Texas Brings the Bible Back into Schools
In the 1963 landmark decision Abington School District v. Schempp, the U.S. Supreme Court banished Bible reading and prayer in public classrooms, ending a practice that had been commonplace since the nation’s founding. With the State Board of Education (SBOE)’s approval of a sweeping K–12 state required literature list, Texas has now returned the Bible to the classroom.
Advertisement
Though teachers typically make the decision about what students read, based on a state list of suggested book titles, Texas leads the nation in issuing an established literary canon. The SBOE has included important literary texts of around 200 Bible passages, essays, and books designed to integrate with historical events that students are studying in social studies. Since Texas educates approximately one in 10 of the nation’s public school students, this is transformational.
Critics claim that the selections from the Bible violate the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which prevents the government from establishing an official, state-sponsored religion. But federal law allows public schools to teach the Bible objectively as a part of secular history, culture, or a literature curriculum.
Advertisement
Critic Northrup Frye said, “A student of English literature who does not know the Bible does not understand a good deal of what is going on in what he reads.” It is essential for students to understand biblical stories when analyzing Western literature because the Bible is a pillar of Western civilization. Passages, moral frameworks, and narrative structures have informed the classical literary canon since antiquity.
Some of the greatest classics draw their plots, characters, and ideas mainly from the Bible. Two of the most notable examples are Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost. The Divine Comedy merged the biblical story of the afterlife with the formal structure of classical epic poetry to create a motif. The definitive English epic poem, Paradise Lost, traces the biblical Fall of Man from Genesis, merging Hebraic theology with classical Greco-Roman epic structures.
Advertisement
Hundreds of references to the Bible are found in Shakespeare’s plays, with the Book of Psalms, Genesis, and the Gospel of Matthew quoted or referenced most often.
Modern major American figures such as William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor continued to use biblical themes in their works. The Great Gatsby, the famous novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, makes many clever allusions to the Bible.
Advertisement
Justice Potter Stewart, the only dissenter in the 1963 Abington decision, warned that the ruling did not protect freedom of religion, but rather established “a religion of secularism.” His prediction was correct. The spiritual foundation anchoring American public life had been severed, and moral clarity steadily declined.
With the Bible banned in public schools, students no longer learned the Ten Commandments. The story of creation was replaced by the story of evolution. God could not be mentioned in textbooks. Prayer was no longer allowed in schools. The teaching of radical sex and far-left indoctrination replaced academic learning. Student mental health is in a crisis. Social emotional learning (SEL) is purported to improve student mental health. Instead, SEL has become the vehicle for intertwining Marxist indoctrination in the curriculum, which has created unstable, anti-American youths.
Advertisement
A superior alternative to SEL, the Texas literature selections are packed with life stories.
Critics of the literature list generally do not want religion included in the selections. If religion is included, they want passages from other faiths (such as the Quran or the Book of Mormon) to be included.
Advertisement
Yet it was the Bible that shaped America as a nation from the beginning.
In 1620, Pilgrims landed at Plymouth carrying a vision of a “city upon a hill,” a phrase borrowed from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. The colonists believed they were in a covenant with God like that of the Israelites in the Old Testament. This biblical worldview informed the founding of the United States.
The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written with an understanding that liberty and governance rest on moral principles derived from Scripture.
John Adams, the second president, believed that the Bible’s teachings are essential for a free and virtuous society.
George Washington, in his Farewell Address, warned that national morality could not prevail without religion. To Washington, that principle was biblical.
Other founders, including Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, though diverse in their beliefs, shared a conviction that the Bible was indispensable to the American experiment.
Texas students will read the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution and learn about their biblical foundations.
Thomas Jefferson wrote, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” The literacy rate of our early Republic was the highest in the world.
Today, only 13 percent of eighth-grade students are proficient in American history. Only 30 percent of eighth-graders are proficient in reading. Public classrooms have become government indoctrination centers rather than institutions of academic learning.
With an extensive required reading list for each grade level, Texas classrooms will return to reading great classics from Western literature and learn how the Bible shaped America’s founding.
For nearly 200 years, the Bible was not just a religious text; it was the bedrock of American identity, education, and governance. Now the Bible is returning to the classroom, beginning in Texas.
Carole Hornsby Haynes, education policy/curriculum advisor, historian, classical pianist. [email protected]
Image via Pixabay.