Every few months, as dependable as the scorching Texas heat or as dastardly as the Christmas Grinch, the Freedom from Religion Foundation sends out some small news blip, an outmatched David’s shot across the bow in the Goliathan battle against religion in Texas classrooms.
Last month, it took the form of a successful effort to stop the athletic director of College Station Independent School District from tagging his emails with a New Testament verse from the book of Romans. Before that? A missive urging the state’s school districts to stop sponsoring religious baccalaureate graduation ceremonies. The time before that? Ending last year’s school prayer marathon in Burnet Consolidated Independent School District.
Each tiny win, on its own, may seem inconsequential. But within the current roiling culture war — where every traditional American symbol has been seized to signal some self-righteous superiority — the Freedom from Religion Foundation has taken on the thankless task of pushing back on the multitude of efforts to put religion (and, specifically, evangelical Christianity) in Texas classrooms.
This trend started with a rather innocuous bill, passed two sessions ago, which required Texas school districts to post “In God We Trust” signs donated by local businesses. In places where far-right conservatives were making inroads in local school board races, that ended up being a whole lot of signs.
Of course, it’s Texas, and not all religions are seen as equal: a school district in North Texas rejected “In God We Trust” signs printed in Arabic when a resident tried to donate a rainbow version in August 2022. “Why is more God not good?” asked Sravan Krishna at the school board meeting in Southlake.
Add to that Kennedy v Bremerton, a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2022, which rolled out the welcome mat for teachers to share their own religious views — and it’s no surprise the Republican Party of Texas added the Bible to its platform, front and center, during its convention in San Antonio in May. “We support affirmation of God, including prayer, the Bible and the Ten Commandments being returned to our schools, our courthouses, and other government buildings,” said the document.
In College Station, the skirmish over religion was brief. The Freedom from Religion Foundation sent the district a complaint saying the New Testament verses in a coach’s emails implied a preference for one religion over another. A month later, the district agreed. No inspirational sentences, no literature highlights, and no Bible verses. Simply name, title, and department, according to an email from the district sent to the foundation’s legal fellow, Hirsh Joshi, on August 8, which has since been reviewed by The Barbed Wire. (The school district did not respond when asked for comment by The Barbed Wire.)
Religion can exist in schools as long as it’s not forced on students. That’s the law on the federal level — thanks to Madelyn Murray O’Hair — and thus, the one Texas has used for guidance. (O’Hair challenged prayer in schools in Baltimore, Maryland in 1960, which led to the U.S. Supreme Court decision three years later to ban officially sanctioned school prayer. (Shortly after, O’Hair founded American Atheists and built its headquarters in Austin.)
There’s a constitutional guarantee of freedom from religion granted to all Americans. But in practice, religion and education have never been entirely separated in Texas schools. In fact, guidance from the Texas Association of School Boards says school districts can post religious displays, teach religion from a historical perspective, and allow citizens to express their religious beliefs. What they can’t do is “inculcate,” proselytize, or convert students.
The idea that Texas school districts can teach a Bible elective isn’t new, either, even if the inclusion of the Bible as curriculum in early Texas grades is. (The contract for the content, oddly, was signed by Gov. Greg Abbott as part of a pandemic-era disaster declaration, according to nonprofit news organization The 74.)
The State Board of Education added an optional Bible elective for high schools in 2009. At the time, the biggest question wasn’t whether the elective could be offered: everyone agreed a course on the Bible could be appropriate if treated as a cultural and historical document. It was whether it would be a mandatory offering in every high school. The board settled on a course offering upon request. Enrollment, tracked annually by the Texas Education Agency — has been nominal since the elective was added. The same is true of enrollment for a similar course in Georgia, which started the trend.
“It’s problematic because it’s conflating belief and knowledge in a way that tends to diminish belief,” said Bee Moorhead, executive director of the interfaith organization Texas Impact.
“We found many cases where the depiction of Jews, Judaism, and the Hebrew Bible were inaccurate, inappropriate, disturbing, and even anti-semitic.”
Lisa Epstein
Supreme Court ruling or not, many of the practices before O’Hair’s work still exist today, if only in a modified form. Prayer at football games still happens. So does See You at the Pole, the global day of student prayer, which falls on Sept. 25 this year. Groups like Young Life and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes still exist, as long as the effort is student-led, and the adult sponsor serves as a bystander only.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Kennedy v Bremerton, however, appears to have broadened when and where school district employees can share their own religious beliefs. With that legal interpretation in hand — and Coach Joe Kennedy’s law firm just up the road in Plano — Republican lawmakers in the Texas Senate have pounced on what had been a delicate balance of interests, attempting to send Texas back to the very specific place: an imaginary homogenous and extremely white Protestant Texas that some wish had the 1960s had been.
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On Tuesday, the State Board of Education took testimony from the public on the so-called Bible-infused K-5 curriculum that would incorporate portions of the text into learning objectives. At the meeting, more than 70 people brought by the Texas Freedom Network signed up to speak, many of whom felt that such reading materials stepped over the line.
“There is a difference between preaching and teaching, and this curriculum is preaching,” said state Rep. James Talarico, who is currently studying at the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, per KVUE. “We are indoctrinating students with this curriculum in the state of Texas, it’s unconstitutional, and I will add, it’s also deeply unchristian.”
When Lisa Epstein, director of community relations at the Jewish Federation of San Antonio, sat down with her counterparts in the state to review the curriculum, she told the state that the group viewed the curriculum “through the eyes of a Jewish parent.”
“We found many cases where the depiction of Jews, Judaism, and the Hebrew Bible were inaccurate, inappropriate, disturbing, and even anti-semitic,” Epstein said. “The curriculum misguides students in ways that go against Jewish parents’ rights to teach children their own religious belief system.”
Here’s an example from the third grade curriculum discussed this week by the state board: Children are taught Mary found favor with God. An angel came to her to tell her she would have a son who would be called Jesus and that Jesus would be the Messiah. Then the teacher is expected to ask the children what the important part of the passage is, and told that the children’s answers may vary.
“The answers may vary, but it should include that a Messiah is born,” Epstein said. “Let me just say that telling children to repeat, ‘Jesus is the Messiah’ or ‘A messiah is born’ is a profession of Christian faith and not something that Jewish people actually believe or teach their children.’”
That’s just one passage in one piece of the elementary school curriculum. Last session, Republicans offered a number of religious bills with mixed results: The legislature said yes to allowing school districts to substitute religious chaplains for school counselors. (Few have done so.) On the other hand, the answer was “no,” on both a push to put the Ten Commandments on the wall of every Texas classroom and one to add free time for Bible study within the school schedule. (Proponents on both of those last two are still trying.)
Joshi, of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, describes the Kennedy decision’s impact in terms of hats. Every school employee wears a hat. The hat at school is firmly neutral. The one at home, or in private email, can be different. Joshi describes the Kennedy decision as allowing the football coach to change hats in the midst of his coaching duties. The Supreme Court saw this as constitutional; FFRF disagreed.
To evangelicals, the court’s affirmation of Kennedy’s right to pray was a victory in a fight to preserve faith and freedom. To opponents like FFRF, it was an odd and narrow free speech exception that was preserved because the students in Kennedy’s case said they did not feel coerced to practice his particular type of Christianity.
And if that continues to be a successful tactic, it’s one Republicans will surely continue to use. The argument — that religious speech is good, historic, and harmless to Texas students — is a compelling one in today’s political environs.
“I think this would be a good, healthy step for Texas to bring back this tradition of recognizing America’s religious heritage,” Republican state Sen. Phil King said when he laid out the Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick-supported Ten Commandments bill during the regular session in 2023. “Senate Bill 1515 restores a little bit of those liberties that were lost, and, most importantly, reminds students all across Texas of the importance of a fundamental foundation of American and Texas law.”
“There was a broad coalition of Christians of various sects and atheists and agnostics who had to coalesce in this new nation and put their ecclesiastical differences aside because, together, they had one common goal.”
HIRSH Joshi
Underneath King’s seemingly benign statement is a belief, often spoken about privately within fundamentalist circles, that the current recognition of gay and transgender youth in Texas schools is a sign of a state that has lost its way. Journalists Mike Hixenbaugh and Antonia Hylton, in their widely lauded podcast Grapevine, point to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s own father, pastor Rafael Cruz, who urged Christians to be “on fire for the Lord.”
“Our generation is being destroyed with all kinds of ungodliness,” the elder Cruz said. “It’s gotten to the point that they are telling girls, ‘You’re not really a girl.’ They’re telling boys, ‘You’re not really a boy, you’re a girl.’ And we have now children being mutilated, basically saying, ‘God made a mistake.’ This is an abomination before God. We cannot remain silent.”
It seems that the Texas Republican Party’s solution to the “problem” of gender diversity, tolerance, and acceptance is to bring the Bible back into Texas schools. To reinforce that end, GND Media, which also made the “God’s Not Dead” movie series, will have Kennedy’s story, “Average Joe,” out in movie theaters next month.
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David Brockman, who recently completed a review of the influence of the Bible on Texas curriculum for the Texas Freedom Network, rejects that premise. Brockman attended school in Grand Prairie in the ‘80s. He doesn’t remember ever seeing the Ten Commandments.
“With all due respect, I think Sen. King misses the point,” said Brockman, noting the current mix of Texas students crosses all religions. “Is it fair to say Hindu, Buddhist or non-religious Texas students be confronted with a state-mandated biblical text, one that says, ‘You shall have no other gods before me?’ Would evangelical Christian parents be comfortable with the Muslim Shahada posted in public school classrooms?”
Brockman isn’t an atheist; he’s a visiting lecturer in the religion department at Texas Christian University. Moorhead, the executive director of the interfaith organization Texas Impact, offered similar observations in an interview with The Barbed Wire about who gets to decide what our children are taught.
“It’s potentially damaging to a developing belief system of any given child,” said Moorhead. “How you interpret the Ten Commandments varies by faith tradition.”
Moorhead worries about how faith develops within a religious tradition. Joshi is concerned about a decision, early in America’s history, to eschew endorsement of a religion.
“Not to be the history nerd, but this is actually something you found all the way back when the First Amendment was being written,” Joshi told The Barbed Wire. “There was a broad coalition of Christians of various sects and atheists and agnostics who had to coalesce in this new nation and put their ecclesiastical differences aside because, together, they had one common goal.”
Patrick doubled down on his promise to pass a Ten Commandments bill in June, after Louisiana passed its own version of the bill, labeling it an effort to recognize America’s Christian heritage. To be clear, Patrick has also walked out on a Muslim opening prayer (when he served as senator), and, to this day, signs his personal fundraising emails with New Testament verses.
