Texas Steps Up to Include Religious Texts in Public Education| National Catholic Register

COMMENTARY: If public schools expose students to Scripture as one of the foundational texts of Western civilization, Catholic families should welcome the chance to build on that foundation.

On June 26, the Texas State Board of Education approved a required reading list for the state’s 5.4 million public school students, kindergarten through 12th grade. Alongside classic literature, students will encounter selections from Scripture: Jonah and David and Goliath in the early grades, building later to Job and the Sermon on the Mount, most drawn from the King James Version.

The move follows, by less than a year, Texas’ own law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in every public school classroom, a law recently upheld by the entire Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Nathan v. Alamo Heights ISD. Together, the two make Texas the state farthest along in welcoming back the presence of religious texts in public education.

Critics have rushed to compare the reading list to Mahmoud v. Taylor, the case in which the Supreme Court held that Montgomery County could not compel young children to sit through LGBTQ-themed storybook instruction without giving parents notice or an opportunity to opt out.

This obscures what Mahmoud actually protects. The decision vindicated parental authority, the right to be excused from instruction that substantially interferes with a family’s religious formation of its children. It said nothing about whether a school may assign a text in the first place. Texas’s Bible curriculum does not ask students to pray, profess belief, or participate in worship. It assigns Scripture the way a literature class assigns Beowulf. Whether to opt out is a separate question.

The Ten Commandments law raises a separate question. A framed Decalogue on a classroom wall asks nothing of the student who passes it. There is no lesson to teach, no assignment tied to its content. It functions the way the Ten Commandments carved into the frieze of the Supreme Court’s own courtroom function, a marker of the Decalogue’s role in the development of Western law that a student may notice or ignore.

That passivity is what lets the display rely on the history-and-tradition framework the Fifth Circuit applied in Nathan. The Bible curriculum cannot borrow the display cases’ reasoning, because a teacher assigning the Sermon on the Mount is doing something a wall plaque never does.

What the state can borrow is the Supreme Court’s 1963 decision in Abington School District v. Schempp that struck down devotional Bible readings as unconstitutional worship. The court went out of its way to note that the Bible remains “worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities,” a line that has quietly supported comparative religion and Bible-as-literature courses in public universities for decades. That is the ground Texas is testing at the K-12 level, and the case for it does not require any theological premise.

Lincoln’s classic House Divided speech drew from the Gospels of St. Mark and Matthew; his second inaugural leaned on the Psalms to explain the Civil War’s losses as divine judgment on slavery; Harriet Tubman was known as Moses for leading enslaved Americans out of bondage; the titles of American literature, from East of Eden to Song of Solomon, are themselves a catalog of biblical reference. A student who cannot place those allusions is missing part of the country she is being educated to understand.

Biblical literacy matters for a reason beyond cultural competence, too. The Church has taught that the Word of God speaks to every generation, and a public school introducing students to the Bible’s role in history and literature is not competing with catechesis so much as leaving an opening for it. A child who comes home asking about the Beatitudes or the shepherd boy who felled Goliath has handed his parents an opening the family should welcome, not worry over.

We should, of course, resist expecting too much from a public school reading list. Students may learn the story of Jonah without understanding repentance, read the Sermon on the Mount without encountering the Eucharist, or study the shepherd David without seeing him fulfilled in the kingship of Christ. Those connections belong to parents, pastors and the parish religious education program.

That is why this debate is ultimately an opportunity rather than a threat. If public schools expose students to Scripture as one of the foundational texts of Western civilization, Catholic families should welcome the chance to build on that foundation rather than fear that academic study will crowd out faith. The Bible deserves to be read because it shaped our civilization. Catholics know it deserves more than that: it is the living word of God, and it remains the joyful task of the family and the Church, not the state, to help a child discover why.