A new state-sanctioned curriculum could expose millions of kids to Christian mythology

May 30, 2024

Texas has somehow found another way to shove Christianity into public schools and this one’s just plain sneaky.

I guess giving schools the option to replace trained counselors with untrained Christian chaplains, and trying to get the Ten Commandments in every classroom, and proposing a platform that would force schools to offer “instruction on the Bible” just wasn’t enough.

Last year, Republican lawmakers passed a bill (costing over $731 million over the next two years) directing the Texas Education Agency to develop instructional materials that aligned with state standards. This would, in theory, be a huge benefit for cash-strapped districts that wouldn’t have to purchase separate textbooks from outside companies anymore. While public schools wouldn’t be forced to use this material, they would at least have that option... but the state also dangled a carrot in front of districts: We’ll give you at least $40 per student if you use our resources. It would be very hard for low-income districts to pass up.

Whether or not this was a good use of state dollars is up for debate. Critics say the money would have been better spent on, say, raising teachers’ salaries in order to attract better educators to the field. But on Wednesday, the State Board of Education finally posted drafts of the new material online—including the English Language Arts and Reading material for students in Kindergarten through Grade 5. The public now has a few months to weigh in before the material is finalized.

One of the big takeaways? This material is infused with Christianity.

(Follow above article link to view photos/PDFs that accompany this article.)

According to The 74, an outlet that covers education, this is largely because right-wing groups played a significant role in developing the curriculum:

While largely hidden from public view, the redesign sparked behind-the-scenes debate long before its release. When a leading curriculum publisher balked at the state’s request to infuse its offerings with biblical content, Texas officials turned to other vendors. They include conservative Christian Hillsdale College in Michigan and the right-leaning Texas Public Policy Foundation, which supported an unsuccessful effort to require the 10 Commandments in every classroom, according to a list obtained by The 74.

So how bad does it all get?

Let me show you two examples of how conservatives worked the Bible into the material in a way that allows them to claim plausible deniability when accused of violating church/state separation.

The material for 5th graders includes a unit on “Juneteenth and Beyond” where students are supposed to read Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” King wrote the now-famous letter after he was arrested during a non-violent protest and after several white clergy members urged Black Americans to just be patient and fight racism through the courts.

King responded, “For years now I have heard the word ‘wait.’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This ‘wait’ has almost always meant ‘never.’” He also quotes the line, “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” In the middle of the letter, he says that his form of protest is hardly a new approach:

Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was seen sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar because a higher moral law was involved. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks before submitting to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience.

In the Book of Daniel, the characters Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are thrown into a furnace because they’re not bowing down to an image of the King of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar II. But when the king looks to see them burned up, he notices four figures… one of whom appears to be “like a son of God.” The three men remain unharmed.

How significant are those biblical references in the King letter? Not significant at all. They’re just one of many, many allusions made throughout the piece. The Wikipedia article for the letter doesn’t even mention them once. When people talk about King’s letter, those biblical characters do not come up because the bigger picture of what King is saying is so much more important.

But not to the lawmakers in Texas. They saw an opening.

In the student activity book meant to accompany this unit, kids are asked to write a short response to the question, “Why did Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. reference the story of Daniel in his ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’?”

They could have asked any number of questions of that sort: Why the references to Socrates and Aristotle? Why did King bring up Brown v. Board of Education? Why did King bring up Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln? Instead, the big takeaway for the Christians writing this curriculum is to make sure kids understand the biblical reference.

Sure, understanding the Bible story helps make sense of what King is saying, but it’s hardly necessary. And yet Texas education Commissioner Mike Morath thinks it’s vital:

“If you don’t know who Nebuchadnezzar is, you don’t know what [King’s] talking about,” Morath said. “How do you make sure that you can unlock in the minds of our kids their ability to wrestle with … ideas that have surfaced in great works of literature?” 

You can absolutely figure out what King is saying without knowing that Bible reference.

But you see what they’re doing here. They used a minor reference to the Bible and blew it up in order to centralize it within a discussion of King.

A separate document provided by state officials includes a lengthy account of the Bible story in order to hammer home the point conservative Christians want kids to take away from this unit: “To understand King, one must also understand his religious references.”

It’s nothing more than a Sunday School sermon wedged into a unit about King. What could have been explained in a single paragraph (as I did above) is expanded into six pages of Bible storytelling.

In addition to that, nothing in the entire unit, as far as I can tell, suggests that many racists were inspired by their Christian faith to maintain segregation. Instead, students are only told “many leaders of the civil rights movement were motivated by their Christian faith.”

That’s one example. Here’s another.

There’s a 2nd Grade lesson about “Fighting for the Cause” which introduces students to “ordinary people who stood up for what they believed in and who fought for a cause, even when faced with immeasurable odds.” Sounds wonderful! The leaders mentioned in the unit include Jackie Robinson, Dolores Huerta, Rosa Parks… and Queen Esther.

The Bible says Esther saved the Jewish people by foiling a plot to eradicate them, which is why she’s included in this unit… but unlike everyone else included in this lesson, there’s no evidence she ever actually existed. Students are never told that. Her story is just treated as factual as Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on a bus:

It doesn’t stop there. In the packet of images meant to be used in the unit, there are actual pictures of people like Dr. Héctor P. Garcia and Cesar Chavez. And there are paintings of the historical figures William Penn and William Wilberforce. Esther, however, receives a similar treatment. It’s implied we know what she looked like because here she is:

The teacher’s notes never mention that this image, clipped from an 1878 painting by Edwin Long, was not the result of a portrait session but rather conjured up out of thin air because she wasn’t real. The notes go on to say the Bible describes Esther as someone “who was chosen by the king of Persia to be queen”… as if her mention in the Bible proves it.

You get the idea. Throughout these lessons, Christianity is treated as fact. The Bible’s characters are not referred to as characters but as real people in history. And whenever the faith can be shoved into a lesson, it is.

Like in a 5th Grade lesson on the Renaissance, in which a section on Leonardo da Vinci becomes a launching pad for a lesson on The Last Supper… and what the Bible says about it:

The thing about all this is that there is a very good argument that can be made for teaching children about the Bible in the name of cultural literacy. Without knowing the story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden, for example, you may miss out on a lot of references made in literature, art, and pop culture. But if that’s the goal, then it’s imperative to tell students the Bible is a work of fiction—or at least to treat it objectively instead of as a historical fact. It would also be important, then, to focus primarily on the biggest Bible stories and not certain B-plot characters just for the sake of telling their stories.

One professor who spoke to The 74 expressed that very concern:

“It is reasonable to devote some attention to [the Bible], and state education standards across the nation often require such attention,” said Mark Chancey, a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “The problem, of course, is that sometimes the legitimate reason of cultural literacy is used as a smokescreen to hide religious and ideological agendas.” 

That’s what we’re seeing here, over and over: a religious agenda masquerading as a broad-based education.

It’s also the result of complaints from conservative parents who, according to The 74, said the previous curriculum offered by the company Amplify emphasized mythology over Christianity. (The irony was apparently lost on them.)

State officials asked Amplify to provide a lesson on the story of Esther and suggested a unit on Exodus, said Alexandra Walsh, the company’s chief product officer.

While it had previously tweaked its curriculum for other states, Walsh said the company had never been asked to add biblical material. And when it suggested inserting content from other world religions, the state rejected the idea, said Amplify spokeswoman Kristine Frech.

“There was not much appetite for a variety of wisdom texts,” she said. “There was much more of an appetite for the tie to traditional Christian texts.”

So Texas ditched Amplify and began working with right-wing groups like the Texas Public Policy Foundation and Hillsdale. And this is what they developed.

Interestingly enough, The 74 points out that Texas was already offering high school students elective courses on the Bible. Those, too, may be legal as long as they’re taught objectively... which they’re definitely not. But it seems those classes are extremely unpopular: “Just over 1,200 of the state’s 1.7 million high school students took the course this year.”

Since that plan to indoctrinate students didn’t work, it seems like Texas lawmakers have found another way to do it, and this time, instead of waiting for high school students to choose a class on the Bible, they’re shoving the Bible into an entire elementary curriculum.