In Texas, religious freedom and parental rights are only for Christians

They say everything is bigger in Texas — apparently, including the hypocrisy.

How else do you explain people who say they oppose “indoctrination” in public schools, but want to turn elementary school classrooms into Sunday Schools?

With help from a temporary appointment by Gov. Greg Abbott (R), the state board of education has narrowly approved a controversial new curriculum that targets elementary school students for religious indoctrination. Texas officials may deny that’s what they’re doing, but it’s the reality that Rice University religion scholar David Brockman found when he studied the plan.

For example, the biblical creation story is used in an art lesson for kindergartners, with questions for students not about the art but about the biblical account.

“It is difficult to avoid concluding that this art appreciation unit is being used to smuggle in what is effectively Bible study,” Brockman wrote.

He also found that the teaching plan treats biblical stories about miracles and the Christian belief in Jesus’ resurrection as historical facts. A section on the Roman Empire for older students draws heavily on New Testament accounts of the life of Jesus, something unclear in the letter parents would receive about the curriculum.

The curriculum slants history, highlighting Christian opposition to slavery and segregation while ignoring the ways Christianity was used to justify and defend them. Brockman concluded that the way the curriculum addresses religious liberty suggests a political agenda and “smacks of indoctrination rather than education.”

Religious-right activists have been trying to turn public schools into mission fields for a long time.

In 2000, People For the American Way Foundation published an exposé of inappropriate proselytizing and antisemitic course materials in Bible classes being taught in Florida school districts.

A decade ago, Southern Methodist University religious studies professor Mark Chancey documented that Bible classes in Texas public schools were being taught from a fundamentalist viewpoint with materials “designed to evangelize rather than provide an objective study of the Bible’s influence.”

This year, Oklahoma’s State Superintendent of Education Ryan Walters spent tax dollars to put Trump Bibles into public school classrooms and invited discredited Christian nationalist “historian” David Barton to put his notoriously inaccurate stamp on the state’s social studies curriculum.

Knowledge of the Bible’s influence on our culture can be valuable. It is possible, particularly in high school classrooms, to teach about the Bible and its role in art, history and literature, or as part of a course on the world’s religions, without violating the Constitution.

But teaching appropriately about the Bible in public schools requires a commitment to effective teacher training and oversight — and a commitment to upholding the Constitution, which seems woefully absent among the promoters of the new Texas curriculum.

America is an increasingly diverse nation. And Texas is one of the most religiously diverse states in the country. It is simply wrong, and a violation of core constitutional principles, for a politically empowered majority to use public schools to indoctrinate students into one particular faith. This is especially true when young kids are targeted.

“Children are not developmentally able to make the sorts of distinctions that these lessons assume of them at age 5 or age 6,” Chancey said while testifying against the curriculum. “5-year-olds aren’t going to say, ‘I’m so grateful I’m learning these stories for the sake of cultural literacy!’”

Which gets us back to hypocrisy. Right-wing activists make a lot of noise about “parental rights,” but this scheme is profoundly disrespectful to parents — Christians and non-Christians alike — who believe the responsibility for their children’s religious upbringing belongs to families and faith communities, not state officials.

In a recent op-ed in the Houston Chronicle, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten and Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum wrote that “embedding one form of Christian orthodoxy into schooling betrays the promise and purpose of public education to serve all students, including Christian students who don’t believe that version of Christianity.”

Amen to that.

Svante Myrick is the president of People For the American Way.

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