Two and a half months ago, the same Texas State Board of Education that just voted to teach high schoolers a captured reading of Islam made Bible passages required reading for millions of Texas public school students. The board’s Republican majority votes together. They come from the same operation. They borrow the same authority. They pick which verses to teach and which to skip, and what they pick is the point.
Friday’s vote taught that “radical Islam” — not al-Qaeda, not Osama bin Laden — motivated the September 11 attacks, and that early Islam should be understood through “brutal military campaigns against Jewish and Christian tribes, the normalization and regulation of slavery, and the taking of female captives as harem slaves.” Muslim Texans came to Austin to testify. They told the board, under oath, that no credible Islamic scholar would find that portrayal accurate. The board voted for it anyway.
Salman Hamdani was twenty-three years old when the towers came down. He was a New Yorker, an EMT, a Muslim. He went toward the wreckage with a first-aid kit on his body. The New York City medical examiner’s office initially classified him as a suspect in the attacks because the Arabic name in his wallet was in the wrong pocket of the wrong body at the wrong scene. His family had to fight the city for three years to have his death ruled the homicide it was. The board’s new curriculum does not leave room for him. It does not leave room for the millions of Muslims who had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, who grieved alongside the rest of the country on that Tuesday morning, and who have grieved, in their own way, ever since, in classrooms where their children will sit in September and be told that their faith is the explanation for what killed their countryman the EMT.
I want to be careful about one thing before I say what I am about to say. The board members who voted for this language are not my target. Some of them I have known and respected in other contexts. The captured person is not the target of the indictment. The target is the operation: a state education board, claiming Biblical authority, deploying state power to write religious hostility into the curriculum that every public high schooler in Texas will study.
Let me show you what the operation is doing. The passages below are in the translation I was raised on; the substance is consistent across English versions even where the wording shifts.
Leviticus 25:44–46: “Both your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may acquire slaves. You may also acquire some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans who have been born in your country, and they will become your property. You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and make them slaves for life.”
Numbers 31:17–18: “Now kill all the boys and kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.”
Deuteronomy 20:13–14: “When the Lord your God delivers it into your hands, put to the sword all the men in it. As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves.”
Deuteronomy 21:10–14: “When you go to war against your enemies and the Lord your God delivers them into your hands and you take captives, if you notice among the captives a beautiful woman and are attracted to her, you may take her as your wife. Bring her into your home and have her shave her head, trim her nails, and put aside the clothes she was wearing when captured.”
Joshua 6:21: “They devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it — men and women, young and old.”
Read those five passages in the board’s Friday voice. The conquest of Canaan is a brutal military campaign against the indigenous tribes of the land — Jewish, Christian, and pagan tribes by the board’s own typology. Leviticus 25 is the normalization and regulation of slavery. Deuteronomy 21 is the taking of female captives; the captive woman shaves her head, mourns her parents for a month, and becomes the warrior’s wife with no voice in the matter. Numbers 31 is the explicit regulation of what to do with captive girls: kill those who have lain with a man, keep for yourselves those who have not. Joshua 6:21 is every living thing in Jericho, men and women, young and old, devoted to destruction. The board’s lesson language, applied verbatim, would describe the Hebrew Bible.
The same standard. Verbatim.
The board’s lesson is not scholarship. It is a confession of which tradition the board is willing to read at its worst and which it intends to read at its best. That is the captured-brand move I have been naming for years. The operation does not read. It selects. It takes the worst reading of another tradition’s texts and the best reading of its own, and it pretends the asymmetry is faithfulness. It pretends the asymmetry is what the Bible plainly says. It pretends the asymmetry is what the scholars of the tradition agree on. The operation is the same one Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson built in the Southern Baptist Convention between 1979 and the present, the same one the Council for National Policy coordinates between the Republican Party and the religious-Right apparatus, the same one that decided the SBC’s 2000 Baptist Faith and Message would restrict the pastorate to men while saying nothing about the verses on slavery the SBC still requires for ordination examinations. Friday’s vote in Austin is what that operation writes when it sits down to a state curriculum rubric. The same one that decided, two and a half months ago, that Bible passages would be taught in Texas public schools as the literal foundation of American law — without the surrounding verses that make the foundation what it is.
The board has not skipped past the Bible entirely. It has skipped past every verse that costs something to read.
Leviticus 19:33–34: “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.”
This is not a marginal text. The Hebrew word ger — sojourner, resident alien, foreigner — appears more than ninety times in the Hebrew Bible. More often than the commands about sexual ethics that conservative pulpits preach on every other Sunday. The construction “love them as yourself” is the same construction as Leviticus 19:18 — “love your neighbor as yourself” — which Jesus, in Mark 12:31, called the second great commandment, equal to the first. The moral reach is the same. The neighbor is the one in front of you. The foreigner is the one in front of you. The text does not distinguish. And the warrant is not human reasoning. It is God’s own character. “I am the Lord your God.” The same God who brought Israel out of Egypt is the God who commands that the stranger be loved as the native-born, because the people of God were once the strangers in Egypt, and they remember what it felt like to be the ones no one protected.
The Bible the board claims to follow has Jesus, in Luke 10:30–37, telling a story about a man beaten and left for dead on the road, and the two religious insiders who passed him by, and the despised outsider — a Samaritan — who stopped and bandaged him and took him to an inn. When the lawyer asked Jesus “Who is my neighbor?”, Jesus answered by making the despised outsider the moral exemplar and telling the lawyer to go and do likewise. The board has skipped past that, too. The verses that are easy — personal piety, Jesus forgiving individual sinners, the verses that can be deployed against Muslims and gay people and transgender teenagers without disturbing the comfort of the donor class — those verses are kept. The verses that would require the board to love the Muslim Texan who came to testify as a native-born — those verses are skipped. That is what a captured reading of the Bible looks like. It is the same shape as the captured reading of Islam the board has now written into the curriculum of every public high school in the state.
I taught Sunday school for fifteen years. I taught women’s Bible study out of workbooks that walked women through Joshua and Leviticus and Numbers and never once used the word “brutal.” I taught the conquest of Canaan as providence. I taught the laws of slavery in Leviticus 25 as the moral foundation for Western civilization. I taught Deuteronomy 21’s procedure for taking a captive woman as a wife as a merciful restraint on the warrior’s passion. I taught all of this without noticing what I was doing. Let me show you what I was doing.
I sat in a Sunday school class in the late 1970s where we read Leviticus 19:34 and did not notice what it said. We were studying about loving our neighbors, and the teacher skipped past the sojourner verses because they did not fit the curriculum we had been assigned, which was about being kind to people who came to our church. The foreigner, the Muslim, the Hindu, the Sikh — they were not in the room. They were not in the lesson plan. They were not in the imagination of the teacher, who was a good woman who tithed and taught the children’s choir and would have been horrified if you had told her she was teaching a captured reading of Leviticus. She was. We were. I was.
I was the teacher later, not the student. I had the workbook in my hand. I chose which verses to teach. The verses about loving the foreigner were not in the curriculum. The verses about submission and modesty and sexual ethics were. I taught the verses that were in the book and skipped past the verses that were not. I did not notice I was doing it. The operation does not require malice. It only requires a curriculum and a teacher who trusts the curriculum.
I am telling you I was inside that operation. The operation has now expanded from Sunday school workbooks into state curriculum mandates. That is what I am calling a captured reading. That is what the board did on Friday.
The Muslim families of Texas — the EMT’s family, the families who came to testify, the families whose children will sit in Texas public school classrooms this September — already describe harassment they link to Republican officials’ rhetoric. The board’s vote hands that harassment a curriculum. It tells every Texas high schooler that the religion of nearly two billion people is to be understood through “brutal military campaigns” and “harem slaves.” It tells them that the September 11 attacks were motivated by “radical Islam,” not by al-Qaeda, in a framing that conflates a faith tradition with a terrorist organization and tells the Muslim children in those classrooms that their faith is the explanation for what killed their countryman the EMT. The board did this with full knowledge.
The board will say they are teaching the truth about Islam. I want to defeat the strongest version of that defense on its own terms, because the defense is the only ground the board has left. The early Islamic conquests did involve military campaigns. Slavery did exist in seventh-century Arabia. These are facts, and a serious history class ought to teach the facts. I am not denying the facts. The facts are facts. But the facts are not the curriculum. A lesson about seventh-century warfare and pre-modern slavery practices, situated in the history of the Mediterranean world, would teach the facts and leave the religion of nearly two billion people alone. The board’s lesson does the opposite. It packages the facts as a definition of Islam. The framing is the indictment. The framing is what they voted for.
The Bible does not need the Texas State Board of Education to defend it. The Bible has been read and argued with for three thousand years by Jews, Christians, and Muslims together, and the people who have done the careful work know what Joshua 6 means in its narrative context and what Deuteronomy 21 means against the rest of the Mosaic law and what Numbers 31 means against the prophets who came afterward and said, repeatedly, that God’s delight is not in the blood of the slain. The board’s lesson does not defend the Bible. It defends a reading. It defends the reading the operation needs to keep its coalition intact.
I am a Christian, still inside the tradition, still in church on Sunday, still reading the Bible at my kitchen table. I am telling you, from inside the tradition, that the Texas State Board of Education is not following the Bible it claims to follow. The Bible it claims to follow says love the foreigner as yourself. The Bible it claims to follow has Jesus answering “who is my neighbor?” by making the despised outsider the moral exemplar. The board has skipped past both of those texts, in the same operation, on the same Friday, with the same vote. That is not Bible reading. That is political capture wearing a Bible costume. And the children of Texas are the ones who will be taught the costume instead of the text.
I love this tradition. I love the Bible it gave me. I love that the same Bible the board claims to follow contains Leviticus 19:34 and the Good Samaritan and Matthew 25:35 and the Sermon on the Mount, and that those texts are still there, still readable, still in print, still able to be opened at a kitchen table and read in plain English by anyone who picks one up. The board did not edit the Bible. The board skipped past most of it. The text is still there. The readers are still here. The captured operation has the statehouse, for now. The text does not need the statehouse.
The text was being read at kitchen tables long before there was a Texas State Board of Education. The board voted on Friday. The verse is still in the Bible on Monday morning. The board will move on to the next curriculum fight. The verse will still say what it says.
I am naming what I was doing for fifteen years in those Sunday school classrooms because I would like the people still in the pews where I sat to notice what the operation is doing in their name. That is the only ground I have, and it is enough ground to stand on.