How do you keep faith in TEKS?

Jun 27, 2026

So Texas has decided to add bible verses and stories to its state curriculum. I won’t get into the politics of this. But I wanted to get into why I think this is a bad idea for people of faith.

I was raised a missionary kid and I have attended a lot of churches. My parents saw visiting new churches as a fun thing to do on vacation. We would visit churches and do our dog-and-pony show to try to raise money for our mission work. I could go into why having the state roll out a version of Christianity is a bad idea based upon the diversity of theological ideas that exist even within American Christiantiy, but I don’t think most people care about that. Most Southern Baptists probably don’t know or care that their church doesn’t have a central theology that all churches have to adopt.¹

I think the bigger issue isn’t about theology, but about a loss of faith.

I have been an atheist for almost two decades now. I still struggle with that label because it feels like it is applied as a type of religion itself. If I had become an atheist in my teens I feel like it would have been a belief system. I would have strongly believed there was no God. But what I have now is an absence of faith, which is very different from believing or not-believing in God.

After having my daughter we started attending church again and the best way I can describe it was that my faith at the time was like whispy clouds in a sunny summer sky. One-by-one they slipped away until the sky was completely clear. It wasn’t a decision. It was just that the faith had floated away in a gentle breeze.

I was at the barriers at the Pride parade a few years back and a woman came up and started talking to me. She told me that she had suffered several miscarriages, and that the last time she had gotten pregnant was after Pride the year before. She had just gone out on a date with her husband that night and they had come across the parade. She had found hope that night, and so she came back because it was a place she now found community and hope. The people at Pride were on her side.

This makes me think of why people go to church. Despite the number of arguments I’ve heard that God always answers prayer - he doesn’t. Religion is not transactional. No matter how many times pastors want to suggest that if you go to church every Sunday good things will come to you, I think most chruch goers realize there is no guarantee.

So why do people go? For the exact same reason that woman went to pride. She knew having a successful pregnancy was a long shot, but she was supported there. People talked to her and offered her sympathy and hope.

So what happens when we try to bring scripture into schools? They’re bringing it in via the King James Version. So the language will be similar to Shakespeare. Kids will be exposed to peers joking and ridiculing the language and stories. They may be exposed to kids who can tell you why the King James Version is a politically minded translation. There may be kids of other faiths and denominations who explain the similar stories they know. In short they become just stories. They are Beowulf or the Canterbury Tales. Stories written in old-timey language divorced from the mystery of faith and church community. When liturgy becomes literature it encourages those whispy clouds of faith to float away.

We routinely hear about European nations as being godless, but many of them have state religions. England has the Church of England which a majority of English say they are members of, but the overwheliming majority of those Christians say they never or hardly ever attend church. Finland, Norway, and Sweden all have state churches. Many nations have compulsory religion education which does not seem to have had a positive effect on church attendance or faith.

I don’t actually want to take people’s faith from them. I think faith can bring hope and peace to our lives. People of different faiths worry their kids will feel uncomfortable or face bullying for being different, but I don’t know that I think it’ll happen more than it already does. I think it will make the Bible common. Boring. Silly. Just another TEK² that the kids have to learn to pass. And how do you find faith in a TEK?

Which is also a major reason why they have a sex abuse problem, but I digress
[Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills](https://tea.texas.gov/curriculum-and-instruction/texas-essential-knowledge-and-skills-teks)