When Public Schools Teach Religion: What Texas’s New Standards Get Right—and Risk.
Texas has adopted high-school social-studies standards that put religion at the center of classroom debate. That is not automatically a mistake. Religion belongs in the story of art, law, reform, war, and public language.
But the new Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, or TEKS, show how religious literacy can become conclusions about particular believers. Public schools may teach about religion. The question is whether Texas will do so with historical care and room for inquiry.
What Texas actually adopted
On September 4, the Texas State Board of Education gave final approval to new high-school TEKS for U.S. history, U.S. government, world history, and world geography. TEKS are statewide learning standards, not a day-by-day lesson plan. They shape what districts, materials, and teachers cover. The official agenda says the rules also implement 2025 state laws concerning civic knowledge and communist regimes.
Religion is central to the language that the board adopted. A world-history expectation directs students to describe Christianity’s contributions to Western civilization and early America, including universal dignity after Christianization of the Roman Empire. Another directs students to explain early Islam through the Prophet Mohammed’s “brutal military campaigns” against Jewish and Christian tribes, the normalization of slavery, and female captives. The same standards describe the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as “motivated by radical Islam.”
Those phrases have drawn strong response. They select descriptions and causal frames, not simply religion’s historical influence. Selection is unavoidable; the question is whether it is accurate, proportionate, and comparably careful across traditions.
The rollout date is also worth reading closely. The board’s September attachment says the high-school rules begin in the 2033–34 school year. An earlier statewide planning timeline mapped implementation for August 2030. Families and educators should follow final rule text, Texas Register filings, and agency updates rather than assume that broad planning chart resolves the classroom date.
Religious literacy is an educational good
Leaving religion out of social studies would not make history neutral. Religious ideas have affected empires, civil-rights movements, literature, social welfare, conflict, and peace-making. A student who encounters Islam only through terrorism, or the Bible only as a political symbol, has not received serious religious literacy.
The constitutional principle is more workable than the public argument often suggests. The U.S. Department of Education states it directly:
“Public schools may not provide religious instruction, but they may teach about religion.”
Its guidance lists comparative religion, religious texts as literature, and religion’s role in U.S. and world history as permissible subjects. The Supreme Court made a similar point in Abington School District v. Schempp: objective study of religion within a secular education program can be consistent with the First Amendment, while state-required religious exercises are not.
That distinction protects everyone: Christian students from faith becoming a civic slogan; religious minorities from being made spokespeople; and nonreligious students from coerced observance or a test of belief.
Good religious literacy asks different questions from devotional instruction. Students can compare sources, identify diversity, weigh evidence, and distinguish rulers’ or armed groups’ actions from ordinary believers’ views. The American Academy of Religion calls for an intellectually sound, nonsectarian approach and notes that few educators have been trained in these methods. That is an implementation challenge for Texas, not an argument for ignorance.
Why the Islam language has prompted criticism
The criticism is specific. Muslim Texans who testified asked the board to include Islam’s principles and historical contributions. The Texas Tribune and KERA/Houston Public Media report that the board did not restore a proposed expectation on Muslim contributions to algebra and astronomy, while retaining the “brutal” description.
Critics, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, call the framework discriminatory. That is their assessment, not a court ruling. A course can discuss warfare, slavery, conquest, and contested interpretations without presenting a faith chiefly through violence and threat. The concern applies whenever one religion bears its worst chapters while another is described mainly through ideals.
The historical question matters, too. According to the Tribune, content advisers Andrea Hutchison and University of Texas at Austin philosopher Robert Koons questioned the wording’s historical support and the reliability of its sources. That does not disqualify every passage on early Islamic history. It is a reason to test materials against strong scholarship and let students encounter more than one frame.
Board Chair Aaron Kinsey has called the framework balanced, while supporters say American history cannot be understood by pretending Christianity had no influence. Neither proposition relieves the state of its obligation to approach every tradition with intellectual consistency.
Students should confront difficult history. Islamic societies, like Christian societies and secular governments, include conquest, slavery, debate, reform, achievement, and injustice.
The risk begins when a standard gives students a sweeping label in place of the distinctions history requires: between eras, communities, political authorities, texts, interpretations, and believers.
The public-school boundary is not silence
A balanced classroom need not sanitize history. Christianity’s roles in colonization, abolition, segregation, immigration, and civil-rights organizing can be studied. So can early Islamic societies, theology, political expansion, trade, science, law, slavery, and Muslim diversity. Honest teaching can include harsh facts without asking students to accept a religious or anti-religious verdict.
For teachers, the safest posture is also the strongest. Use credible sources. Name historians’ disagreement. Do not turn a broad religious label into an explanation for terrorists’ or rulers’ acts. Assess evidence rather than assent. Teachers cannot repair every defect in a statewide standard, but their sources and questions will decide whether the words yield understanding or stigma.
Texas has time to make implementation credible. Before rollout, it can publish its source rationale, invite historians and scholars of religion—including scholars of Islam—to review materials, and train teachers for controversial questions. Districts can tell families what texts are used and what students will be asked to do with them. These are implementation measures, not declarations of lawfulness; no court has resolved that question here.
Advocacy groups have said they will work to overturn the standards. A court challenge is possible, but its outcome cannot responsibly be predicted. Litigation is a poor substitute for careful standards writing. A curriculum that is transparent about its sources and evenhanded in its scrutiny gives schools a better chance to educate rather than divide.
Implementation will decide the lived curriculum
The adoption vote was not the last word. The board anticipates an instructional-materials rubric in 2027, review in 2029, and approval in November 2029. Those steps will determine which texts, excerpts, maps, assignments, and teacher supports reach classrooms.
For readers trying to follow the process, each stage answers a different question. Standards state the knowledge and skills Texas expects; an instructional-materials rubric supplies criteria for reviewing resources; and local classroom work determines the examples, questions, and discussion students encounter. The scheduled reviews therefore give the public specific moments to inspect how broad language becomes classroom material.
Families can compare proposed resources with the adopted standards, while teachers can ask whether a resource identifies its sources, separates historical evidence from interpretation, and represents diversity within traditions. That practical scrutiny is more informative than predicting the future course from one contested phrase alone.
Parents, students, and educators can watch for evidence rather than assume the outcome. Do materials treat “Islam,” “Christianity,” or any other tradition as a single unchanging actor? Do they pair difficult history with reliable context? Are students invited to compare sources and recognize debate? Is professional development available when a lesson may expose a student to hostility? These questions do not demand theological agreement. They demand responsible public education.
This calls for restraint. Saying schools must never mention religion is neither historically serious nor constitutionally required. Saying a standard has settled the truth about a living faith is no better. The public interest lies in classrooms where students describe beliefs they do not share accurately, test claims with evidence, and see classmates as neighbors rather than symbols.
In my view, Texas is right to reject a religion-free version of history. Faith has shaped moral language, public institutions, art, and political choices; students deserve knowledge that makes those realities intelligible. The constitutional line does not require educators to speak as if religion were unimportant. It requires them to teach it without using public authority to privilege belief, compel devotion, or disparage people who believe differently.
For that reason, I think the adopted language about Islam is a serious risk. A curriculum can face episodes of violence and slavery honestly. It should make distinctions history demands: among eras, communities, rulers, texts, interpretations, and believers. The same standard should govern teaching about Christianity, Judaism, and every other tradition. That is not an argument for softening evidence. It is an argument for refusing caricature.
My forecast is conditional, not fact: transparent sources, scholarly review, and well-supported teachers could limit harm from the language. If it does not, students may inherit a more polarized understanding of religion and of one another. Public schools cannot settle theology. They can however model the disciplined fairness a plural society needs.
Texas has years before these standards reach high-school classrooms. That is time enough to choose rigorous religious literacy over religious shorthand—and to ensure that no student is taught a neighbor’s faith is a problem to solve rather than a history to understand.
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