“In a state as diverse as Texas, home to millions of people from countless faiths and beliefs,” Hinojosa continued, public schools should focus on preparing students for college and the workforce because “the teaching of religious doctrine should stay in our places of worship where it belongs.”

But Hinojosa is dead wrong. It is precisely because the United States, and Texas, is “home to millions of people from countless faiths and beliefs” that public schools have a greater duty, now more than ever, to teach students about Christian thought, biblical literature, and the values that shaped American institutions.

The founders of our great nation understood this better than anyone. In Federalist No. 2, John Jay, the future first chief justice of the Supreme Court, described Americans as “a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government.”

Later, in his farewell address, President George Washington proclaimed, “The name of American, which belongs to you in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived from local discriminations.”

“With slight shades of difference,” Washington continued, “you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles.”

Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia signatory of the Declaration of Independence, wrote, “Our schools of learning, by producing one general, and uniform system of education, will render the mass of the people more homogeneous, and thereby fit them more easily for uniform and peaceable government.”

“The only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in religion,” Rush continued. “Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments.”

These statements reflect the founders’ belief that a democratic republic like ours needed a shared understanding of the world, settled moral standards, and a common public language in order to survive. Christianity and the Bible shaped the intellectual world of nearly every founder, including those whose personal beliefs departed from orthodox Christianity. The Old and New Testaments were foundational texts of the culture they shared.

This does not mean that the founders wanted any one sect of Christianity to be taught as truer than any other in schools. Quite the opposite. At independence, Americans worshipped as Congregationalists, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers, Lutherans, Methodists, Moravians, Mennonites, and Catholics. These groups disagreed sharply over theology, church government, sacraments, and worship. What united them was not adherence to a single creed or denomination, but familiarity with the same biblical stories, moral vocabulary, and conception of human nature.

This is why Article VI of the Constitution forbids the creation of a “religious test” as a “qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” It is also why the First Amendment says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

The founders fully believed that a person’s religion must be chosen freely. During the 1776 debate over the Virginia Declaration of Rights, James Madison argued that “religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.”

Later, while fighting a Virginia proposal that would have imposed a tax to pay Christian teachers, Madison explained that “ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of Religion, have had a contrary operation,” producing “pride and indolence in the Clergy,” “ignorance and servility in the laity,” and “superstition, bigotry and persecution.”

Madison did not see state-subsidized religion as merely a violation of individual rights, but as a threat to belief itself, because government support made religious leaders complacent, believers submissive, and faith less genuine.

But the phrase so often employed by Democrats, that the First Amendment created a “wall of separation between Church & State” forbidding any mention of the Bible in public schools, appears nowhere in the Constitution.

The phrase originated in 1802, when the Danbury Baptist Association wrote to newly elected President Thomas Jefferson about Connecticut’s establishment laws. The 14th Amendment did not exist for another 66 years, so the First Amendment’s prohibition against establishing religion then applied only to Congress, not to states such as Connecticut.

In his response, Jefferson wrote that the First Amendment had built “a wall of separation between Church & State.” He was reassuring a religious minority that the federal government would neither establish a national church nor interfere with its worship.

The phrase remained largely obscure for more than a century before Justice Hugo Black, an anti-Catholic former member of the Ku Klux Klan, revived it in Everson v. Board of Education. Although Black upheld a New Jersey program providing transportation benefits to students attending both public and parochial schools, the metaphor later helped shape a stricter separationist jurisprudence.

In Lemon v. Kurtzman, the Supreme Court invalidated a Pennsylvania program reimbursing private schools, including Catholic schools, for the costs of teaching secular subjects. The majority held that monitoring religious-school teachers to ensure they remained strictly secular would require “excessive government entanglement.”

Lemon has since been overturned. But even under the Supreme Court’s stricter separationist jurisprudence, the court recognized that the Bible could be taught in public schools for its “literary and historic qualities.” In Abington School District v. Schempp, the court invalidated a Pennsylvania policy requiring Bible readings and recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, but added: “Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment.”

To be perfectly transparent, I am not a Christian, nor have I ever been one. I was raised in a secular household. I have never been baptized, nor have I ever belonged to a church, Christian or otherwise.

The first time I read the Bible was in a secular high school English class. The thinking was that, if we were going to read the classics of Western civilization, including Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, we needed at least a passing familiarity with the Old and New testaments. Even more recent authors, such as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner, require an understanding of Christian references and concepts.

The same logic applies to American political thought. In Federalist No. 51, Madison wrote, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” His case for checks and balances rested on a biblical view of human nature: People are capable of self-government but are also prone to pride, ambition, and the abuse of power.

In Federalist No. 37, Madison described the Constitution as evidence of “that Almighty hand” that had repeatedly aided the nation. His reference to the “finger” of God drew on biblical language his readers would have immediately understood.

We are not, and never have been, a nation where anyone had to become a Christian to participate in public life. Quite the opposite. From the beginning, the founders sought to protect everyone’s freedom of conscience, not only for their own well-being, but for the health of religion itself.

CELEBRITY CULTURE WAS A MISTAKE

That said, America was founded by Christians who infused our founding documents and institutions with Christian values and understandings. As more Americans are raised without any understanding of the Bible, it becomes increasingly incumbent upon our education system to ensure that every American is familiar with the moral and cultural language that America inherited.

Teaching the Bible for its historical and literary significance does not impose Christianity on students. It gives students of every faith and no faith equal access to the ideas, stories, and language that shaped our country. Texas is not establishing a religion — it is ensuring that future citizens can understand the civilization and Constitution they have inherited, and more states should do the same.