Texas Fights for a Christian Identity

Texas’s State legislators deserve a lot of praise for consistently writing and passing legislation, especially over the last few years, that aims to strengthen the Christian Faith in their State.  It is precisely these efforts that have caused the anti-Christian opposition to reveal itself so completely. 
 
The Texas chapter of the ACLU, for instance, has raised objections to the following bills, which are not radical proposals for a predominantly Christian nation like Texas: ​

• Senate Bill 1515, which requires the display of the Ten Commandments “in a conspicuous place in each classroom of the school.” 
  

• Senate Bill 1396, which authorizes school boards to require a period of prayer and Bible reading in public schools. 
  

• Senate Bill 1556, which emboldens public school employees to claim a right to pray at any time, without interference or objection from the school. 
  

• Senate Bill 763, which allows so-called “chaplains” to serve as school counselors. ​
  

The Texas Tribune provides more objections from other people and organizations: ​

Andy Wine thinks most children can understand the Golden Rule. Talking over your peers is rude. Insulting others is mean. Don't hurt people. In short, it’s common sense, Wine said. 
 
That’s why the 43-year-old parent of two, who is an atheist, finds it appalling that the Texas Education Agency wants to incentivize public schools to teach the Golden Rule as a core value in the Bible. 
 
“We teach kids to be nice to each other and to share,” said Wine, a member of the Freethinkers Association of Central Texas, a social organization of religiously unaffiliated people. “You don't need to bring up any religion in order to do it.” 
 
Religious and nonreligious groups have raised concerns like this since the TEA proposed a curriculum that would insert Bible teachings into K–5 reading and language arts lessons. . . .  
 
“It's a question of inclusivity,” said Jackie Nirenberg, regional director of Anti-Defamation League Austin, an organization fighting antisemitism and bias against Jewish communities. “It's also a very slippery slope. Because once we open the door to that kind of content, it's much easier to get more and more religious content into the curriculum.” 
 
 . . . “What I hear a lot in Texas is parental rights — that we have the right to be able to make decisions about our children's education,” said Nabila Mansoor, a Muslim who is the executive director of Rise AAPI, which primarily serves Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities. “And yet, this particular faith tradition is being superimposed on children who come from many different faith backgrounds and whose parents would find it very offensive.” ​

Most of these folks who object to the Texas State government’s attempts to reintroduce Christianity into the public school curriculum extol multiculturalism.  Because Texas isn’t monolithically Christian, they argue, she shouldn’t advocate for one faith over another.  Per the Tribune: ​

Texas is one of the most religiously diverse states in the nation. Seventy-seven percent of adults adhere to some form of Christianity, according to a study conducted in 2007 and 2014 by the Pew Research Center. Non-Christian faiths, such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam, constitute 4% of adults, while 18% are not affiliated with any religion. ​

There are two things that should be taken into account on this point.  First, those who are new arrivals in a place with an established culture (and Texas does have a long-established Christian culture, as we shall see) are expected to conform to the culture of the place into which they are settling.  The Muslims, Buddhists, and others who want Texas to scrap her Christian school proposals are demanding the opposite, that the host conform to their demands.  It is an immoral demand, but in the age of Revolution it is not too surprising to see it made. 
 
Second, we have a duty not simply to do justice to the present generation, but to the past generations as well.  To use the worn-out secular Enlightenment terminology, that means that the dead also have ‘rights’ that we must respect.  Texas’s ancestors established a Christian culture; their descendants are bound by a commandment of the Lord Himself (‘Honor thy father and thy mother’—Exodus 20:12) to uphold the good things their forefathers raised up and passed on to them as a precious inheritance. The newcomers ought not to demand that Texans break this commandment of filial piety and love for the sake of their false multicultural utopian ideal. 
 
The beginnings of Texas’s origins lie in the Spanish explorers and settlers of the 16th century.  One of their principal aims in coming to North America was to plant the Christian Faith on this continent.  One can see with just a cursory glance at place names in Texas that this is what they did.  Some of those names include Saints’ names (San Augustine, San Patricio, San Saba), but there are other Christian references, too (San Angelo, referring to the holy angels, and Corpus Christi, that is, the Holy Body of Christ that is consumed at the time of Holy Communion by Christians, and the feast day established in Its honor).  All subsequent generations of Texans have supported this culture, but now they are told it is an evil act to do so. 
 
They should ignore such calls per the foregoing.   
 
But there is another reason Texans should support their Christian culture, and it is the most important one – because Christianity is the True Faith.  Joseph Pearce, writing at The Imaginative Conservative, elaborates: ​

In brief and in sum, Western Civilization in its fullness and fruitfulness is a synonym for Christendom. It is the consummation of the mythological and philosophical musings of the Greeks and the fulfilment of the theological covenant of the Jews in the Person of Jesus Christ as made manifest in the Church He founded throughout the centuries since His Incarnation. The quest and questions of Athens and Jerusalem are fulfilled and answered in the Gospel as enunciated by the One who proclaims Himself to be the Way, the Truth and the Life. Christ incarnates the transcendental trinity of the Good, the True and the Beautiful in who He is. ​

Texas, as a part of Western Christendom, has found the Fulfilment of the ages, the Pearl of Great Price, in Christ Jesus.  Those who now ask her to throw Him away for some other faith or ideal (such as religious neutrality or religious pluralism) are quite literally asking her to commit suicide.  Mr. Pearce continues, and what he says of Islam can be applied to any religion aside from Christianity: ​

If this is so, the Qur’an is not one of the foundational pillars of wisdom on which the West is built but is a subversive text which undermines those very foundations. If Christ is who He says He is, Muhammed is a false prophet [and Buddha, Hanuman, etc.—W.G.]. This is as logically inescapable as it is theologically obvious. 
 
As for the fruit of the Qur’an’s influence with respect to Western Civilization, it has been bitter indeed. Islam as a military force overthrew the emerging Christian civilization in the Middle East and north Africa and would eventually overthrow Constantinople, the capital city of eastern Christendom. At the height of its military incursions into the heart of Christian Europe, it reached as far north as Tours, in northern France. Had Islam prevailed, the Christian Bible and Augustine’s City of God would have been smothered by censorship and the sands of time, which is to say, in modern parlance, that they would have been “cancelled”. There would have been no Summa Theologica of Aquinas and no Divine Comedy of Dante. There would have been no heritage of Western art, no Renaissance, no Romanesque or Gothic architecture, no Shakespeare. These icons of civilization would have been cancelled in a debauch of iconoclasm. ​

The Texas State government seems unwilling to deny Christ, for the most part, though there are some troubles on the horizon.  Some folks within it are trying to water down Christ’s divinity (via the Tribune story linked above; bolding added): ​

The proposed curriculum would prompt teachers to relay the story of The Good Samaritan — a parable about loving everyone, including your enemies — to kindergarteners as an example of what it means to follow the Golden Rule. The story comes from the Bible, the lesson explains, and “was told by a man named Jesus” as part of his Sermon on the Mount, which included the phrase, “Do unto others as you would have done unto you.” 
 ​

The Church Fathers who fought so valiantly against heretics like Arius and Nestorius who denied the full divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ would be sickened by reading a phrase as careless as the one used by the Texas Education Agency:  ‘a man named Jesus’. 
 
Others in her government are trying to pander to the growing Asian population in Texas (also from the Tribune story):  ‘A fourth grade poetry unit includes Kshemendra, a poet from India who “studied Buddhism and Hinduism.”’ 
 
Be such things as they may, the overall trajectory of Texas’s project to strengthen her Christian culture is generally positive, one that she will hopefully not abandon, for the sake of her own people and for the sake of other Western countries, who might be encouraged to repent of their own betrayal of Christ by her good example. 
 
The one thing that could derail all of this is Texas’s own constitution, which includes provisions that forbid the State government to place any force whatsoever on the human conscience as it relates to what religion one practices (especially Article 1, Section 6).  This is an unfortunate holdover from the deistic/atheistic ‘Age of Enlightenment’.  But the world, including the West, is moving away from the strict rationalism and religious skepticism of the Enlightenment; a rather wild and chaotic rush back towards religions of all kinds is now taking place. 
 
Texas could do herself and Christendom an act of great kindness by getting out in front of this trend, and rewriting the sections on religion to favor Christianity specifically for the sake of protecting her citizens from all the false and harmful religions and cults out there.  Freedom of religion wouldn’t have to be abolished completely; other religious faiths could co-exist with Christianity, but if any of their tenets promoted anything that conflicted with Christian morality, such things would be declared illegal. 
 
Without such a proactive step, Texas faces a religious future that resembles the Wild West of her past.  In such an environment, Texans will not flourish, and their culture will enter a phase of steep decline that Germany, France, and other Western European countries are currently undergoing for making that same fateful decision, for extolling religious pluralism/relativism instead of being faithful to Christ. 
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