by Daisy Mae Inglese, Restoring the West
If future generations are to guard the West, they must know the texts that form the bedrock of our civilization.
The argument: Texas is right to require biblical texts in schools regardless of religion, race, or creed. They restore the shared cultural literacy and moral vocabulary our fragmented society has lost.
WHY IT MATTERS
Texas’s recent decision to require biblical stories in the education of five million public school students goes beyond the study of classical texts. It seeks to heal generations that have lost a shared language, morality, identity, and purpose. For generations, biblical stories provided a common vocabulary that bound people together, whether they had faith or not. Restoring these stories to our shared understanding, therefore, is not religious instruction. It is essential to rebuilding a broken culture.
The long-term decline of religious education in the public school has severed generations from their cultural inheritance. As the principle that religion should not interfere with the state took hold, it produced an unintended consequence: the belief that a serious education should exclude religion altogether. Christian literacy was quietly relegated to the home and places of worship, while schools continued to teach history, literature, and ethics without the biblical foundations that shaped them. The result is not neutrality, but historical and cultural illiteracy, leaving generations without a fundamental understanding of who they are and where they came from.
To believe in the goodness of Western civilization is to recognize that biblical literacy matters for everyone, even those who fundamentally reject Christianity’s theological claims. The ideas that flow from Genesis, Exodus, the Gospels, and Christ’s parables reach far beyond scripture. They have shaped the West’s literature, political rhetoric, music, art, and law. More profoundly, the Bible gave people a foundation for understanding the meaning and purpose of their existence. Putting the Bible alongside Dickens and Shakespeare makes educational sense. But at a deeper level, it plants a seed in the hearts and minds of young people: that perhaps they were made for more than this world offers them.