This year, Texas will require its students to take a Bible course. In the supposedly secular public schools.

This could be a bad thing if all the schools bring in their local Southern Baptist minister to teach fundagelicalism…but it would be a great thing if the teachers brought a properly skeptical attitude towards it. Well, except for all the teacher lynchings that we’d be seeing around October.

A correction from the Texas Freedom Network:

Just a quick note about your post on Bible classes in Texas public schools. Unfortunately, the article you linked to in your post got it wrong – public schools in Texas are NOT required to offer Bible courses. In fact, we were successful in 2007 in changing that bill in committee so that high schools could choose whether or not they want to offer elective courses about the Bible’s influence in history and literature.

The Texas attorney general has ruled that the law, as written, does require that something about the Bible’s influence in history and literature must be in the curriculum somewhere, but it doesn’t have to be a separate course. Of course, many social studies and literature classes have long included samples of sacred writings from Christianity and the other major religions and explain their influence on various cultures. So we don’t think the law will change much unless school districts decide to offer separate Bible courses.