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Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general running for US Senate, has long believed in school prayer. Now, he’s prescribing precisely what type of prayer he wants the state’s 6 million public school students to recite.
“In Texas classrooms, we want the Word of God opened, the Ten Commandments displayed, and prayers lifted up,” Paxton said in a statement on Tuesday, encouraging students to say “the Lord’s Prayer, as taught by Jesus Christ”.
The press release included the full text of the Lord’s Prayer as it is written in the King James version of the Bible, the latest example of Paxton and other Texas officials seeming to endorse Christianity over other faiths.
“Twisted, radical liberals want to erase Truth, dismantle the solid foundation that America’s success and strength were built upon, and erode the moral fabric of our society,” Paxton said. “Our nation was founded on the rock of Biblical Truth, and I will not stand by while the far-left attempts to push our country into the sinking sand.”
Paxton’s statement was released as Senate Bill 11 went into effect across Texas; it’s a piece of Republican legislation allowing schools to set aside time for “prayer and reading of the Bible or other religious texts” during the school day. Critics have condemned the bill as an attempt to imbue a secular public education in the state with the practice of Christianity, in violation of the US constitution’s separation of church and state.
“They’re blowing right through separation of church and state,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.
“They have no respect for other faiths. And in fact, that includes a lot of Christians who don’t agree with this far-right version of Christianity. They’re trying to indoctrinate children into this agenda and it’s outrageous, and it’s breaking one of the most important constitutional principles we have in this country with the first amendment and the separation of church and state.”
Beirich added that Paxton, along with figures in Washington DC, such as the House speaker, Mike Johnson, were “people who believe that this country is a Christian nation, that Christianity should have primacy”.
Paxton’s office did not respond to a request for comment about whether he was trying to push Christianity on Texas’s public school students.
It is instructive, however, to revisit how Paxton once reacted to a report of Muslim students praying in a Dallas-area school. In 2017, the attorney general’s office published an open letter to the superintendent of schools in Frisco, Texas, expressing “concerns” over Muslim students at Liberty high school using a spare classroom to pray during school hours.
“It appears that the prayer room is ‘dedicated to the religious needs of some students’,” the letter stated, quoting an article in the school’s newspaper, “namely, those who practice Islam.”
In a subsequent press release, Paxton’s office stated: “Recent news reports have indicated that the high school’s prayer room is … apparently excluding students of other faiths.”
Again, “recent news reports” seemed to refer to a single article in the high school newspaper.
But that article, written by an 11th-grader, made no mention of the room being off-limits to students of other faiths. Rather, the article quotes the principal observing how “the trademark of what makes Liberty High so great” is the “diversity” of the faiths and cultures on campus.
“As long as it’s student-led, where the students are organizing and running it, we pretty much as a school stay out of that and allow them their freedom to practice their religion,” the principal said.
Had Paxton’s office checked with the school district before publishing its open letter, school officials would have noted the spare classroom was available for all students – not just Muslims – to practice their faith.
Paxton, it seemed, had tried to create a culture-war controversy out of thin air.
“It is unfortunate that our state’s top law enforcement officer would engage in a cheap Islamophobic publicity stunt that could very well result in increased bullying of Muslim students and the creation of a hostile learning environment,” the Texas chapter of the Council of American-Islamic Relations (Cair) said in a statement at the time.
That Paxton once fearmongered about Muslims praying in class but is now encouraging students to say the Lord’s Prayer is consistent with his particular brand of Christian nationalism or dominionism, which seeks to erode any wall between church and state, establishing a government run according to a far-right interpretation of Christian scripture.
During his time in public office, Paxton has received considerable financial support from a coterie of ultraconservative west Texas billionaires who, as ProPublica reported, have made the state into “the country’s foremost laboratory for Christian nationalist policy”.
On Thursday, Paxton announced he would appeal a “flawed ruling by a federal judge” that stopped another Christian nationalist piece of legislation from going into effect, this one requiring Texas schools to display the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms.
“The Ten Commandments are a cornerstone of American law, and that fact simply cannot be erased by radical, anti-American groups trying to ignore our moral heritage,” Paxton seethed in another statement.
“There is no legal reason to stop Texas from honoring a core ethical foundation of our law, especially not a bogus claim about the ‘separation of church and state,’ which is a phrase found nowhere in the Constitution.”
Paxton’s wife publicly accused him of disobeying the seventh commandment – “Thou shall not commit adultery” – earlier this summer while stating in a divorce petition that he had had an extramarital affair.
His Christian nationalist statements this week, Texas political observers have noted, might be an attempt to repair his reputation, and to shore up ultraconservative support in his battle to unseat John Cornyn in the US Senate.
If his agenda, and the GOP’s broader Christian nationalist agenda, is allowed to move forward, Beirich said, it will be “absolutely punishing for people of other faiths”.
In a statement to the Guardian, the Texas chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, was wary of Paxton’s insistence that students say the Lord’s Prayer in public schools: “Although protecting religious freedom in schools would be a noble pursuit, Attorney General Paxton’s rhetoric and his history of anti-Muslim bigotry raises the obvious suspicion that his embrace of religious liberty will not extend beyond his own claimed faith.
“If Attorney General Paxton wants schools to set aside time for praying and reading scripture, that must include time for Texas Muslims to read the Quran, Jewish students to read the Torah, and on and on,” the group added.
“Only if students of all faiths can freely worship on the same terms without any coercion or favoritism from the government will the Constitution be upheld.”
