Texas education officials approved in an initial vote on Tuesday a new elementary school curriculum that infuses material drawn from the Bible into reading and language arts lessons, a contentious move that would test the limits of religion’s presence in public education.
The optional curriculum has already drawn protests in Texas, which has emerged as a leader in the ascendant but highly contested push to expand the role of religion in public schools. The new curriculum could become a model for other states.
With the administration of President-elect Donald J. Trump promising to champion the conservative Christian movement in his second presidential term, the lessons may also offer a playbook for the White House.
Advocates of religious freedom say the new curriculum is the latest major effort by conservatives to explicitly tie the nation’s history and politics to Christian values. Texas was the first state to allow public schools to hire religious chaplains as school counselors, and the Republican-controlled legislature is expected to try once again to require public-school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments.
Schools have emerged as a focus for clashes over the role of Christian values in public life. In Oklahoma, the state superintendent has begun buying Bibles for classroom use, and sent a video to schools last week inviting students to pray for Mr. Trump. Louisiana is fighting in court over a new state mandate that all classrooms there post the Ten Commandments.
Supporters of the Texas curriculum say that the Bible is a fundamental part of American history and is crucial to students’ knowledge of the world. They argue that children’s literacy skills would suffer without a robust understanding of Bible references because Christian themes are pervasive in American culture.
Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, said in a statement that the lessons would “allow our students to better understand the connection of history, art, community, literature and religion on pivotal events like the signing of the U.S. Constitution, the Civil Rights Movement and the American Revolution.”
The Texas State Board of Education, which is led by Republicans, sets standards for what students must be taught and approves a selection of curriculums, and individual schools and districts choose which ones they will teach.
On Tuesday, an effort to reject the curriculum failed in a narrow 7-to-8 vote, with three Republicans joining the board’s four Democrats. The other members approved the lessons. The vote was preliminary; a final vote is expected to take place later in the week, with the same outcome.
The curriculum, which covers kindergarten through fifth grade, would be optional. But the state’s school districts, which serve about 2.3 million public-school students in kindergarten through fifth grade, would be offered a financial incentive to adopt it.
Religion makes up a relatively small portion of the curriculum’s overall content. The lessons delve into Christianity far more often and in more depth than they do into other faiths, according to religious scholars and a review of the materials by The New York Times.
A kindergarten lesson on the Golden Rule introduces students to Jesus and his Sermon on the Mount, for example. And a fifth-grade lesson on Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” includes an account of the final meal shared by Jesus and his 12 disciples, as well as several verses from the Gospel of Matthew.
At the Texas State Board of Education meeting on Monday, many parents, including several who said they were reverent Christians, argued that it was their right, not the state’s, to choose how their children learned about religion.
Others argued that Christianity was inseparable from the American story and central to understanding figures like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Speakers pointed out that the Bible is often called the most-read book in the world.
Renate Sims, a Texas mother and substitute teacher, said at the meeting that the incarnation of Jesus “is and always will be the hinge of all of history.”
“How would the canceling of such fundamental facts serve the education of our children or contribute to shape them morally?” she said.
The Texas Education Agency, which oversees public education in the state, released the new curriculum in the spring, after the state enacted a law directing the agency to develop its own free textbooks. The law was aimed at providing high-quality teaching materials to educators who often spend long hours searching for them, lawmakers said.
The move provoked immediate controversy, upsetting the state’s largest teachers’ union and some parents, including practicing Christians, who expressed worry that the lessons blur the line between instruction and evangelizing. A top curriculum publisher took issue with a state request to add more biblical content to its materials, the education news outlet The 74 reported.
When a panel was convened to vet the new curriculum for bias, opponents complained that the panel included several people who were known for religious advocacy, including Ben Carson, the former federal housing secretary, to rubber-stamp the lessons.
“They’re using Texas as a testing ground for these extreme ideas,” said State Representative James Talarico, a Christian and a Democrat who is also a student at a Presbyterian seminary in Austin.
The Texas State Board of Education convened on Monday to consider the new curriculum. After more than seven hours of public comments, the meeting was adjourned until Tuesday morning.
Several Texans of other faiths said at the meeting that the lessons are inappropriate for a public school classroom and lack balance. Barbara Baruch, a San Antonio-area grandmother who is Jewish, asked the education board to leave religious instruction to parents and their houses of worship.
“I believe my grandkids should share our family’s religion,” Ms. Baruch said. “I need help stopping the government from teaching them to be Christians.”
Some board members also questioned whether the curriculum would violate the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which bars the government from making laws “respecting an establishment of religion.”
Jonathan Covey, the director of policy for Texas Values, a nonprofit that promotes Judeo-Christian values, argued that the curriculum would not face a successful legal challenge, describing the material as “high quality” lessons with “contextually relevant religious topics.”
He pointed to the Supreme Court’s ruling two years ago that a high school football coach had a constitutional right to pray on the field after his team’s games, and said the decision showed that a “strict governmental neutrality toward religion” was not required.
“It has always been understood that religion has a place in American civic society,” Mr. Covey told board members, adding that “there’s no rule that says ‘If you have 25 references to the Bible, you must have 25 references to every other religion.’”
Some critics of the curriculum say that besides a lack of balance, some of its lessons simply are not very good.
Amanda Tyler, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, said at a news conference on Monday that the curriculum was “neither instructionally sound, nor factually accurate,” and would teach “misleading” content to children as young as 5.
David R. Brockman, a Christian theologian and religious studies scholar who reviewed the curriculum, said he believed deeply in the value of teaching about religion in public schools. But he also said lessons must be balanced, accurate and not promote one faith over others.
The Texas curriculum, he said, does not clear the bar.
In a fifth-grade unit on racial justice, students would be taught that Abraham Lincoln and abolitionists relied in part “on a deep Christian faith” to “guide their certainty of the injustice of slavery.” But they would not be taught that other Christians leaned on the same religion to defend slavery and segregation.
It was one example, Mr. Brockman said, of what he called a “whitewashing of the negative details of Christian history” that “helps to promote Christianity as an inherently ‘good’ religion.”
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