The Texas State Board of Education approved a mandatory statewide reading list that includes passages and stories from the Bible last week.
Cue the exaggerated, sanctimonious complaints. “The Texas State Board of Education is misusing public schools to impose one narrow set of religious beliefs and indoctrinate a new generation of Americans in the lie that America is a Christian country,” moaned Americans United for Separation of Church and State. PEN America and the National Council of Teachers of English likewise offered customary denunciations for mandating curriculum, something they of course have no problem supporting when it comes to Marxist content on race, sexuality, or the sexes.
In truth, the Texas education decision is exactly the kind of thing American boards of education at the state and local level should be instituting. As argued by the signers of the Phoenix Declaration, a 2025 document encouraging a revitalized American education curriculum, to teach the Bible isn’t to evangelize or coercively impose one religious faith on students but rather to educate them about what constitutes Western (and, more particularly, American) civilization. Education administrators contemplating next year’s curriculum should take note.
A Culture Every American Should Know
You don’t have to be Jewish or Christian to know that the Bible has played an integral role in the history of the United States. The writings of the Founding Fathers are imbued with scriptural language, as are those of Abraham Lincoln and many other prominent American statesmen, even into the 20th century. Christianity inspired American efforts to end slavery, grant women the right to vote, and end racial discrimination, among other noble causes.
Moreover, knowledge of the Bible helps make sense of the art and literature not only of the United States but of the broader Western civilization to which it is indebted. Ignorance of Scripture makes it harder to understand Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, or Chaucer, as well as Twain, Melville, Faulkner, Poe, or Hawthorne. To know American culture as a historical reality, you must know Scripture, regardless of whether you think it true and divine revelation, an admirable historical artifact, or nothing more than fanciful mythological nonsense.
The Texas decision mandates that students learn about David and Goliath, Daniel in the lion’s den, and a few of Jesus’ teachings, among other things. Again, students (and their parents) are welcome to think whatever they like about these excerpts from Scripture, just as they are welcome to shrug at Aesop’s Fables, the Odyssey, or Greek mythology. The fact of the matter is that biblical stories are foundational for understanding American civilization, and thus students’ ignorance is an impoverishment of their education as informed citizens who know something about their cultural heritage and the religious beliefs that inspired and grounded the virtues of earlier generations.
I have personal experience of this. Two decades ago, when I was teaching high school history at a public school, I showed the students the 1989 film Henry V. The titular character denounces several English noblemen for betraying him as akin to “another fall of man.” I asked the class if they knew what Shakespeare was talking about regarding the “fall of man.” Only one student, a Methodist, seemed to have any clue about “the fall,” which is not only a theological doctrine but a theme found across Western literature and music. It was shameful.
The Bible Transmits Culture and Forms Character
Enter the Phoenix Declaration, an “American vision for education” released last year and signed and supported by many names that should be familiar to Federalist readers, as demonstrated in a recently published series of essays on it. The declaration cites Founding Father John Adams: “Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private [virtue] … and public virtue is the only foundation of republics.” For the sake of this virtue, the Phoenix Declaration affirms “parental choice and responsibility,” “transparency and accountability,” “truth and goodness,” “cultural transmission,” “character formation,” “academic excellence,” and “citizenship.”
Cultural transmission, argues author and academic Mark Bauerlein in one essay, “is a core function of the curriculum.” That transmission, says Bauerlein, requires background knowledge in a “Grand Narrative” that connects such pieces of literature as Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to the Roman Republic and Roman Empire, which were deeply influential in the creation of our own nation’s government. Without any educational connection to a “momentous, unified past,” our youth feel disconnected from their own nation and culture, engendering mistrust and depression. “The progressive way of blocking cultural transmission has created a giant hole in the curriculum, a void that leaves students uncertain as to where they stand,” he observes.
More than this, schools must also teach character formation, as Hillsdale faculty member Matthew Mehan argues in another essay. “To succeed in the most basic sense, a student needs virtues like honesty (no cheating), perseverance (no giving up), temperance (saying no to social media or video games), constancy (doing daily work and not foolishly cramming), friendliness (not quarreling such that one is thrown out of class), and many others.” The stories of the Bible — again, whether or not you believe them to be historically true or assent to their theological meaning — serve to help with this character formation. Jesus doesn’t have to be God for his teachings about humility and compassion to inspire us to be better humans (and citizens).
There’s No Such Thing as Neutral Education
Critics of Texas and the Phoenix Declaration will argue that such curriculum is somehow a breach of the separation of church and state, an (unconstitutional) principle that for too long has exerted undue influence over public debates about education. The claim is flatly absurd. As Ryan Anderson argues in another essay, education is never value-neutral; it will form students “in The Gospel of Hedonism or The Gospel of Autonomy or The Gospel of Expressive Individualism,” or, alternatively, what we might call the “Gospel of Excellence.” If you’re a parent or recent graduate of public education, you can tell me what “gospel” they’re teaching nowadays.
If the 1619 Project and other recent leftist educational initiatives have taught us nothing else, it is that curriculum will inspire either thankfulness or derision toward our nation’s past. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are either (flawed) great men who gifted us an incredible political and cultural heritage, or they are racist misogynists to be dishonored. “There is no neutral curriculum,” writes Anderson, and he’s right. Ignoring God and the Bible is not neutral, but “habituates a certain functional atheism,” as well as a sentiment of anti-Americanism.
Teaching the Bible should not be controversial, and it wasn’t until recent decades. Other civilizations around the world get this, and we hear no complaints from the left. In Turkey, knowledge of the Quran opens up your ability to understand Turkish civilization, whether or not you are Muslim. The same is true in India regarding its revered Hindu texts or in Thailand regarding its Buddhist ones. To think you can understand these people and their cultures without reference to their religion and revered texts is both stupid and insulting.
It’s time for Americans of all political and religious stripes to acknowledge the same about the Bible. As parents and educators think about next year’s curriculum, they should consider whether it actually aligns with anything resembling our nation’s unique character and whether it will help the next generation of Americans to assume the remarkable responsibilities bequeathed to us by those virtuous men and women who came before us.
