Image courtesy of the National Cancer Institute.

Twenty-nine Bible verses and stories have become required reading for 5.5 million K-12 public school students in Texas with the State Board of Education (SBOE)’s approval of a contentious statewide mandatory literary works list by a 9-5 vote, with one member absent, on June 26th, with all nine votes in favor coming from Republicans. The list is set for a 2030-31 implementation timeline.

Each year of instruction includes at least one required Bible verse or story, with the specific reading varying by grade level: first-graders will read Jonah and the Whale, fifth graders will read chapters 3 and 14 of the Book of Exodus, and high school sophomores taking English II will read fifteen chapters of The Book of Job. In total, 29 of the 190 required readings are Bible selections, or 15.3% of the list. Democratic legislators in the state, such as State Sen. César Blanco, have criticized the list for promoting a particular religion through public schools and for placing decisions about religious instruction in the hands of the state rather than families and faith communities. Before the vote, 46 Democratic lawmakers signed a letter circulated by State Rep. Salman Bhojani, urging the board to pause final action on the proposed standards and required reading list, but the request was unsuccessful.

The new state reading list does more than require certain biblical passages to be taught in schools; it also specifies the exact translation teachers must use for certain passages. For example, sixth-grade teachers will be required to teach Matthew 6:25–34 using the English Standard Version, while seventh-grade teachers will use the King James Version when teaching Psalm 23 and the English Standard Version for 1 Corinthians 13. Seventh-grade teachers will also be required to teach the story of Jonah using the New International Reader’s Version. Disputes over which version of the Bible should be used in public schools date back to the mid-19th century, when Protestants and Catholics clashed over which Bible translations and religious practices belonged in the classroom. One of the central points of contention was the widespread use of the King James Version in public schools, which many Catholics regarded as a Protestant Bible and objected to being required to use in place of Catholic translations.

The June 26 vote came at the end of the SBOE’s June 22–26 meeting, during which more than 400 experts, teachers, and concerned citizens registered to testify on the reading list and proposed new social studies standards. Sixty-one Republican state representatives urged the Board to adopt the standards, describing them as a “long-overdue restoration of academic rigor and cultural grounding,” while 46 Democratic lawmakers asked the Board to delay action over concerns about the process and the content of the proposed standards and reading list. One of the Republican SBOE members who supported the list, Brandon Hall, argued that biblical texts were necessary for understanding the country’s history and culture, pointing to Psalm 23 as an example of a text that has endured for thousands of years.

Among the parents who testified against the proposal was Megan Boyden, a Christian mother of three from Denton, who objected to the state determining how biblical material would be presented to her children. “As a Christian mother, it is my right and responsibility to teach our family’s religion,” Boyden told the Board. She questioned how teachers who did not share her beliefs might present biblical passages and asked what the requirements would mean for non-Christian students. Another individual who testified against the proposal, Chad Seales, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Texas at Austin, said the proposed list involved complex questions of scriptural interpretation. “I don’t know how in the world a public school teacher would be qualified to help a student understand all the nuances involved in scriptural interpretation,” he said.

Several religious leaders who testified during the June hearings objected to how the state had selected and presented particular biblical passages, but did not necessarily oppose teaching scripture in public schools. Rabbi David Segal of Houston, who testified before the Board, criticized the required use of the Jewish Publication Society’s 1917 translation of Lamentations 3, which he described as outdated, and objected to placing the passage alongside Holocaust literature. Segal warned that the pairing could invite eighth graders to consider whether the Holocaust represented “God’s punishment for the Jews.” He later said he supported teaching scripture to improve religious literacy, but argued that Jewish texts should not be taught “through a Christian lens.”

Rabbi Joshua Fixler of Houston’s Congregation Emanu El, who also testified before the Board, raised a similar concern about the religious perspective reflected in the list. He argued that its near-exclusive use of Christian interpretations and scriptures could lead to the “further alienation of non-Christian students.” Speaking after his testimony, Fixler also objected to describing the proposal as “Judeo-Christian,” arguing that the term made Christian initiatives appear more inclusive by invoking Jews. He described its use in this context as “a fig leaf at inclusion.”

Texas’ legislators' decision to implement the Bible reading list in public schools comes months after the Department of Education (DoE), under Secretary Linda McMahon, released revised guidance on religious expression in public schools in February 2026, requiring that schools do not favor one religious view over another. McMahon said that the administration was “proud to stand with students, parents, and faculty who wish to exercise their First Amendment rights in schools across our great nation.”

A month before the revised guidance was issued, President Donald Trump said in a Religious Freedom Day proclamation that he had directed the DoE to protect the “foundational First Amendment right to prayer in public schools.”

The new Bible reading list follows several other recent efforts in Texas to introduce religious material into public schools; for example, in 2024, the State Board of Education approved Bluebonnet Learning, a state-developed curriculum that incorporates biblical stories and teachings into elementary reading and language arts lessons. Critics of the Board’s approval of Bluebonnet Learning, including the ACLU of Texas, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, sent a letter to Texas superintendents and school board members in January 2025, urging them not to adopt the curriculum. The groups argued that Bluebonnet could impose religious beliefs on students and violate their First Amendment rights. 

Shortly after the curriculum began being taught in classrooms, educators across the state started identifying and reporting thousands of problems in the materials, including typos, formatting errors, incorrect page numbers, missing pages, incorrect answer keys, and hundreds of image-licensing issues. The Texas State Board of Education later considered roughly 4,200 corrections and changes to the curriculum, which prompted some board members to question how so many problems had made it through the state’s review process. The Texas Education Agency, which oversees the state’s instructional-materials review system and developed Bluebonnet Learning, disputed descriptions of all 4,200 changes as factual errors, arguing that many were minor corrections or duplicate issues repeated across different parts of the curriculum.

In February 2026, the Board ultimately approved the requested updates, requiring the changes to be reflected in the digital materials within 30 days and incorporated into the next print run. By June, the Texas Tribune reported that correcting and replacing the affected materials could cost the state up to $8.4 million.

Although school districts are not required to adopt the curriculum, those that do are eligible for additional state funding.

Texas lawmakers took another step in 2025 in their efforts to introduce religious material into public schools with Senate Bill 10, which requires public elementary and secondary schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom. Gov. Greg Abbott signed the bill into law on June 21, 2025. Before he signed it, the ACLU and other civil-rights organizations said they would sue Texas if the measure became law. Abbott responded to the threat on social media by telling the groups to “bring it.” The groups followed through on that threat after Abbott signed the bill by filing a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas on behalf of a group of Texas families with children in public schools. In Nathan v. Alamo Heights Independent School District, the families argued that Senate Bill 10 violated the First Amendment’s Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses. A federal district court initially blocked the law, but in April 2026 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, sitting en banc, reversed the decision, vacated the preliminary injunction, and dismissed the plaintiffs’ claims.

Texas is not alone in the recent push to introduce more religious material into public schools; several other states, particularly Republican-led states, have pursued similar initiatives. Louisiana, for instance, enacted House Bill 71 in 2024, requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in every public-school classroom. In response to the bill’s enactment, nine Louisiana families with children in public schools filed a federal lawsuit, Rev. Roake v. Brumley, on June 24, 2024, challenging the law. The families argued that requiring classrooms to display a state-approved version of the Ten Commandments would favor certain religious beliefs over others and expose their children to religious messages that conflicted with their own beliefs. A federal district court initially blocked the law, and a three-judge Fifth Circuit panel upheld that decision in 2025. However, the full Fifth Circuit later vacated the injunction in February 2026, concluding that the challenge was premature because important details about how individual school districts would implement the displays had not yet been determined. The court therefore allowed the law to move forward without deciding whether the requirement to display the Ten Commandments in public schools was constitutional.

Oklahoma, under Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt, took an approach in 2024 that combines elements of both Texas’ new reading requirements and Louisiana’s Ten Commandments law, with then-State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters directing public schools on June 27 to incorporate the Bible and the Ten Commandments into classroom instruction. The following month, Walters issued more detailed guidance stating that every Oklahoma teacher would be provided a physical copy of the Bible and that students would be taught its historical, cultural, and literary significance. Walters said in the statement that the Bible was “indispensable in understanding the development of Western civilization and American history” and that “every student in Oklahoma will be taught the Bible in its historical, cultural, and literary context.” He also warned educators who opposed the directive that “they will comply, and I will use every means to make sure of it.”

The debate over how much religious material public schools can require students to learn is not new; courts have confronted similar disputes before and have sometimes ruled that such requirements are unconstitutional. For example, in Abington School District v. Schempp in 1963, the Supreme Court ruled that public schools could not require devotional Bible readings, while still recognizing that the Bible may be studied for its literary and historical value. Seventeen years later, in Stone v. Graham, the Court struck down a Kentucky law requiring the Ten Commandments to be posted in public-school classrooms. And in 2005, a federal judge in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District ruled that a Pennsylvania school board violated the Establishment Clause by requiring ninth-grade biology students to be introduced to intelligent design as an alternative to evolution.

Author Bio: Lila Li is a sophomore at Dartmouth College majoring in Government and Engineering. She is interested in national security and international humanitarian law, and is hoping to commission into the Navy on the pilot track after graduation.