CNA Staff, Dec 4, 2024 / 09:45 am
The Texas State Board of Education has sparked renewed debate over the role of religion in public schools in the wake of the agency’s approval of a new language arts curriculum that includes the Bible.
The K–5 curriculum, which will become available this spring, features a cross-disciplinary approach that uses reading and language arts to reinforce other subjects. The Blue Bonnet Learning curriculum has come under scrutiny due to its references to Christianity and the Bible, including lessons from Genesis and Psalms as well as the New Testament.
For example, the parable of the good Samaritan is part of a lesson plan about the Golden Rule. The program is optional, though schools receive funding per student to cover the cost of the program if they participate. Participating schools will begin the program in the 2025-2026 school year.
According to a report by the Texas Tribune, critics of the curriculum cite fear it will “entrench religion in public life” and could “diminish the protections that are afforded to religious minorities.” Other critics fear that this could ostracize students of different faith backgrounds, while one parent called the curriculum “indoctrination.”
But Mary Elizabeth Castle, director of government relations for Texas Values, a group that supports the curriculum, pointed out that understanding the Bible helps deepen students’ understanding of Western history.
“These materials were attacked for no other reason but to completely erase any mention of religion or the Bible from the classroom, which would create a hostile environment for free speech,” Castle said in a statement.
Catholic takes
When asked about the Texas Bible curriculum, Father Steve Grunow, CEO of Word on Fire, told CNA that the goal of the curriculum — to stress “the cultural influence and moral perspectives of the Scriptures” — is “commendable.”
Grunow emphasized that the Bible’s vast global influence “is such that it should not be ignored in any academic curriculum.”
But he noted that this goal is difficult to implement. “The open and often volatile question has been how to best do this,” he pointed out.
“The Bible is not only culturally valuable but holds the status for believers to be revelatory of God,” he noted. “No interpretation of its meaning or significance can [be] characterized as neutral, and it is clear that the Bible itself does not present its purpose as relative — the text intends to convince us of the truth of its claims.”
Grunow noted that parish schools were founded with this concern in mind.
“Contemporary Catholics might not remember, but one of the contributing factors to the founding of parochial schools was that the public school curriculum was suffused with Protestantism, particularly in regards to presentations of the Bible,” Grunow explained. “The first conflict of Catholics with public schools and other institutions in this country was not that they were secular but that they were Protestant.”
Does the curriculum cross a line?
Weighing in with legal perspective on the curriculum, a professor at the Columbus School of Law at The Catholic University of America pointed out that proselytizing is unconstitutional, but education about religions is not.
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Marc DeGirolami, co-director at CUA’s Center for Law and the Human Person, said that “from a constitutional point of view as the law now stands, in principle, there is nothing illegal about what Texas is doing.”
“What is not permitted at present is to ‘proselytize’ — to teach a particular set of religious views as true and other religious views as false,” he told CNA. “From what I could see in the proposed curriculum, though, this is not what Texas is now proposing. And teaching about religion, including the historical and cultural connections of the American republic to Christianity, is not forbidden.”
However, this can be a hard line to walk. “Of course, the line between teaching about religion and teaching religion can be gray. So much will depend upon the implementation of these curricular policies,” DeGirolami said.
When asked if he thinks the curriculum could be a violation of religious freedom, Grunow agreed with DeGirolami — it’s only unconstitutional “if its purposes were sectarian and to proselytize.”
“I do think that most Americans would not have an issue [with] the presentation of the Bible in the public schools; that’s not the point of contention,” Grunow said. “The issue is how to do this in a way that respects ... the Bible, those who hold it to be God’s revelation, those who ascribe to differing interpretations, and those who might appreciate its cultural significance but are wary of any encroachment of religion in public institutions.”
“The Texas curriculum is trying to navigate these concerns,” Grunow said. “I give them credit for their efforts, but time will show us the efficacy of this endeavor.”
Some critics have threatened legal action, but DeGirolami said objections like these “are on awkward footing.”
For DeGirolami, excluding a particular religion in education “seems discriminatory to me, especially in a world where what children are taught in public schools seems, at least to me, to be neck deep in moral and religious teaching.”
In other words, religious and moral values manifest throughout education anyway, so excluding Christianity would be discriminatory.
“School curricula are meant to develop in children certain civic, moral, political, and cultural views, together with teaching them certain basic skills,” he explained. “Those civic, moral, political, and cultural views presuppose answers to some very basic questions that are also questions addressed by Christianity and many other religions.”
For DeGirolami, Christianity should not be excluded from the civic and moral discussion.
“To say that Christianity, because it is ‘religious,’ is not to be included in that discussion, is to gerrymander a category (‘religion’) so as to exclude particular substantive positions that are unwelcome or that critics think are wrong,” he said. “But if they are wrong, critics should just say so and explain why, rather than excluding them from the get-go as categorically inappropriate or out of bounds.”
