America’s back-to-school traditions are many: The first-day photo, lunchboxes in hand. A bursting bag of classroom supplies for perpetually under-resourced teachers. And vehement debate at the state and national level over the place of religious instruction in public classrooms.
As the 2026–2027 school year begins, the most visible political battle in this culture war is being fought in Texas. In late June, the state’s Republican-majority Board of Education voted to approve a reading list for public school students that includes passages from Scripture alongside works from classic authors like Charles Dickens, Langston Hughes, William Shakespeare, and—a bit less classic—Margaret Thatcher.
The list is not a complete literature curriculum; it’s intended to supplement other selections made by individual schools and teachers. And the 200 biblical selections students will encounter between kindergarten and graduation, per reporting from The Texas Tribune, include major stories (Creation, Noah, Daniel) alongside excerpts from the Sermon on the Mount, the parables of Jesus, 1 Corinthians 13, Lamentations, and more.
The proposed translation to be used is the New International Readers Version, which is derived from the NIV but intended to be “even easier to read and understand.” Yet for younger students, some biblical encounters will not come straight from the Bible but from picture books produced by publishers including the Christian Broadcasting Network.
If Texas parents don’t want their children to receive this instruction, they can opt out of it with a written request—much as parents in other states have opted their children out of instruction on LGBTQ themes that contradict their faith, a right upheld by the Supreme Court.
Though it does not appear to have been challenged in court so far, the Texas curriculum decision was no less controversial for being widely anticipated since the Board of Education granted preliminary approval in April. The Freedom From Religion Foundation, for example, condemned it as a “brazen promotion of religious doctrine.”
But major media outlets including The Atlantic and The New York Times have published op-eds arguing that biblical instruction in public schools, provided it isn’t devotional or evangelistic, is not just legitimate but necessary for students to rightly understand American history and literature.
Pepperdine University professor Jessica Hooten Wilson, who teaches on the Great Books, made the same distinction. “There are two different ways of studying religion,” she told me in an interview by email, “monastically or scholastically. In the former, you read the Bible for devotion, prayer, and to encounter the author, the triune God. Whereas scholastic study of the Bible is to know about its stories, main points, general character, but without affirming its meaning by your beliefs.”
Public schools can provide scholastic study of religion without running afoul of the First Amendment’s Free Exercise clause by verging into the monastic. That’s true of teaching about the Bible, but the same can be said of instruction in other religions too.
“Christians can study the Quran or Bhagavad Gita as scholastics without becoming believers of those gods,” Wilson added. “Religion should be taught in schools because it is at the core of human existence—what someone worships affects how they live. Education about politics, history, or literature without discussing religion has missed the through line.”
Biblical instruction like we see in Texas is the most common focus of this conversation, albeit in varying forms. In Arkansas, some schools participate in release time programs in which public school students go off campus during the school day for more devotional Christian lessons. The program is supposed to be voluntary, but recent reporting suggests some students have been signed up without their consent.
Georgia has twice approved the same kind of release program, although, as CT has reported, it’s very rarely used. And last year, Oklahoma’s public schools superintendent reversed his predecessor’s requirement of biblical instruction.
In Connecticut, meanwhile, the religious instruction controversy takes a different shape.
“A new state provision, passed as part of a larger education bill last month, directs the Connecticut State Department of Education [CSDE] to develop instructional resources on Arab and Islamic studies,” Madhiha Anis and David Katibah report for Religion News Service (RNS), “offering public schools optional materials designed to expand how students learn about the history, culture and contributions of Arab and Islamic civilizations.”
Advocates say reducing ignorance about Arab and Islamic culture can reduce bigotry too. The CSDE likens the curriculum to resources on “Holocaust education, Native American studies, and Asian American and Pacific Islander studies,” per RNS. But because of its attention to Islam, some Connecticut residents—including some Christians—have raised the same kind of Establishment Clause concerns we see in critiques of the Texas reading plan.
The Connecticut curriculum “validates, endorses the teaching of public religion in a public school, which is a clear violation of the First Amendment,” Chris Healy, executive director of the Connecticut Catholic Conference, told the Hartford Courant. “It’s similar to the outrage people would have if the Ten Commandments were put on the wall”—as indeed they have been in Texas public schools, where a new lawsuit over the displays was filed this month.
Christians may land in different places on these policies, as Wilson and Healy seem to do, because there are multiple truths here: The Bible is scholastically useful, and “there’s clearly a need for students to know something about the religious convictions and practices that inform the lives of their fellow citizens, not to mention others around the world,” as Grove City College English professor Jeffrey Bilbro noted in an email interview.
But Christians also affirm, Bilbro added, that “the Bible conveys truths that young people need to encounter and respond to by changing their lives!” Critics of Bible curricula may not themselves believe that the Word of God “will not return to [God] empty, but will accomplish what [God] desire[s]” (Isa. 55:11)—but we do. And with a straightforwardly scholastic curriculum, Bilbro said, “the danger is that religion becomes merely something to learn about and not something we might learn from.”
Done right, Wheaton College dean and politics professor Bryan McGraw told me, religious instruction in US public schools can be constitutional. “To the degree that these are merely efforts to acquaint students with important religious texts and traditions, it seems fine, even admirable,” he said. “But to the degree that these efforts reflect an effort to shape students’ inclinations for or against any particular religious tradition, I can see the worry.”
