The Real Lesson Behind Texas’ New Bible Curriculum Requirements

In late June, the Texas State Board of Education set controversial new curriculum requirements for the state’s public schools, which educate approximately 5.5 million students. Alongside further curtailing of cultural, ethnic, and geographic diversity, the new requirements mandate the teaching of Bible passages in Texas public schools. Though widely discussed in various media outlets, coverage of this last mandate has failed to fully grasp how it will shape students, future voters, and democracy alongside Texas’ already highly politicized public school curriculum.

With all levels of state government under their control since 2003, Republicans have systematically reshaped how Texas public school students understand economics, history, society, religion, and citizenship. By 2010, the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) set standards that exaggerated biblical influence on the nation’s founders and dismissed the historical separation of church and state. Those education standards also reduced or eliminated coverage of labor issues, economic inequality, slavery, and segregation. 

Another telling requirement that the SBOE set in 2010 was for high schools to offer courses that teach “Economics with Emphasis on the Free Enterprise System and Its Benefits.” In response to those heavily politicized educational revisions, the education-reform think tank Thomas B. Fordham Institute concluded that Texas students were “explicitly urged to condemn federal entitlement programs, including Texas-born President Lyndon B. Johnson’s ‘Great Society.’”  

The conservative-leaning institute classified Texas social studies standards as offering “a politicized dissertation of history” with “misrepresentations at every turn.” It noted that “from the earliest grades, students are pressed to uncritically celebrate the ‘free enterprise system and its benefits’” as well as “minimal government intrusion” in the economy. And in this reshaping of Texas public education, business leaders were depicted as the bringers of social and national progress alongside such figures as the Founding Fathers and United States presidents. 

When, as the Fordham Institute put it, “students are pressed to uncritically celebrate” business leaders alongside the writers of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, they learn that to critique the free enterprise system and its leaders is to critique the nation’s very foundation. 

The latest curriculum revisions build upon these already fraught requirements. Consider two Bible excerpts that the SBOE chose to include in the state’s school curriculum standards are “To Everything There is a Season” from the Book of Ecclesiastes and “The Necessity of Humility” in the Gospel of Luke. “The Necessity of Humility” teaches acknowledgment of individual limitations and dependence on higher authority. “To Everything There is a Season” focuses on the idea that life operates in cycles beyond individual control, emphasizing acceptance over forceful, immediate action. 

Going forward, Texas students will be taught Bible passages about accepting limitations and depending on higher authority. Students will learn that life circumstances are beyond their power to change. They will learn that their place and the place of others in the economy and larger society should not be questioned. Instead, they should celebrate the wealthy and powerful for their economic success. 

Students who have been taught that they must revere the barons of the “free enterprise system” as we do the Founding Fathers, that inequality is not worth discussing, and that they should accept their life circumstances will become a compliant workforce and a malleable voting base. They will become working adults who will not expect fair wages. They will become voters who will not protest and who will not demand change for the betterment of their life circumstances. They will not question unjust economic realities, labor conditions, or the concentration of wealth and power. 

In Texas schools, religious lessons will join an already ideologically influenced curriculum agenda that aims to create a passive student body, workforce, and citizenry. All Texans, all Americans, of any religious or political leaning should be deeply alarmed.

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