The news from Texas is grim but predictable: the Lone Star State now mandates Bible stories in public schools, wrapping scripture in the flag of educational reform. This is not an isolated curriculum tweak. It is a declaration of cultural war, a retreat from reason into the bosom of a very particular religious tradition.
And yet, the UK Foreign Office has deemed it appropriate to issue a warning about ‘cultural division.’ How quaint. How utterly British.
We tut-tut from a distance as if our own history does not groan under the weight of sectarian strife, as if the English Civil War was fought over tea and biscuits. Texas has decided that the Good Book is the bedrock of literacy, character, and national identity. But whose book?
Whose interpretation? The mandate, as it stands, is a Trojan horse for a specific brand of evangelical Protestantism. It ignores the growing religious diversity of Texas itself, a state where Catholic Hispanics, secular liberals, and a small but vocal Muslim population are hardly clamouring for the Book of Job on the curriculum.
This is the same logic that gave us the ‘moral majority’ and the Christian right: the assumption that ‘American values’ are indistinguishable from biblical literalism. The British government’s warning is not empty. We have seen what happens when religion is grafted onto state education.
The shadow of Northern Ireland looms large. The divisive role of faith schools has been a fixture of our own debates. But warning Texas is like warning a hurricane.
The storm has already made landfall. What is more disturbing is the intellectual decadence that allows such a policy to be taken seriously. In an era that prides itself on data, on evidence based policy, we are told that the moral lessons of David and Goliath are as vital as the theory of evolution.
This is not education. This is catechesis. And it is a dangerous precedent.
If Texas succeeds, other states will follow. The United Kingdom, for all its secularism, has its own fault lines. The Church of England remains established.
Faith schools are publicly funded. We are not in a position to cast stones, but we are in a position to warn: when you blur the line between church and state, you do not get harmony. You get theocracy.
And theocracy, as history teaches us, ends in tears. Or in civil war. The Texas mandate is a small step, but it is a step backwards.
To Rome. To Geneva. To an age of compulsion and conformity.
Britain should not stand idly by. We should offer a model of secular, pluralistic education that respects all faiths and none. Instead, we warn from a distance, as if cultural division is an exotic disease that cannot cross the Atlantic.
It can. It will. And when it does, we will have no one to blame but our own complacency.
