The Texas State Board of Education voted 9-5 along party lines on June 26 to require public schools to deliver Protestant-translation Bible readings to five million children beginning in 2030. The mandate covers more than 200 required readings—including about a dozen biblical selections: David and Goliath for the youngest students, Adam and Eve for older ones, and Jonah, Psalms, Lamentations, and Genesis for middle and high schoolers—all drawn from translations used by Protestant Christians. There is no Catholic deuterocanonical book on the list. No Orthodox lectionary. Nothing from the Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or Sikh traditions that a third of Texans call sacred or foundational. The opt-out for objecting families is offered as the constitutional safety valve.
The First Amendment has answered this question. In School District of Abington Township v. Schempp (1963), the Supreme Court struck down devotional Bible readings in public schools, holding that the Establishment Clause forbids the state from using its machinery to advance one religion over others. Justice William Brennan wrote in concurrence that “the holding of the Court today plainly does not foreclose teaching about the Holy Scriptures or about the differences between religious sects in classes in literature or history.” What the First Amendment permits is teaching about the Bible as a foundational text of world literature and history. What it forbids is the state’s compulsory-attendance apparatus delivering devotional instruction in one faith’s preferred canon to every child in the room. That distinction—teaching about religion versus imposing it—is the controlling Establishment Clause framework, and Texas’s 2023 mandate is on the imposing side of the line.
The 2023 Texas statute that required the Board to compile this list is the legal foundation of the breach. Under the Establishment Clause framework the Court refined in Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971)—applying the secular-purpose and primary-effect analysis that controlled in Schempp—the Board’s 9-5 vote fails each prong. The secular purpose the Board invokes is civic literacy. The primary effect is the establishment of one specific Christian tradition over every other: Catholic, Orthodox, and the third of Texans who claim non-Christian or no religious affiliation. And the Board’s decision to identify certain Protestant translations as authorized and others as not is precisely the religious-state entanglement the Establishment Clause was written to prevent. This is a constitutional breach, not a theological error. The breach is named in the curation itself.
The Board will say the opt-out cures the constitutional defect. Schempp already foreclosed this argument sixty-three years ago. The Pennsylvania statute the Court struck down in 1963 contained the same opt-out the Texas Board now offers. An opt-out puts the burden on the family of the child whose tradition is being excluded, in a school environment where the default has been reset to devotional instruction in a faith that is not theirs. The state has not withdrawn from religion; the state has shifted the cost of withdrawal to the family.
The list excludes the deuterocanonical books that 1.4 billion Catholic Christians include in their Bibles, and the broader Orthodox lectionary that 260 million Orthodox Christians read as scripture. It excludes the Jewish scriptures that most Jewish Texans would name as their foundational text. It excludes the Qur’an, the Bhagavad Gita, the Dhammapada, and the Guru Granth Sahib that together make up a third of Texas’s religious landscape. It excludes all of these even though Catholic and Orthodox Christians are within Texas’s 67-percent Christian majority. The Board has not taught about a historical text. The Board has identified Texas public education with one specifically Protestant civic project. That is the establishment of religion in the constitutional sense.
This same state apparatus has spent the past two years testing what the federal courts will allow in religious display in Texas public schools. As MSI reported April 23, the state’s defense of Ten Commandments displays followed the same logic: the Christian Nationalist apparatus tags the state with its specific symbols, then claims that because the symbol is “Judeo-Christian,” the exclusion of every other tradition is anodyne. There is no Judeo-Christian monolith that excludes the Catholic, the Orthodox, the Jewish, the Muslim, the Hindu, the Buddhist, and the Sikh. There is only the state enforcing one tribe’s preferred text on every child in the room.
The text the Board claims to be honoring has already named this maneuver. In Mark 7:6-8, quoting Isaiah 29:13, Jesus indicts the religious authorities of his day for the precise act the Board has just executed: “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules. You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men.” The tradition of men the Board has installed in Texas classrooms is the 16th-century Protestant narrowing of the canon. The Board has held on to that tradition, and it has let go of the broader scriptural record—the deuterocanonical books and the apostolic-era canon the Catholic and Orthodox traditions have preserved.
The Supreme Court of the United States has answered statutes like the Texas one repeatedly since 1872. It will answer this one in its turn. The 67 percent of Texans who identify as Christian have not lost anything by being told their public schools cannot impose their canon on every child in the room. The third of Texans whose traditions have been excluded from the list have already lost something. The First Amendment names them as the constituency the Establishment Clause was written to protect. The Board’s eleven members who voted yes have made themselves defendants in a lawsuit that begins the day the rule is filed for publication in the Texas Register. The Western District of Texas will grant the inevitable challenge a preliminary injunction long before the rule takes effect in 2030. The Texas Legislature should repeal the 2023 statute that compels this sectarian selection. The Board should withdraw the mandate now, before the litigation it has invited begins.