Texas’ Christian-influenced curriculum spurs worries about bullying

Andy Wine thinks most children can understand the Golden Rule. Talking over your peers is rude. Insulting others is mean. Don't hurt people. In short, it’s common sense, Wine said.

That’s why the 43-year-old parent of two, who is an atheist, finds it appalling that the Texas Education Agency wants to incentivize public schools to teach the Golden Rule as a core value in the Bible.

“We teach kids to be nice to each other and to share,” said Wine, a member of the Freethinkers Association of Central Texas, a social organization of religiously unaffiliated people. “You don't need to bring up any religion in order to do it.”

Religious and nonreligious groups have raised concerns like this since the TEA proposed a curriculum that would insert Bible teachings into K–5 reading and language arts lessons. They worry the increased emphasis on Christianity could lead non-Christian students to face bullying and isolation, undermine church-state separation and grant the state too much control over how children are taught about religion.

“It's a question of inclusivity,” said Jackie Nirenberg, regional director of Anti-Defamation League Austin, an organization fighting antisemitism and bias against Jewish communities. “It's also a very slippery slope. Because once we open the door to that kind of content, it's much easier to get more and more religious content into the curriculum.”

The State Board of Education will vote on the proposed curriculum in November, which is now available for public viewing and feedback online. The proposal came after the Texas Legislature passed House Bill 1605, a law that directed the TEA to create its own free-to-use textbooks with the goal of helping teachers save time preparing for classes.

If approved, the decision to adopt the curriculum would rest with school districts. Those that do would receive an incentive of up to $60 per student. The extra funds could be particularly attractive after the Legislature failed last year to approve a significant boost to the base amount of money every school gets per student, leaving them to grapple with multi million-dollar budget deficits.

Religious and nonreligious organizations say they are reviewing the material and plan to show up at city council meetings, school boards and the Texas Capitol to voice their concerns.

“What I hear a lot in Texas is parental rights — that we have the right to be able to make decisions about our children's education,” said Nabila Mansoor, a Muslim who is the executive director of Rise AAPI, which primarily serves Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities. “And yet, this particular faith tradition is being superimposed on children who come from many different faith backgrounds and whose parents would find it very offensive.”

TEA Commissioner Mike Morath told The Texas Tribune in May that the curriculum as a whole — which consists of lesson plans for K–12 students and spans other subjects that don’t include religious references like math and science — is based on extensive cognitive science research and will help improve student performance in reading and math.

Morath noted that religious references only make up a small “but appropriate” fraction of the content pie and that the textbooks mark a shift from a skills-based curriculum to a more “classical, broad-based liberal arts education.” Conservatives nationwide are championing a similar approach to education, which Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis described as “focusing on core academic subjects and rejecting indoctrination.”

The proposed curriculum would prompt teachers to relay the story of The Good Samaritan — a parable about loving everyone, including your enemies — to kindergarteners as an example of what it means to follow the Golden Rule. The story comes from the Bible, the lesson explains, and “was told by a man named Jesus” as part of his Sermon on the Mount, which included the phrase, “Do unto others as you would have done unto you.” Many other religions have their own version of the Golden Rule, which the lesson plan acknowledges.

A first-grade lesson about the Liberty Bell would teach students a story in which “God told Moses about the laws he wanted his people to follow — laws that were designed to help ensure that the Hebrew people lived in peace in the freedom of their new land.”

There’s also a fifth-grade lesson on Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper that challenges students to consider “how the disciples may have felt upon hearing Jesus telling them about his betrayal and death.”

References to other religions are also included. A second grade lesson highlights the Jewish celebration of Purim. A fourth grade poetry unit includes Kshemendra, a poet from India who “studied Buddhism and Hinduism.”

The materials drew praise from top Republican officials while raising eyebrows among some school district leaders, parents and education advocates. A handful of people who testified at an SBOE meeting last month raised questions about the lessons’ age-appropriateness, their potential impact on non-Christian children and the motives behind the heavier Christian emphasis. Some people said they believe TEA officials are making curriculum decisions based on their personal beliefs.

Megan Benton, a strategic policy associate at Texas Values, an organization that describes itself as being dedicated to the Judeo-Christian faith, family and freedom, said her group supports “an objective reading of the Bible and other religious texts” in public schools.

“In fact, they'll elevate the quality of education being offered to all Texas students by giving them a well-rounded understanding of important texts and their impact on the world,” Benton said about references to religious texts.

But critics worry the TEA’s proposal is a symptom of a growing Christian nationalist movement, the belief that the United States’ founding was ordained by God and that its laws and institutions should favor Christians.

Texas is one of the most religiously diverse states in the nation. Seventy-seven percent of adults adhere to some form of Christianity, according to a study conducted in 2007 and 2014 by the Pew Research Center. Non-Christian faiths, such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam, constitute 4% of adults, while 18% are not affiliated with any religion.

Still, state leaders have increasingly pushed to grow Christianity’s presence in public schools.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who presides over the Senate, pledged last month to revive a bill that would require schools to post the Ten Commandments on classroom walls, following in the footsteps of Louisiana. The Legislature passed a measure last year allowing volunteer chaplains to provide mental health services to students. Legislators passed a law in 2021 requiring public schools to display donated posters with the message “In God We Trust.”

Gov. Greg Abbott has made passing school voucher legislation his top priority, which would allow families to use taxpayer dollars to pay for private schools, most of which have a religious focus in Texas. The nation’s largest voucher programs give most of their funds to religious schools, according to a Washington Post analysis.

Texas sits at the center of the Christian nationalist movement, said Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons, communications director for the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, and he said it has taken a particular interest in public schools, where children are most impressionable.

“I think what we're seeing right now is Christian nationalism taking these religious symbols, the Bible, specifically the Ten Commandments, and pushing them in a way that is trying to say that to be a good Texan, you need to be a Christian,” said Graves-Fitzsimmons, whose organization advocates for church-state separation. “I think it has a major impact on the religious freedom protections of students and families.”

Religious liberty advocates and legal experts are also worried the TEA’s proposed curriculum might violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which prohibits states from endorsing or promoting an official religion.

Efforts to infuse more Christianity in schools across the nation are currently facing several legal challenges, but legal experts note that recent rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority have eroded decades of precedent and made it unclear what state actions are unconstitutional. In its 2022 ruling on Kennedy v. Bremerton, for example, the high court found that a Washington high school football coach did not violate the First Amendment by conducting personal prayers on the field after team games.

In doing so, the Supreme Court put an end to what was known as the Lemon test, a standard the court used to assess whether the primary purpose of a government action was secular, whether it promoted or inhibited religion and whether it represented an excessive entanglement between church and state.

During the same term, justices also ruled that states could not exclude religious schools from programs that use taxpayer dollars to fund private education.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba, a law professor at Texas A&M University, said conservative activists and officials are testing the waters of how far the courts will go in eroding church-state separation precedents.

“I would say there is currently no test for assessing the constitutionality of this curricular change,” Bloch-Wehba said about the TEA proposal. “In a constitutional void where nobody can really predict what the rules are going to be, it facilitates these advances to both entrench religion in public life and also to diminish the protections that are afforded to religious minorities.”

Some Texans, including some Christians, worry about the impact the proposed curriculum’s religious allusions could have on children of other faiths.

“In a public school, you've got people from a variety of backgrounds,” said Paul Ziese, a Lutheran pastor who serves as treasurer of the San Antonio chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “And I think that's a concern — that no one feels that they're not equal to anyone else or that their position or their faith is less, including people who have no faith.”

Gipson Arnold, an atheist who is also a member of the Freethinkers Association of Central Texas, said he is worried that any perceived preference toward Christianity could lead to children of other religious faiths, or no faith, being bullied or ostracized by their classmates.

Amatullah Contractor, a senior adviser with Emgage Texas, an organization advocating for the rights of Muslim communities, said the emphasis on Christianity could create an identity conflict for some Muslim students. She also questions whether K–5 students need to be taught religious context in public schools at all, considering the diversity of religions and their complexities.

Wine, one of the members of the Freethinkers Association of Central Texas, is uneasy about what the curriculum could mean for his 5-year-old son, Aidan, who is entering kindergarten in the Boerne Independent School District this year.

He is not at the point where he feels like Aidan understands enough to engage in deeper conversations about religion. And he doesn’t want his school to be the one starting that discussion.

“My taxpayer dollars going toward indoctrinating my child into a religion that I don't believe in just sounds terrible,” Wine said.

Disclosure: Texas A&M University has been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

Big news: director and screenwriter Richard Linklater; NPR President and CEO Katherine Maher; U.S. Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-California; and Luci Baines Johnson will take the stage at The Texas Tribune Festival, Sept. 5–7 in downtown Austin. Buy tickets today!

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/07/19/texas-christianity-school-curriculum-worries/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.