Today, my high school looks very different. My classmates are Jewish, Catholic, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, atheist and everything in between. That diversity has made me appreciate something I rarely questioned as a young child. Even in a private school setting, students come from many different backgrounds, which means no single belief system can define the experience for everyone.

That question is now at the centre of a growing debate in Texas.

In June, the Texas State Board of Education voted to make stories and passages from the Bible part of the state’s kindergarten-through-12th-grade (K-12) English and literature curriculum. This will affect more than five million public school students, starting in 2030.

The decision establishes a required reading list for every grade level in Texas’s public schools. Alongside canonical works of American literature, students will read Bible stories such as David and Goliath, Daniel and the lions’ den, passages from Genesis, and selections from Psalms.

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Supporters insist these texts are being taught for their literary and historical significance, arguing that students cannot fully understand Western civilisation or the founding of the United States without a working knowledge of the Bible.

Critics see something else entirely: a state government stepping beyond teaching about religion and into enforcing it.

As someone who grew up receiving a religious education, I don’t believe the problem is that students are reading the Bible.

The First Amendment protects both the free exercise of religion and prohibits the government from establishing one. Those two principles work hand-in-hand to ensure that students of every faith, and of no faith, can enter a public school knowing the state is not endorsing one belief system over another.

The Supreme Court has long recognised that teaching about religion is constitutional when it serves a genuine educational purpose. Requiring specific biblical passages as part of a state-mandated curriculum, however, raises a different question of the difference between teaching and promoting. That distinction will likely become the focus of the legal challenges many constitutional scholars expect to follow from the Texas decision.

A broader debate over religion

The decision also comes amid a series of educational debates in Texas that have increasingly centred on religion.

Earlier this year, Muslim parents and several Islamic private schools filed federal lawsuits against the state after they were excluded from Texas’s new school voucher programme. The plaintiffs argued that schools meeting the programme’s academic requirements were denied participation because of their religious identity, raising concerns about whether the state is applying its policies equally across faiths.

At the same time, the Texas Education Agency concluded its investigation into allegations of antisemitism in a school district in the city of Plano. Investigators documented multiple incidents – including antisemetic bullying, curriculum concerns and failures to follow district procedures – but ultimately found no systemic violation of civil rights law.

For many Jewish families, the finding raised difficult questions about what constitutes meaningful protection for religious minorities in public schools.

Together, these concerns illustrate a broader shift in how Texas is navigating the relationship between religion and public education. Whether intentionally or not, the state increasingly finds itself deciding which religious influences belong in schools and how different faith communities are treated under its policies.

The Texas Board insists that these changes are about education, not religion. But making those texts required for every public school student is what transforms this from a curriculum debate into a constitutional one.

There is a meaningful difference between teaching students about the influence of religion and having the state determine which religious texts every child must study. In a public school system that serves millions of students from countless religious backgrounds, that distinction is crucial.

The courts will ultimately decide whether Texas has stayed within the bounds of the First Amendment, but the conversation shouldn’t end there. Even if the new curriculum is upheld, it forces us to ask what role religion should play in the public education system designed to serve everyone, not just Christianity.