"A Significant Worry"

Many Texans of faith oppose injecting sectarian content into public education. Including Baptists.

SB10 and SB11 are bills in the current Texas legislative session seeking to advance sectarian religious education and practices in public schools. Many faith leaders—including leaders in the traditions being advanced—oppose these bills. Both bills received hearings this week in the Senate Committee on Education K-16. Both bills passed out of committee the same day they were heard, putting them on a fast track to the Senate floor.

Reverend Jody Harrison is an ordained Baptist minister with a long career—as a staffer to Republican legislators, hospital NICU chaplain, and clergywoman. Her public testimony against SB11, which would require local Texas school boards to consider requiring teachers to hold periods of “prayer and Bible reading” during the school day, focused on her personal and professional concern that the bill “violates a foundational tenet of the Baptist faith,” namely preferring one type of Christian faith over other expressions of Christianity and other spiritual paths.

Senator Donna Campbell disagreed with Rev. Harrison’s testimony, and took the opportunity to lecture Rev. Harrison from the dais on Baptist doctrine. In her defense of SB11, Sen. Campbell asserts that the foundation of Baptist faith is to be “a disciple and a witness for Christ” which she takes to mean supporting the Ten Commandments in classrooms and prayer in schools, not “a fight for separation of church and state.”

The Ten Commandments came up because the Senate Committee on Education K-16, who were hearing SB11, also were hearing SB10, which would require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom in Texas. SB10 prescribes the specific translation of the Ten Commandments to be displayed, and prohibits schools from accepting donated of the Ten Commandments that have language other than the exact language in the bill. In her testimony against both SB10 and SB11, Lutheran Pastor Jessica Cain, a member of the San Marcos school board, pointed out that there are different versions of the Ten Commandments, and different traditions number them differently.

In the Baptist publication Word & Way, Rev. Dr. Greg Mamula writes that posting the Ten Commandments in classrooms “weakens both Church and State.” As a Baptist minister, Mamula fears “The potential for the Ten Commandments to be misused, particularly in the absence of a comprehensive understanding of their context and meaning, is a significant worry.”