Parent Outraged Amid Push for Religious Lessons in Texas Public Schools

This proposed curriculum has immediately caused immense backlash from many parents in Texas, as well as various church and religious leaders who don’t believe the state should decide how the Bible is taught.

Most notably, Louisiana has become the first and only state in the U.S. to mandate by law that every single public school classroom in the state must have a poster of the Ten Commandments.

For example, Oklahoma has recently mandated that religious influences must be seen in public school curricula.

However, this bill wasn’t successfully passed, and Texas lawmakers dropped it. Now, some conservatives within the state are pushing for a new change.

Texan education department officials have emphasized that the new curriculum includes material from other faiths. The platform also pushed for “prayer, the Bible and the Ten Commandments” being brought into courthouses and other government buildings.

The change could reach more than 2 million K-5 students to embrace what conservatives consider traditional values in an educational environment. Religion has increasingly encroached on Texan education, as last year, Texas passed a law that allowed chaplains to work as school counselors.

This plan would see the TEA propose a curriculum that inserts various Bible teachings and stories into reading and language arts lessons in classes from kindergarten to fifth grade.

This incentivization comes during a time when many public schools are seeking extra funds, as the Legislature failed to approve a boost to the money that schools get. This has left many schools struggling to deal with budget deficits.

“What I hear a lot in Texas is parental rights — that we have the right to be able to make decisions about our children’s education. And yet, this particular faith tradition is being superimposed on children who come from many different faith backgrounds and whose parents would find it very offensive,” Mansoor said.

Parents have shot back that teachers don’t need to bring up any religion to teach children to be kind to each other.

This could lead to an increase in bullying — and a lack of inclusivity — seen throughout public schools in Texas.

Wine said, “We teach kids to be nice to each other and to share. You don’t need to bring up religion in order to do it.” Nonreligious groups have brought forward concerns about both ostracizing children of other faiths but also undermining the separation of church and state.

A leading curriculum publisher rejected the state’s request to include biblical content in its texts. Texas officials have turned to other publishers, including the conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan and the right-leaning Texas Public Policy Foundation, which supported the unsuccessful Ten Commandments bill.

State officials asked Amplify to include more biblical content in its materials. Kristine French, an Amplify spokesperson, said the state rejected the company’s idea of including content from other world religions like Islam or Hinduism. “There was much more of an appetite for the tie to traditional Christian texts,” said French.

Texan education officials said that the charge that they rejected content from other religions was “completely false.” The state has not specified how many of the new lessons derive from Judeo-Christian sources. Since Amplify bowed out of the contract, the state awarded an $84 million contract to Public Consulting Group to revise the curriculum.

Lutheran pastor Paul Ziese said, “In a public school, you’ve got people from a variety of backgrounds. And I think that’s a concern — that no one feels that they’re not equal to anyone else or that their position or their faith is less, including people who have no faith.”

The state education commissioner, Mike Morath, said: “If you’re reading classic works of American literature, there are often religious allusions. Any changes being made are to reinforce the kind of background knowledge on these seminal works of the American cultural experience.”

Mark Chancey, a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said: “It is reasonable to devote some attention to the Bible, and state education standards across the nation often require such attention. The problem is that sometimes the legitimate reason of cultural literacy is used as a smokescreen to hide religious and ideological agendas.”

“It’s a question of inclusivity. It’s also a very slippery slope. Because once we open the door to that kind of content, it’s much easier to get more and more religious content into the curriculum,” Nirenberg explained.

“I would say there is currently no test for assessing the constitutionality of this curricular change. It facilitates these advances to both entrench religion in public life and also to diminish the protections that are afforded to religious minorities.”

“I think what we’re seeing right now is Christian nationalism taking these religious symbols and pushing them in a way that is trying to say that to be a good Texan, you need to be a Christian,” said Graves-Fitzsimmons.

The Supreme Court conservative bloc has eroded decades of precedent and made it unclear which actions are unconstitutional. In its 2022 ruling on the Kennedy v. Bremerton case, the court ended the use of the Lemon test, a standard that was used to determine if a government action was too entangled with the church.

Megan Benton, strategic policy associate at Texas Values, said her group supports “an objective reading of the Bible and other religious texts” in public schools. Benton said that more materials on the Bible will provide higher-quality education overall.

The Texas Legislature recently passed House Bill 1605, which allows the TEA to create its own textbooks with a proposed curriculum to help teachers in class preparation.