Texas, that sprawling laboratory of American exceptionalism, has done it again. Governor Greg Abbott has signed an executive order mandating the inclusion of Bible stories in public school curricula. The rationale? A noble if transparently convenient desire to 'restore moral clarity' to a generation raised on TikTok and moral relativism. But beneath the pious rhetoric lies a deeper, more troubling current: the growing religious polarisation that threatens to fracture the Anglosphere into warring tribes of the faithful and the secular.
Let us not pretend this is a novel experiment. The Victorians, masters of hypocrisy, stuffed the Bible down the throats of their charges while turning a blind eye to the horrors of child labour and the workhouse. They understood, as the Texas legislature does, that religion is a useful tool for social control. But what works in a homogeneous society where everyone at least pretends to believe fails spectacularly in a pluralistic one. The result, predictably, is not moral uplift but cultural warfare.
We have seen this play before. The late Roman Republic, awash in exotic cults from Isis to Mithras, eventually collapsed under the weight of its own spiritual contradictions. The Christianisation of the empire, far from being a triumph of faith, was a desperate bid for unity by a dying state. Sound familiar? America, and by extension the Anglosphere, is now replaying this tragedy. The left clings to its own secular dogmas. The right retreats into fortress Christianity. Both sides speak past each other, each convinced of its own righteousness.
Texas, naturally, sees itself as the vanguard of a new Reformation. But the Bible, read as a text of law and order, misses the point entirely. The stories of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus are not morality tales for classroom consumption. They are subversive, radical, and deeply uncomfortable. The state that forces them into schools will find, as Constantine did, that you cannot tame the Word of God for political ends. It will turn on you.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Anglosphere watches with a mixture of horror and fascination. Britain, with its established church and its state-funded faith schools, is hardly a model of secular purity. But we at least pay lip service to the idea of tolerance. Texas, by contrast, has declared open season on the wall between church and state. The result will be a generation of students forced to study scripture they may not believe, taught by teachers who may not want to teach it. The outcome will not be spiritual awakening but intellectual resentment.
And what of the children? They are the real casualties here. They will learn that their identity is tribal. That faith is a weapon. That the state will use God to enforce its will. This is not the gospel of love. It is the gospel of power. The Romans knew this. The Victorians knew this. We seem to have forgotten it.
So as Texas marches backward into a theocratic fantasy, let us not pretend this is about education. It is about control. It is about fear. And it is about the slow, grinding collapse of a society that has lost its ability to agree on even the most basic shared truths. The Anglosphere, once the beacon of enlightenment, now burns with the fire of its own contradictions. Pass the popcorn. The show is just beginning.
