The Left Is Right About
the Bible 

Texas Public School Students Will Be Required to Read the Bible,” warned a headline in the New York Times in June. The Texas State Board of Education had just approved a required reading list for K–12 schools in the state. The list in its current form prescribes a Bible passage or two in each grade. The excerpts are short and generally episodic—Adam and Eve, the parting of the Red Sea, Daniel and the lion’s den—and they’re mixed with longer works such as Hamlet and Pride and Prejudice in twelfth grade, Julius Caesar and Inferno in tenth, The Diary of a Young Girl in seventh, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in fifth. Still, the inclusion of the Bible was national news. Coverage extended from the Los Angeles Times to the Baltimore Sun, from CNN and CBS to the BBC and The Guardian.

The board also approved a new framework for social studies in grades K–8. The 140-page document lists “Religious Literature, including the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) and New Testament,” among required subjects such as the Founding documents, free enterprise, and Texas and U.S. history. The framework is quite specific about what is to be taught and when. Third graders will learn about Abraham and Moses, and fourth graders will “identify the Catholic Church and the Pope as important institutions in Europe during the Middle Ages.” In a psychology course, students will examine “the concept of the soul in ancient Scriptures, including the Hebrew Bible.” Those topics, it must be said, sit alongside many other historical matters. The directives on Moses and Abraham follow those regarding Mesoamerican influences in the region and are followed by lengthier items on ancient Greece and Rome. In the psychology course, students study the concept of the soul not just in the Bible, but in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Vedas, and Buddhism.

Nonetheless, news reports were alarmist. PBS called Texas’s curriculum one of several “widening conservative efforts to push Christian teachings in U.S. classrooms.” A headline at NewsNation made the curriculum sound like Sunday school: “Texas approves mandatory Bible lessons in K-12 schools.” The Houston Chronicle accused the board of “enshrining Christianity as part of classroom instruction for all 5.5 million students.” A story at msn.com stated that public testimony heard by the board “continued an existential debate for Texas, where conservative[s] have consistently pushed for more Christianity in schools and emphasized its role in American values.” The American Historical Association issued a statement accusing the board of racist, sexist, and Eurocentric attitudes, ideological distortion, and suppression of the “diversity of beliefs, denominations, and traditions that have shaped the United States since its founding.”

Liberal alarm was to be expected. It echoed the concerns raised in 1976 when Jimmy Carter took the lead in the primaries and declared himself a born-again Christian, in 2001 when the election of George W. Bush threatened a takeover of the executive branch by the theocons, in 2024 when Louisiana lawmakers passed a bill requiring that the Ten Commandments be posted in every public school and university classroom, and on a thousand other occasions on which biblical belief has entered public affairs.

The change to the Texas curriculum can be defended, though, in secular terms. It’s the old E. D. Hirsch argument for “cultural literacy.” James Traub in the New York Times and Adam Kirsch in The Atlantic both drew on Hirsch in their somewhat surprising defenses of the Bible’s presence in the Texas curriculum. (Theirs are the only positive analyses I have seen in liberal organs.) Starting with his bestseller Cultural Literacy in 1987, Hirsch argued that if we want Americans to be more literate, our schools must teach facts, ideas, myths, and other bits of “background knowledge.” When an op-ed refers to an “Achilles heel” and a reader doesn’t get the allusion, comprehension is diminished. Such references are common in passages on standardized tests, not to mention in freshman courses in the humanities and social sciences, where familiarity is assumed. So Hirsch compiled a list of items that should be taught in early grades because they are necessary to success in a knowledge economy such as ours: laws passed by Congress, scientific facts, military leaders, sports figures, idiomatic phrases, movies, historic sites, and so on. Because the Bible is so embedded in American history, civics, jurisprudence, politics, oratory, literature, and the arts—not just religion—dozens of biblical terms made the list, including Isaiah, Jeremiah, Job, and Solomon from the Old Testament alone. In follow-up “dictionaries” of cultural literacy, Hirsch and his coeditors grouped items by topic (physical sciences and mathematics, world geography, and so on), and the Bible got a chapter of its own.

Cultural literacy, then, provides a basis for defending required Scripture readings while avoiding disputes over separation of church and state. It also averts the charge of neglecting other faiths. College readiness demands the Bible, period. Two kids go to State U and enroll in a required civics course, which includes four speeches by Abraham Lincoln. One student, who read the Bible in high school, picks up references to “a house divided” and the like. The other, who has read not a word of the Good Book, passes over Lincoln’s many allusions without awareness. The difference shows when the papers are graded. The second student’s Bible-free high school failed him.

That’s the pedagogical rationale—neat, forward-looking, and utilitarian. A snippet on the burning bush in fifth grade isn’t a cardinal appearance of the one true God. It’s a venerable story, the Bible as literature, an element of background knowledge, a tool of college readiness. No indoctrination, no proselytizing—just straightforward literary history. The Bible shares space with Shakespeare, the Civil War, and the rise of modern science. In Hirsch’s account, the inclusion of the Bible in public school curricula is not just licit but necessary. As the example of the two students shows, schools have been remiss to exclude it.

Surely the realities of the naked public square demand this liberal justification. The last thing Christians who support the Texas curriculum should do is say anything like this: “We’re going to stop watering down American history. We’re going to teach the truth. Our nation was founded as a Christian nation, and Texas is a Christian state.” Those are the words of Brandon Hall, a Baptist pastor in a town west of Dallas who was elected to the Texas State Board of Education in 2024 and spoke to the media a few days before the reading list was approved. To many liberals and conservatives alike, Hall’s rhetoric is reckless, a frontal attack in a culture war (or religious war) that need not be fought. Reading scores are down, kids can’t write, knowledge of U.S. history is dim, the curriculum isn’t working, and Hall answers with a religious prescription that can only appall the academic establishment. I can imagine many reformers in the education world who readily accept Bible readings wincing at his rhetoric.

And yet it strikes me that Hall’s turn to the Christian state of the nation is more compelling than the narrow pedagogical rationale. Hall announces something real: The Bible is different. It can never stand as but one subject among others. No matter how much a teacher domesticates Scripture, treating it as would an Enlightenment skeptic or a professor of comparative religion, the Bible is a summons to every student who opens it. It’s a loaded text for all. The left is right to panic.

We should acknowledge the actual stakes of the revision, whose consequences will amount to more than cultural literacy and college readiness. If kids are reading the Bible in class, the schools have indeed conceded the religious core of the United States, as liberal critics surely realize. Hall forces the question secular progressives wish to suppress: How do the Founding, the two Great Awakenings, abolition and the Civil Rights Movement, the writings of Hawthorne and Melville and Stowe, the Progressive Era, William Jennings Bryan’s oratory, and other American facts and artifacts relate to the Bible? If the answer is “Very closely”—as it obviously is—then the inclusion of the Bible in the curriculum is a necessity. From there, as students see how the Puritans adopted the Exodus story (fleeing persecution, crossing dangerous waters, landing in the wilderness), hear in the cadences of Leaves of Grass the Old Testament prophets, and learn that Booker T. Washington began every morning with a Bible reading and that a Catholic TV show in the 1950s drew 30 million viewers (Life Is Worth Living, hosted by Fulton Sheen), the religious roots will be clear. Most worrisome of all to the liberal educator, stories of the Fall, the Good Samaritan, and the ministry of Jesus may induce students to want more.

If Christianity is essential to the American experiment, then the formation of citizens must include study of the faith. The ideals of liberal education in its current form entail Christianity’s exclusion, but Christians may insist on biblical material in the curriculum by appealing to historical fact. Indeed, they should be blunt about it. In 1933, T. S. Eliot delivered a lecture titled “Modern Education and the Classics.” In it he ponders the future of Christianity and complains, “The universities are too far gone in secularization.” They instruct students that the main purpose of education is “more money, or more power over others, or a better social position.” How is one to defend the classics amidst this decay?  Here is what Eliot says:

It is only upon readers who wish to see a Christian civilization survive and develop that I am urging the importance of the study of Latin and Greek. If Christianity is not to survive, I shall not mind if the texts of the Latin and Greek languages became more obscure and forgotten than those of the language of the Etruscans. 

We must not go so far as to say that if the Bible is excluded from American classrooms, then the whole enterprise of civic education may collapse with our blessing. What we can say is that the Bible and our nation go together and have done so from the start, and so they should, too, in literature, history, civics, and art classes. If teachers exclude the Bible from their syllabi, they are no longer really teaching America.