Just how far down the path of imposing their religious dogma Christian nationalists will drag us depends — like so much else these days — on the strength of the resistance. Over the past 60 years, we could pretty much depend on the Supreme Court to protect our religious freedom. These days, with the right-wing super-majority hacking away at precedent like a movie serial killer with a machete, who knows? The latest from Texas gives us more than a hint of what's at stake.
For much of American history, the fiercest disputes over religion in public life have centered on what government should not do. Establish an official church. Compel religious observance. Favor one faith over another. The succinct constitutional guardrail was not conjured out of Enlightenment abstraction. It was forged after centuries of European sectarian bloodletting that killed 8-15 million people. It has been refined through generations of judicial precedent. This never eliminated religious controversy, of course, but did help steer the nation away from government religious decrees and toward private conscience in matters of faith.
It's important to note, however, that what the Constitution says and what actually happens on the ground can be way different. It wasn't until 1962 and 1963 that the Supreme Court knocked down mandatory school prayer and Bible readings, while preserving the right of students to pray voluntarily. It wasn't until 1978 — 187 years after the Bill of Rights was approved — that Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act after years of suppression of Native spiritual practices, a prohibition implicated in the last government massacre of the Indian Wars at Wounded Knee.
Today we have self-identified Christian nationalists in high places working to undermine and circumvent the separation of government and religion. The latest episode just concluded in Texas. Hundreds of books previously on reading lists had already been banned when, after months of contentious debate, the State Board of Education voted 9-5 Friday to require 5 million public school students to study selected Bible passages as part of the state's English language arts curriculum beginning later this decade.
Reporting by the Texas Tribune shows the curriculum extends well beyond occasional literary references. It embeds biblical narratives throughout grade levels as required reading while presenting them as foundational to American history and literature. In addition, textbook references to various events and trends in the United States are whitewashed. Case in point: A reference to the Ku Klux Klan's post-Civil War depredations ludicrously removed a previous reference to Black people, but left in the terrorist organization's antipathy for Catholics and Jews. Amazingly, listing slavery as the central cause of the Civil War managed somehow to survive the purge. Getting "DEI" out of textbooks is something in which Texas Republicans gleefully participate.
But doctoring textbooks in twisty ways is no new thing in Texas. Injecting the Bible into classrooms is. Here's Ellie Ashby at the Tribune a few days before the board of education's vote:
A detailed look at the religious excerpts, part of about 200 passages that could become required reading in kindergarten through high school, shows a reliance on Christian perspectives without clear guidance on how to place the stories in historical or devotional context
The new curriculum would have students as young as 6 interact with biblical stories titled “Noah’s Ark,” “David and Goliath” — meant to be read aloud from picture books — and “Daniel and the Lion’s Den” in their English classes. Daniel’s story is to be supplied by the Christian Broadcasting Network, a media company founded by televangelist Pat Robertson in the 1960s.
During a Thursday press conference in Austin, Republican board of educaiton member Brandon Hall said: “We’re going to stop watering down American history. We’re going to teach the truth. Our nation was founded as a Christian nation, and Texas is a Christian state.”
The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) avoided an acid retort but with unflinching clarity: "Public schools exist to educate students with diverse faith backgrounds, as well as those who adhere to no faith doctrine. Public schools are not Sunday schools, and elected officials have no business using state power to elevate one religion above all others. A required reading list that overwhelmingly favors Christian texts while excluding the writings and literary traditions of other faiths, not to mention the perspectives of millions of nonreligious Americans, sends an unmistakable message about who belongs and who does not.” FFRF co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor said “a mandatory public school reading list should never function as a Bible lesson. Texas is telling millions of children that one religion deserves the government’s seal of approval, while everyone else is an afterthought. That’s government-sponsored religious favoritism — and the First Amendment strictly forbids it.”
Bingo.
The Supreme Court firmly backed up that principle since before most people now alive were born. In 1962, it threw out government-written, government-sponsored public school prayer, The next year, it expanded on that by striking down mandatory Bible readings and recitations of the Lord's Prayer in public schools. And it rejected the idea that letting students opt out of this would be a reasonable constitutional solution.
The ruling did not mean, however, as many of its foes have in bad faith claimed over the years, that there could be no public school studying of the Bible. Justice Tom C. Clark wrote: "It certainly may be said that the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities." The Court explicitly stated that objective study of the Bible or of religion in general as part of a secular educational program is constitutional. Teaching how the Bible has affected history, as in battles over slavery and civil rights, or how the King James Version has affected modern English usage, or how the KJV compares with earlier and more recent English Bibles, is worthwhile learning.
But the minute you get into anything deeper, or into theology, trouble arises.
Consider, for instance, the fact there is no single English Bible. The King James Version, New Revised Standard Version, New International Version, English Standard Version, New American Bible, and others differ not only stylistically but also in hundreds of translation choices reflecting linguistic judgments, textual traditions and, at times, theological assumptions. Catholic Bibles contain books omitted from most Protestant editions. Orthodox churches recognize still broader biblical canons. Jewish scripture overlaps substantially with the Christian Old Testament but differs in organization, translation, and interpretive tradition. Once government selects one translation — or even one collection of passages — it inevitably privileges certain religious understandings over others, even if unintentionally. But in Texas, the choice was not unintentional.
The Bible the board has chosen for its required lessons is the New Reader International Version. It's basically a simplified take on the widely read New International Version. Of this translation, Bible scholar Dan McClellan says:
"If you're looking for a translation of the Bible that is faithful to the source texts, the New International Version is not for you. ... The NIV consistently, repeatedly, alters the text of the Bible in order to bring it into alignment with an evangelical worldview that does not allow the Bible to disagree with itself. And this is kind of stated in the preface where it says the translators were united in their commitment to the authority and infallibility of the Bible as God's word in written form. And so this actually governs how they interpret the Bible. And there are a number of places where this causes conflict. And instead of allowing the text to say what it says, they alter the text to bring it into alignment with this conviction. And there are dozens and dozens of examples."
No English versions of the Catholic Bible or the Tanakh, the Jewish Bible, were used for the Bible verses chosen for mandatory inclusion in the Texas lessons. Thus, in addition to fighting with the backers of the Constitution, the advocates of smashing the separation of church and state are at war with the majority of scholars — believers and non-believers — over the claim that the Bible is inerrant and univocal and infallible.
Then, of course, there's the issue of students of other faiths or no faith. What happens in a classroom where the Bible lesson on Noah's Ark is interrupted by a student who says his mom thinks Noah's Ark is a bunch of baloney, or the Muslim kid who points out that the Koran has a different story about the Ark? And if a lesson is about a quote attributed to Jesus, what happens if a student asks if he really existed, or was really the son of God, or really rose from the dead? What happens when a kid raises questions about the rancid prescriptions of Leviticus? Will the answers be: We don't talk about that stuff here, ask your parents? How long before that line gets turned into a student joke meme? How long before fist-fights break out? How long before teachers get fired for stepping over the line as drawn by Christian nationalist enforcers?
Rabbi Joshua Fixler at Congregation Emanu El in Houston told CNN that “this list is full of Christian texts that are inappropriate for public school classrooms. As a rabbi and a parent of Jewish kids, I think it is vital that this board make a distinction between teaching about religion and teaching religion. This list will force teachers to cross that line.”
Legislating use of a book whose every word some people believe to come from God's own voice, and who others think are fanciful human inventions cannot end well.
As noted at the outset, whether the board's policy ultimately survives judicial scrutiny remains uncertain. What's clear is that this effort reaches well beyond Texas. It raises an enduring question about democratic government itself: What happens when the state — not churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, ashrams, or families — decides which sacred texts every child should and should not encounter?
Many of the settlers who established Britain's North American colonies came from societies where governments had spent centuries enforcing official versions of Christianity. Catholics persecuted Protestants. Protestants persecuted Catholics. Protestants persecuted other Protestants. Dissenters fled one kingdom only to discover another government determined to regulate doctrine, worship, and scripture. The bloody violence that accompanied the Protestant Reformation and the subsequent European wars of religion demonstrated how quickly theological disagreements could become matters of state power, taxation, education, and military conflict. After landing in America, the wave of Pilgrims and Puritans, dissenters against government-imposed religion in Britain and Europe, imposed their own version of it in New England for a century.
The founders of the United States did not remove religion from public life. Many were deeply religious. Instead, they tried something more ambitious: constructing a political system in which government would largely refrain from deciding theological questions. The First Amendment's twin protections — the prohibition against establishing religion and the guarantee of its free exercise — represented an effort to prevent political authority from becoming an arbiter of faith.
That aspiration has never been perfectly realized. Public schools have occupied particularly contested ground. Throughout the 19th century, teachers in many public schools routinely read from the King James Version, reflecting the Protestant assumptions of the era. Catholic immigrants objected, arguing that the supposedly "nonsectarian" KJV embodied distinctly Protestant theological choices. Riots erupted in Philadelphia in 1844 after disputes over Bible reading in public schools, underscoring how quickly debates over religion can become physical conflict.
The Supreme Court's decisions drew a distinction rather than erecting an absolute wall. Supporters of the Texas curriculum insist they remain on the constitutional side of that line. They argue that the Bible's influence on English literature, Western art, American political rhetoric and historical development is undeniable. Students cannot fully understand references in Shakespeare, Milton, Martin Luther King Jr.'s speeches or countless works of literature without some familiarity with biblical stories, they say. Excluding those texts, supporters contend, leaves students culturally and historically impoverished.
Totally reasonable in theory. In practice, however, it's barely veiled proselytizing. As the Texas Tribune reported, numerous religious scholars and leaders testified before the board of education to complain about the disproportionate attention given in the lessons to Protestant Christian interpretations. Several Jewish witnesses questioned repeated references to "Judeo-Christian" heritage, arguing that portions of the lessons reflect specifically Christian understandings of texts shared by Judaism rather than presenting the Hebrew Bible within its own religious context.
A few Bible lessons isn't all Christian nationalists have in mind for schools. Not by a longshot. Shortchanging public school funds to religious schools via vouchers is now copacetic in 13 states under various conditions. But Bible lesson advocates essentially are proposing that secular schools shouldn't be so secular. And they want the religious message required for public school kids, too. Politically speaking, that message is poison.
The framers had watched governments across Europe spill oceans of blood trying to answer theological questions with political power. They concluded that the state was competent to collect taxes, build roads, punish crime, wage war, and educate children — but profoundly incompetent to decide the proper relationship between human beings and their version of God. Christian nationalists now ask Americans to abandon that hard-won wisdom in favor of a government empowered to define religious truth for the next generation.
History offers little encouragement that such experiments have good outcomes. Governments that presume the authority to shape souls rarely stop there. They almost always discover an appetite for deciding who belongs, whose beliefs are acceptable and whose conscience must yield to the majority. The wisdom of the First Amendment is that it denied government that power. The tragedy of our moment is that so many people seem eager to hand it back. And not just in the Lone Star State.
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