Texas Heads for Shootout Over Religion in Textbooks

The Texas Board of Education, the nation's second largest purchaser of public school textbooks, is revising its K-12 social studies curriculum and deciding how to characterize religion's influence on American history. Three consultants have recommended emphasizing the roles of the Bible, Christianity and civic virtue of religion. As America's children go back to school, how would you advise the Texas board? How should religion be taught in public schools?

If you find a turtle on a Texas fence post, you know the turtle didn't get there by itself.

Similarly, the Texas Board of Education's conundrum about the role of religion in textbooks didn't just happen.

Beginning with desegregation and the success of the civil rights movement, Christian fundamentalists asserted that God had been kicked out of public schools. They alleged that American culture was anti-religious, anti-evangelical. One Southern Baptist Convention leader said Christians were experiencing a "drizzle of persecution in the U.S."

Perceiving cultural hostility and claiming religious persecution, fundamentalists reacted in different ways to the public education system. Some abandoned the public schools for home schools or private academies. Others remained engaged but commissioned Christian school teachers as "missionaries" and demonized public schools as decaying government schools.

Still others played the victim card, an American game used to gain sympathy and support. Fundamentalists said that as victims they needed to be treated with fairness and balance in public schools, meaning that creationism needed to be taught with evolution in biology classes. Evangelists needed equal billing with drum majors for social justice in social studies books.

By any other name, the fundamentalists' appeal to fairness and balance is an attempt to force their religion on schools.

While the fundamentalists' perception of hostility and persecution was myopic, they were not completely to blame.

Some secularists and religionists thought the solution to the "problem" of religion was to make schools religion-free zones. They sought to sterilize public schools of religion.

Consequently, public education was left with two false choices: either impose religion or banish it; either indoctrinate students or deny the role of religion.

For a number of years, some thoughtful Americans have advocated a third way, a better way grounded in the Constitution. The third way neither inhibits nor inculcates religion. It makes space for the teaching about religion without advancing religious doctrine. It treats religion as an academic subject, not as a devotional practice. It respects the contribution of religion in shaping our culture and avoids denigrating religious leaders and movements.

The third way offers common ground for people of faith and no faith in a culture with intense diversity.

From a theological perspective, the third way is a practical strategy for following the Golden Rule--"In everything do to others as you would have them do to you."

Regrettably, Texas religious conservatives are more determined to rule than to follow the Golden Rule. They are bent on a Texas theocracy--a form of government where fundamentalist Christian clergy and their deputies rule in the name of God.

Why else would they appoint someone who denies the theory of evolution, global warming and the established tradition of the separation of church and state to serve on a committee of the Texas Board of Education to evaluate the religious content of textbooks in public schools?

Only one answer is possible: the religious right wants to impose its religion on public schools.

Texas is heading for a shootout at high noon over religion in textbooks.

By Robert Parham  |  September 2, 2009; 9:24 AM ET
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Posted by: WmarkW | September 2, 2009 11:44 AM
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