel’s escape from bondage (Exodus 14).
— 6th grade: Matthew 6:25-34, Jesus’ teaching against anxiety (“consider the lilies of the field”).
— 7th grade: Psalm 23 (“The Lord is my shepherd”) and Jesus’ Beatitudes in Matthew 5:1-12 (“Blessed are the poor in spirit”).
— 8th grade: Ecclesiastes 3 (“for everything there is a season”), and Lamentations 3, mourning the fall of Jerusalem yet with faith that “the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases”).
— 9th grade: Luke 15:11-32, Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son.
— 10th grade: Selected chapters from the Book of Job on the problem of human suffering.
— 11th grade: Genesis 2-3, the creation and fall of Adam and Eve.
— 12th grade: I Corinthians 13, by the Apostle Paul (“faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love”).
One issue is which translations are assigned. Texas specifies a Jewish translation only for Lamentations, where the 1917 Tanakh is used, not the modernized 1985 or 2023 “gender-sensitive” edition. Otherwise, Texas mandates evangelical Protestants’ favored King James Version, English Standard Version and New International Reader’s Version while ignoring Catholics’ authorized New American Bible and the ecumenical New Revised Standard Version.
Texas is not promoting high school elective courses using “The Bible and Its Influence,” a textbook designed for interfaith acceptance in line with the Abington ruling. Some 650 schools in 45 states use this option. Church-state separationists oppose the 2024 Texas go-ahead for elective elementary school Bluebonnet Learning material, which incorporates biblical content.
Hostilities are increased by the 2025 Texas law requiring Ten Commandments displays in all public classrooms. On April 21, the federal Fifth Circuit by 9-8 upheld displays in Texas, also in Louisiana, and thus spurned the Supreme Court’s ban on such displays in Stone v. Graham (1980). The Fifth Circuit insisted that the “establishment” clause was only intended to forbid a state-authorized religion, not displays that coerce no belief. Petitioners plan a Supreme Court appeal.
Richard N. Ostling was a longtime religion writer with The Associated Press and with Time magazine, where he produced 23 cover stories, as well as a Time senior correspondent providing field reportage for dozens of major articles. He is a recipient of the Religion News Association's Lifetime Achievement Award. He has interviewed such personalities as Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI); ranking rabbis and Muslim leaders; and authorities on other faiths; as well as numerous ordinary believers. He writes a bi-weekly column for Religion Unplugged.