The most significant vote on religion in American public schools in a generation happened on a Friday afternoon in Austin. The Texas State Board of Education, a 15-member body controlled by Republicans, passed a new required reading list for K-12 students by a vote of 9-5. Buried inside that list of roughly 200 texts, alongside Charles Dickens and Jane Austen, are passages from the Bible. Noah’s Ark. David and Goliath. The Sermon on the Mount. The creation of Adam and Eve. And the state has just made them mandatory for every public school child in Texas.
Texas is now the first state to require public school students to read passages of the Bible as part of a mandatory curriculum, affecting roughly 5.5 million students – about 11% of the entire U.S. public school population. That’s not a pilot program. That’s not a recommendation. CNN reported that the Texas State Board of Education approved a proposal establishing lists of required reading, including Bible verses alongside classic titles, for its K-12 English and literature curriculum.
How this happened, and what it actually means for classrooms, parents, and the Constitution, is a story that’s been building for several years. But the vote on June 26, 2026 is the moment it became real.
What’s Actually on the Bible Required Reading Texas Schools List
Multiple titles will be mandated for each grade, and each one must be read “in its entirety.” The effort goes far beyond a 2023 law that requires at least one state board-approved literary work be taught in each grade level. The board has exceeded that legislative minimum significantly. The original law, HB 1605, required one literary work per grade level. The board has mandated up to 20 per grade, and the Texas Tribune reported that Texas House Democrats have argued the board far exceeded the legislative mandate.
Elementary students will be required to read picture-book versions of “David and Goliath” and “Daniel and the Lion’s Den.” Middle school students must read passages from the Sermon on the Mount from the Bible’s New Testament, while high schoolers must read about Adam and Eve and the parable of the prodigal son. The progression is deliberate. The new curriculum would have students as young as 6 interacting with biblical stories in their English classes. The “Daniel and the Lion’s Den” story is to be supplied by the Christian Broadcasting Network, a media company founded by televangelist Pat Robertson in the 1960s.
As students advance in reading level, they encounter passages directly from the Bible. Sixth-grade students will learn “The Shepherd’s Psalm” from the Book of Psalms alongside religious writings from George Washington and poems by Langston Hughes and Robert Frost. By high school, the list requires reading specific Bible passages as supportive materials for literary works, including Charles Dickens and Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.”
The specific Bible translation matters too. The proposal requires teachers to use the New International Readers Version of the Bible, taken from the most widely read English translation and simplified to a third-grade reading level. But that’s not the only version on the list. The proposed Texas reading list also includes passages from the King James Bible and the English Standard Version, one of the best-selling Bibles among conservative evangelicals in recent years. Created in the context of the Protestant Reformation, the King James Bible was specifically designed to be a Protestant Bible. That historical detail isn’t minor. Chad Seales, associate professor of religious studies at the University of Texas at Austin, noted that the King James Bible was taught in public schools “up until the 1950s…which explains why there’s so many parochial Catholic schools in America.” Catholic parents didn’t want their children absorbing Protestant theology through the state curriculum. They built their own schools instead.
The list overwhelmingly presents Protestant Christian biblical passages, with 13 passages from the Protestant Christian Bible and one outdated Jewish translation, according to the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. No passages from the Quran. No Buddhist texts. No Hindu scriptures. As board member Tiffany Clark, a Christian and Democrat who represents parts of Dallas-Fort Worth, put it: Texas’ roughly 5.5 million public school students represent a wide range of religions, including Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism – and imposing a mandate centered on one faith “is not fair to the students that we serve.”
How Texas Got Here
This didn’t come out of nowhere. Texas has spent several years methodically building the architecture for Christian content in public schools, piece by piece.
According to CNN, in 2023 the state became the first to allow chaplains to counsel students, and the following year approved a measure that offered more funding to schools that teach an optional Bible-infused elementary school curriculum. That curriculum, known as Bluebonnet Learning, has already had a rocky rollout. Texas will have to spend $8.4 million to correct more than 4,200 errors, including grammatical errors and incorrect facts and answer keys, found in the Bluebonnet materials.
The board action also comes amid a legal battle over SB 10, a law signed by Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott that requires public elementary and secondary schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom. A US District Judge subsequently issued a preliminary injunction blocking the law. A federal judge separately struck down a similar Louisiana law requiring the Ten Commandments in public schools in 2025, finding it unconstitutional.
At the same June 26 meeting where the reading list passed, the school board also approved a rewrite of the state’s social studies curriculum, focusing more on Texas and US history and deemphasizing some teachings about global history and cultures. The change will eliminate a sixth-grade “World Cultures” course and significantly expand lessons on communism.
The reading list vote itself wasn’t the board’s first pass at the idea. In 2023, the Texas Legislature passed HB 1605, requiring the board to provide a list of mandatory readings for each grade level in public schools. The Texas Education Agency’s proposed list was presented in January 2026, initially recommending roughly 300 texts. After several deliberations, the board gave preliminary approval to a third version at its April 2026 meeting, trimming the list to around 200 texts.
The Case For It
Supporters of the reading list are not all cynics trying to sneak Sunday school into the school week. Some of the arguments are genuinely worth engaging.
Supporters argue the Bible should be studied as an essential literary text that can help students understand Western history and the founding of the US. That’s a position with intellectual credibility. Shakespeare’s plays alone contain over 1,300 biblical references, and a significant portion of English-language literature from Milton to Toni Morrison assumes some familiarity with biblical stories and language.
Former public school administrator Nancy Barker argued before the board that Bible 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.”
Some proponents of the curriculum changes dispute arguments that children will be explicitly taught religion, saying the biblical passages and stories will be taught in the context of world history. Board member LJ Francis said he does not view the inclusion of Bible passages in lessons as “proselytizing.” “What we intend to do is just to introduce new or amazing kids in Texas to the wealth and breadth of a canon of Western literature,” he told CNN after the vote.
Board member Brandon Hall, a Republican who is a pastor, was less subtle. At a news conference he said: “We’re going to stop watering down American history. We’re going to teach the truth. Our nation was founded as a Christian nation, and Texas is a Christian state.”
One position frames the Bible as a literary and historical resource. The other frames the whole curriculum as an assertion of Christian national identity. Those two positions aren’t the same thing, and the legal risk lies precisely in which one drives the classroom. For context on how faith shapes public education debates across the country, how religion shapes American schooling traces that tension further back than Texas.
The Case Against It
The reading list drew criticism from parents and educators who decried the infusion of religion in public school curriculum. Critics, including religious freedom groups and other faith groups, argued it centers Christianity in public school instruction, raising concerns about the separation of church and state enshrined in the Constitution.
The legal foundation for those concerns runs deep. The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment prohibits the government from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion.” In Engel v. Vitale (1962), the Supreme Court ruled that school-sponsored prayer in public schools violated that clause, even when the prayer was nondenominational and participation was voluntary. The court held that the state’s use of its public school system to encourage religious activity breached the constitutional wall separating church and state. If a legal challenge to the Texas curriculum reaches the Supreme Court, justices will have to weigh whether a mandated reading list that overwhelmingly favors one religion’s texts crosses the same line.
Antero Garcia, president of the National Council of Teachers of English and a professor at Stanford University, told ABC News he doesn’t know of any other state with a mandatory reading list that includes religious texts. “It is a substantive reshaping of…what kids are supposed to learn throughout the state of Texas over their 13 years of compulsory public education,” Garcia said. Educators at the district and school level usually choose the texts their students will read, Garcia noted, calling the Texas move a first-of-its-kind action at the state level.
The concern isn’t just constitutional. Kasey Meehan, director of PEN America’s Freedom to Read program, called the strict requirements “almost de facto censorship,” comparing the mandatory list to book bans. “It certainly leans ideologically more conservative,” she said.
Some of the objections have come from religious families themselves. Kimmie Fink, the mother of an active-duty military family stationed in Texas, told the board: “I would like to believe that my children’s constitutionally guaranteed religious freedom rights will remain intact wherever we are stationed. Is this not the case in Texas, a state that champions parents’ rights?”
Board member Tiffany Clark, a Christian and Democrat who represents parts of Dallas-Fort Worth, vocally opposed the curriculum. Clark said she and some of her Christian constituents believe “Bible lessons should be taught on Sundays,” adding: “Not all of us believe the same.”
Board member Evelyn Brooks, the only Republican to vote against the new required texts, said she believes the move is “unconstitutional.” “Teachers need to have their autonomy. They’ve been selecting books for decades, for years,” Brooks said.
What Happens Next
The required list will take effect in 2030. That gives four years for legal challenges, implementation fights, and political shifts. The Ten Commandments battle gives a reasonable preview of what’s coming: a federal judge has already blocked that law pending appeal, and similar challenges are highly likely here.
Garcia, who said the required reading list represents what he believes is a first-of-its-kind action at the state level, said the move could be emulated by similarly minded states. “Oftentimes, where Texas goes, other states will follow, right? So this is a pretty substantial move that I could imagine other states picking up and moving forward with as a possibility,” he said.
Read More: America’s 15 Most Religious States
Said Out Loud
The debate over Bible required reading in Texas schools gets framed as a legal question, a curriculum question, an educational effectiveness question. All of those framings are real. But the vote on June 26 also settled something that wasn’t really in dispute: the Texas board doesn’t see the line between church and state the way the courts have historically drawn it.
Chad Seales, the UT Austin professor of religious studies, put it directly: “Any time compulsory religion happens in public education, it’s going to lead to divisiveness.” That’s not a prediction. It’s a historical observation. The parochial school system in America exists largely because Protestant Bible readings in 19th-century public schools pushed Catholic families out. Jewish families followed. The pattern of exclusion through compulsory religious instruction isn’t new, and neither is the backlash.
Even Christian parents might be reluctant to have secular teachers, or those from a different denomination, instructing their children on key biblical texts. A Dallas-area high school English teacher named Alyse Dent put it plainly to reporters: “I can say all day long, ‘We’re teaching a theme, we’re teaching symbolism,’ but they’re hearing, ‘This is a Bible story.’” That tension, between intent and reception, between literary framing and lived religious experience, is where the classroom gets complicated in ways no curriculum document can fully resolve.
The families of 5.5 million students in Texas now have four years to watch what this becomes in practice – which translation a teacher chooses, how a passage gets contextualized, what a child who isn’t Christian is expected to do with the second chapter of Genesis in their English class. The law is passed. The classroom is where it gets real.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.