The Texas State Board of Education voted 9-5 on June 26 to approve a new state-required reading list that includes passages from the Bible for students from kindergarten through 12th grade. The vote on the Republican-controlled board split along party lines, with the board’s nine Republican members voting in favor and its five Democrats voting against, according to board members who spoke during weeks of public debate.
The approved list contains more than 200 literary works, about a dozen of which are biblical texts. Among the required readings are a picture-book adaptation of the David and Goliath story for elementary students, as well as excerpts from the New Testament and portions of the Book of Job for middle and high school students. The list also includes works by Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Martin Luther King Jr. and Margaret Thatcher.
The mandate stems from a 2023 state law that directed the education agency to compile a list with at least one required reading per grade level. Implementation will be phased in starting in elementary schools during the 2030-31 school year, affecting more than 5 million Texas students, who represent roughly 10% of the nation’s public school enrollment. Parents may opt their children out of specific readings that conflict with their religious or moral beliefs, state education officials have said.
Supporters of the measure have said that Judeo-Christian tradition is foundational to the nation’s history, according to prior reporting on the board’s deliberations. Opponents argue that mandatory Bible readings in public schools violate the First Amendment’s establishment clause, which bars the government from establishing religion. They contend that the readings impermissibly promote Christianity and that the list excludes translations used by Catholics as well as any sacred texts from non-Jewish and non-Christian faiths. Critics have noted that while Protestant translations are included along with one from a Jewish publisher, no translations used by Catholic communities are represented on the list.
The vote reignites a legal debate that has been active in American courts for more than 150 years. The first reported case on the Bible in U.S. public schools came in 1872, when the Supreme Court of Ohio affirmed a ban against religious instruction in classrooms. The U.S. Supreme Court addressed mandatory Bible reading directly in the 1963 case School District of Abington Township v. Schempp, striking down the practice. In that decision, the court wrote that the Bible may be studied objectively for its literary and historic qualities as part of a secular program of education, but that state-sponsored devotional reading violates the First Amendment.
In the decades since, lower courts have invalidated elective Bible courses that promoted Christianity as religious truth. Charles Russo, a professor of education and law at the University of Dayton who has studied the history of Bible-reading disputes in American schools, said he expects the Texas reading-list requirement to face swift legal challenges before the 2030 implementation date.