I graduated high school in 1997. For the entirety of my primary and secondary education, Scripture was part of the required curriculum. I still remember sitting in 11th grade AP English, the Book of Job open on my desk — not as devotional reading, but as the assigned text for our research paper. No one in that classroom had a crisis of conscience. Not one person sued.
We read it, wrestled with it, and wrote about it. That was just education.
When the Texas State Board of Education voted last week to add Bible passages to its required K-12 reading list — Exodus for fifth graders, the Twenty-Third Psalm for seventh graders, the Sermon on the Mount and the Parable of the Prodigal Son at the high school level — the response from certain quarters was something approaching cultural hysteria.
I confess, I had to stop and ask: what, exactly, happened between 1997 and now? The answer is not complicated. In fact, it has been slapping us in the face for quite some time. What happened is that a generation was raised without the Book, and the absence shows in everything.
I was raised learning the Bible, but it was in adulthood, when I began going back through the literary canon on my own terms, that I understood something that no one had ever quite said with any real clarity to me: every great work of Western literature is a shadow of the Scriptures. Really.
Take a moment to reflect on the history of the breadth of classic literature and truly consider it: Milton could not have written without Genesis. Shakespeare could not have written without the Psalms. Dostoevsky could not have written without the Gospels. Dante could not have written at all.
Teaching the history of Western civilization without the Bible is precisely like teaching English literature without Shakespeare. You can arrange the words on a page, but you have lost the living thread that runs through all of it. The Bible is not a religious artifact sitting beside Western civilization. It is the source code Western civilization runs on. It is the DNA.
People who do not know this do not understand America. They cannot read its founding documents with full eyes. They cannot comprehend its greatest art, its deepest grief, or its highest aspirations.
The influence of the Bible is invisible to those who have never read the Book. A Westerner who has never opened a Bible has still been shaped by it — in the way they think about justice, about the dignity of persons, about the arc of history, about mercy as a virtue rather than a weakness. They simply do not know where those instincts came from.
That ignorance is not neutral. It leaves people unable to account for their own formation, which makes them far easier to mislead about who they are and where they came from. This is why the historical argument for the Bible in schools goes far deeper than literary taste.
The Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, the abolitionist movement, the Civil Rights Movement — none of these can be truly and fully understood without understanding the Bible and the people whose hearts and minds were formed by it. You cannot understand the laws they wrote, the motivations that drove them, or the moral courage they displayed without grasping what they believed the Scriptures said about human beings and their Creator.
To remove that foundation from the curriculum is not to offer a more neutral education. It is to offer a deliberately incomplete one.
This is not a sectarian claim. It is a literary and historical one. Texas’s own education code has long required K-12 schools to teach “religious literature, including the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) and New Testament, and its impact on history and literature.” The new reading list is not a revolution. It is a restoration, a return to what was already understood to be true before the culture decided it was afraid of its own inheritance.
Former public school administrator Nancy Barker argued before the board that the readings “will provide students with the background knowledge you will need to understand the books, the speeches, poems and important documents that have shaped our civilization.” She is right. That is not theology. That is literacy.
And yet the objections have come loud and fast. Critics have argued the list favors Christianity. Of course it does, in precisely the same way that a course in Western philosophy favors Plato, or a course in American history favors the Declaration of Independence. Not every tradition contributed equally to the formation of this nation, and intellectual honesty requires saying so without apology.
Those who raise the specter of theocracy reveal something important: they do not understand the difference between a civilization shaped by biblical principles and a government enforcing religious compliance. One produced the freest nation in human history. The other is what the founders were building against.
Texas also passed a law in 2025 requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in every public school classroom. The outcry was predictable. But consider what the Ten Commandments actually are: a moral framework without which law itself becomes nothing more than the exercise of power.
Laws that are not grounded in moral principles are not really law at all. They are simply the will of whoever holds authority at the moment. The founders understood this. Attorney General Ken Paxton called the biblical laws what they are: “irrevocably intertwined with America’s legal, moral, and historical heritage.” You cannot remove that foundation and leave the structure standing. You can only pretend it was never there, until it isn’t.
I spent years studying human behavior as a psychologist. One pattern I have observed without exception is this: people who are threatened by a text have never truly read it. Fear of the Bible is, almost without exception, the fear of the illiterate toward the thing they have been told is dangerous.
Once you have actually read it, wrestled with Job in his suffering, sat with the Sermon on the Mount, followed the Prodigal Son all the way home, you do not fear it. You grieve that anyone ever tried to take it from you.
Texas did not do a radical thing. Texas did a courageous thing. They gave five million children a fighting chance at understanding the world they inhabit and the nation they were born into.
The Book was always supposed to be in the classroom. We simply forgot.