Texas unleashes sleeping giant as conservatives face reckoning over 'truth'

Texas Is Not Teaching “Truth.” It Is Using State Power to Sort Believers From Everyone ElsePower, PlainlyThe institution with actual power here is not a classroom teacher, a family, or a student. It is the Republican-controlled Texas State Board of Education, backed by a GOP legislature, a governor, and an attorney general willing to press the law past the point of constitutionality. They are the ones choosing the curriculum, mandating religious content, and spending public money to make it stick.That matters because the story is not about “values” in the abstract. It is about state authority deciding which faith gets normalized in public schools and which citizens are expected to sit quietly inside that choice.The Source Of The HarmThe reporting shows a familiar chain of command. In 2023, the legislature passed HB 1605, which set up the required reading list and ordered state-owned textbooks. The SBOE then approved Bluebonnet Learning, which already includes Christianity lessons starting in kindergarten. Now the board has gone further and required Bible reading for more than 5 million public school students.That is not cultural heritage. It is bureaucratic enforcement of religious preference.“Truth” As A Cover StoryBrandon Hall’s claim that Texas is a “Christian state” and that the board is “teaching the truth” is the tell. When officials say they are restoring truth, they usually mean they are laundering ideology through the authority of the state. The article itself notes that this “truth” omits climate change, U.S. imperialism, women’s history, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, slavery, and racism. That is not a curriculum mistake. It is a selection strategy.The point is not to broaden history. The point is to narrow the field of legitimate memory until power looks natural.Who Pays For The PerformanceThe cost is not symbolic only. Texas taxpayers are already being billed more than $8 million to correct thousands of errors in Bluebonnet Learning. That is what happens when political theater gets converted into state procurement: the public pays twice, first for the ideology and then for the cleanup.And while officials posture about morality, teachers are told to lose autonomy, families are told to accept the script, and children are told that the state’s preferred religion is classroom policy.Erasure By DesignThe push is also a sorting mechanism. The required list leans hard into Christian texts while excluding other faith traditions and the perspectives of nonreligious students. The Freedom From Religion Foundation says the message is unmistakable: one religion belongs, everyone else is an afterthought. Rabbi Joshua Fixler is making the same point from a different angle: this crosses from teaching about religion into teaching religion.That distinction is the whole fight. Once the state can blur it, it can turn schools into instruments of belonging for some children and quiet exclusion for others.The PatternThis is what authoritarian schooling looks like before it starts using bigger words. Ban books in the name of morality. Rewrite curriculum in the name of truth. Force religious material into public classrooms while pretending the act is neutral. Then call objections “unconstitutional” or “political” only when they come from the people being overridden.Texas is not confused about what it is doing. Its officials are using public institutions to privilege one religious worldview, erase inconvenient history, and train children to mistake power for tradition. Get full access to Systemic Error at paulstsmith.substack.com/subscribe