America cannot be understood apart from the Bible. At virtually every turn in American history, there is a reference or overture to the Bible. Its place in our storied past has been central—forming our imagination, our ethics, our legal code, our cultural markers, and even our holidays.
The Bible’s central role as a quintessential source for shaping our American identity is present from our beginning and then right through to the present day—cited endlessly by the Founders, misappropriated to justify slavery, and still, to this day, drawn from to inspire the moral character of our nation. Some scholars argue, in fact, that Deuteronomy is the most quoted source during the era of America’s founding. If the Constitution is America’s legal constitution, the Bible is America’s moral constitution.
From John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill” sermon, drawn from Matthew 5:14, to the Liberty Bell emblazoned with Leviticus 25:10, to Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural address alluding to Matthew and the Psalms, to Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech the night before he died invoking the biblical imagery of “I’ve been to the mountaintop” from Deuteronomy 34:1-4, the Bible’s role has been central. Now the Bible is, of course, more than just an American document. After all, its origins predate America by thousands of years. Nevertheless, the Bible’s role in shaping America has been clear from the beginning of our national story.
One might think the occasion for this column is America’s 250th birthday and how the Bible contributed to our national birth and narrative. One might also think that I am writing this column because I, as a conservative Christian, wish to seize the opportunity to expound on how the Christian religion formed the American imagination.
But no, this column’s occasion is the mass media hysteria resulting from news that broke last Friday. The Texas State Board of Education finalized a new curriculum for public school students that includes required Bible readings in certain grades. Thus, enter all the predictable howls that “Christian Nationalism” is now upon us and that a violation of the “separation of church and state” and all the other familiar canards require all the usual protests.
Let’s be clear on what is happening in Texas and what this is not. The Bible is not being taught normatively, that is, as a doctrinal source requiring affirmation of its tenets. Nor is it being taught for proselytizing purposes. No, the Bible is being taught as a civics document alongside classics such as Charlotte’s Web, Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet (among 200 other sources). As I mentioned in the examples above, to know the Bible is to appreciate its role in civic literacy and civic fluency. There is no way to understand America without the role of the Bible in our national experience.
The Texas move is controversial only because of a malformed understanding of how religion informs our public imagination. Since the 1940s, Americans have been fed a steady diet of strict separationism, owing to a particular strain of jurisprudence that forecloses any religious influence within the government. This argument for a strict separation of church and state usually includes the idea that any whiff of religion in the public domain constitutes an undue influence. Such an approach to law is far afield from America’s founding, a founding that included the government’s endorsement of a Bible, for example. Seen from this vantage point, the protests against the Texas board’s actions reflect the deracinating efforts of secular ideologues to sanitize the public domain of any hint of religion, let alone Christianity.
Critics who fear that Texas is on the verge of becoming Gilead, the dystopic theocracy in The Handmaid’s Tale, need to take a deep breath and read the curriculum on its own terms. Doing so will quickly disabuse anyone of the notion that a looming theocracy is imminent. Some conservative Christian critics express fear that this move would place the Bible in the hands of unbelieving teachers, who would merely instrumentalize the Bible and empty it of its supernatural foundations. This is a straw man, since teachers are not being asked to expound on the Bible’s doctrinal accuracy, only on its formative role in shaping the American experiment. Moreover, a teacher need not be a regenerate Christian to understand the instrumental value of the Bible’s influence on America.
A closer look at the Texas proposal should allay their concerns. The Texas plan does not require that teachers be Christians in order to appreciate the ways the Bible has informed the American experiment. To know the Bible is to know America’s own grammar and our own story, while to forget it is to mistake our inheritance for an accident of history. To forbid it is to raise a generation fluent in everything but the moral requirements that birthed our nation in the first place. This is not civil religion—it’s just civics. Yet, if, by chance, a student reads the Bible in a public classroom and encounters the supernatural revelation of God speaking to them, well, all the better.
That this story breaks as America celebrates its 250th birthday captures the irony and moral incoherence of the modern progressive imagination. They are glad to quote the prophet Amos on justice, and cite Leviticus for the immigrant, and the prophets for the poor—but then they cry “separation” the moment the same book is opened in a Texas classroom. Liberals rely on the Bible’s social justice teachings to justify expansive government programs and redistribution. But then we’re warned: “Just don’t get too serious about quoting the Bible.” If you do, you will run afoul of the “separation of church and state,” a Jeffersonian-era expression (not in the Constitution) used to expel conservative religion from the public square but quietly discarded when liberals want to use it to their advantage.
Requiring students to be familiar with the texts of their civilization is no reason for hysteria, from either progressive perspectives or from Christians imbibing strict separationist instincts. Cries that this action is an undue entanglement are overwrought. Moreover, American public schools already teach a de facto establishment. My high school science textbook did more to establish a religion—naturalism, presumed to be the normative explanation for the origin of the universe—than requiring Texas public schoolchildren to read Exodus, Proverbs, and Luke ever will.
In truth, this development is a complete nothingburger of a story. Reading a text essential to Western order is basic civics. And, without doubt, the Bible is sui generis in shaping Western culture, ethics, law, memory, and history. So, of course, it should be read in public schools.
Take a deep breath, carry on, and read your Bible with special joy on July 4.
Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to reflect that Congress in the founding era endorsed rather than published a Bible.
This article originally appeared at WORLD Opinions on June 29, 2026.
