Here we go again. The great American experiment in religious liberty has taken another turn, one that will have our bien-pensant British education chiefs clutching their pearls and reaching for a stiff cup of tea. Texas, that vast laboratory of conservative governance, has mandated the teaching of Bible stories in public schools.
The headlines are shrill: 'Religious polarisation!' they cry. But let us pause and consider what this really means.
Is it an assault on secularism, or is it simply a recognition that you cannot understand Western civilisation without understanding the Good Book? Our own Victorian forebears would have laughed at the suggestion that a child could be educated without at least a passing familiarity with Genesis, Exodus, and the Gospels. They knew that the Bible is not merely a religious text but a cultural touchstone, a source of metaphor and law and literature.
To excise it entirely is to render our children semiliterate in their own heritage. And yet here we are, tut-tutting at the Texans as if they had just reinstituted the Spanish Inquisition. The real polarisation, I would argue, is not between religious and secular, but between those who understand that a society must have a shared moral vocabulary and those who believe we can float free of history, like so many fallen angels.
The British officials who warn of 'polarisation' are themselves the agents of a deeper division: they assume that any mention of faith is inherently divisive, whereas a sterile, bureaucratic multiculturalism is neutral. It is not. It is its own kind of dogma, and a thin one at that.
So let Texas teach its Bible stories. Perhaps, in a generation, their children will know why they speak of 'prodigal sons' and 'good Samaritans', while ours will be left to Google the references in a novel they no longer read.
