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The Freedom From Religion Foundation condemns the latest efforts by Texas Christian nationalists to force the bible and Christianity upon a captive audience of public school students.
The Texas State Board of Education took a preliminary vote yesterday to approve a deeply troubling bible-infused curriculum known as Bluebonnet Learning. Proposed teaching materials for elementary school English and language arts curriculum introduce students as young as kindergartners to Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount. Instruction includes the life of Jesus Christ from birth to resurrection and biblical prophesies. “It sure reads like a bible class that you might get at a traditional Christian church,” Rice University Political Science Professor Bob Stein aptly puts it.
The curriculum was initially brought to the Board by Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morah, a known Christian nationalist. In defending his decision to propose the curriculum, Morath absurdly told a Texas House Public Education Committee hearing back in August that “the purpose [of including religion and religious stories] is to build vocabulary and not background knowledge.” However, the curriculum omits references to other religions.
“Half a million Texans are practicing Muslims, and this new state curriculum went through and deleted every mention of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad,” points out state Rep. James Talarico, a staunch defender of the separation of state and church and a past recipient of the “Secularist of the Week” award from FFRF’s legislative arm, FFRF Action Fund.
Among its other omissions, the fifth-grade unit on racial justice credits the “deep Christian faith” of Abraham Lincoln and abolitionists with opposing slavery while ignoring biblical instructions approving slavery and how churches and slavers used them to defend slavery. The Lincoln Memorial even quotes Lincoln, who is considered a Deist, not a Christian, musing that both sides “read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other.” The curriculum also excludes the fact that the earliest U.S. abolitionists were largely either not religious or considered heretical, including Thomas Paine, Frances Wright and William Lloyd Garrison. Many nonbelievers were slaughtered in Comfort, Texas, for being “true to the Union” and planning to join the North.
Talarico has also made the point that the curriculum would teach kindergarten students that the “Golden Rule” is a core value of the Christian bible when, in fact, it is a cornerstone principle of many religions or life philosophies. Fully 20 percent of Texans have no religious affiliation, and another 5 percent follow non-Christian faiths. Regardless, all Lone State Star residents would be taxed to have their children subjected to Christian propaganda and proselytizing. The curriculum would violate the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.
A final vote on the curriculum is expected to occur this Friday, Nov. 22. Texas residents are encouraged to contact the State Board of Education to tell them to reject the measure.
Texas leaders have long been determined to turn the state’s public schools into Christian training grounds. During the 2023 legislative session, the Texas Legislature passed a law requiring school boards to vote on whether to hire or allow, as a volunteer, an unlicensed religious chaplain to take the place of school counselors and social workers. The bill is wildly unpopular among most school boards throughout the state. During the last legislative session, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott relentlessly pushed his pet project: vouchers that would take away funds from public schools and direct them to private (usually religious) schools. It failed, thanks to rural legislators who realized they would see no benefit to funding private schools in the big cities. Abbott bullied his way to oust opponents of his voucher scheme, and now he seems poised to get his wish during the upcoming session. Vouchers are quite unpopular, and Texans are surely growing tired of Abbott wasting their money.
The Texas State Board of Education’s proposed bible curriculum is an assault both on student rights of conscience and parental authority.
“The curriculum targets the youngest, most impressionable elementary students, starting by introducing kindergartners to Jesus,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “Religious instruction is the purview of parents, not proselytizing school boards. This is a shameful ruse by Christian nationalists in Texas who see the schools as a mission field.”
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters across the country, including more than 1,700 members in Texas and a chapter in Austin. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church, and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
