Dear Texas school districts,
You have until March 1 to decide whether or not to provide official prayer periods for your students and faculty.
Texas Senate Bill 11, passed in June, requires school boards to vote on a policy designating prayer and Bible-reading time each school day.
As a non-Christian attending a Texas high school (whose board has fortunately voted against such a policy), I am alarmed by the state’s consistent attacks on secularism in public education, including the Bible-infused Bluebonnet Curriculum approved last year and SB 10’s mandate for Ten Commandments posters in classrooms.
SB 11, like the others, violates the Constitution and undermines religious diversity in public schools – except this time, the bill gives you, districts, a choice. I urge you to reject it.
While the bill does let you opt out, it really shouldn’t exist in the first place. The First Amendment prohibits making a “law respecting an establishment of religion”, and the Fourteenth Amendment requires individual states to comply with all other amendments. Furthermore, public schools are government institutions, and therefore prohibited from carrying out religious operations.
SB 11 tries to circumvent this separation by requiring prayer periods be conducted outside of instructional hours, but this doesn’t address the real problem: state-initiated prayer, which already has been ruled illegal in the Supreme Court. Abington School District v. Schempp (1963) concluded that Bible readings in schools are unconstitutional, even if students have the choice to opt out.
This isn’t just a technicality of who nominally gets the ‘leader of prayer period’ title. Even if you were to employ students to lead sessions, state institutions wield immense legal and social influence.
If religious activity is state-sanctioned, it socially alienates non-practicers. SB 11 may allow students to read other texts besides the Bible, but the bill’s political context still promotes one religion to some degree. At the very least, it discounts the 26% of Texans who are religiously unaffiliated, if not the 6% who practice non-Christian religions (Pew Research Center, 2024).
Considering this ⅓ of the state population, religion is more divisive than uniting in a school setting. I’ve personally witnessed anti-semitism in the classroom, which was deeply hurtful to many. Some may still argue that spirituality – particularly, Christianity – is an essential part of national identity and deserves to be promoted in schools. However, this country’s foundational history says otherwise, consistently emphasizing that Americans’ faith or lack thereof be without government influence.
Secularism in public education does not bar religious expression altogether. Students already have the right to individual religious expression at school without SB 11. My school itself happily accommodates a Fellowship of Christian Athletes and Catholic, Islamic Culture, and Jewish Clubs. As long as practices are limited to student-run activities, even in groups, they are legally protected.
Beyond legal precedence, separation of church and state isn’t just a relic of antiquated law.
As Texas House Representative and Presbyterian seminarian James Talarico puts it, a church affiliated with political power dilutes its own “prophetic voice” and “ability to speak truth to” spiritual matters. And this isn’t just theoretical; theocracies like Iran and Afghanistan notoriously weaponize religion to enforce political agendas, diminishing sacred legitimacy. Secular governance is therefore fundamental in protecting not only the state, but also the church in the United States.
School boards, you must consider the substantive legal precedence around religious establishments in state-funded institutions. SB 11 does not respect diversity by promoting religious expression in classrooms. It squashes it, purposefully inserting religion in educational institutions that are supposed to unite and educate, not divide and indoctrinate.
Rejecting a campus prayer-period policy would be the legal and moral thing to do. Just because higher authorities want to violate these standards does not mean that you have to too.
Sincerely,
Rajasi Agarwal
