The left is in hysterics after the Texas State Board of Education approved new K-12 language arts curriculum standards for the 2030-2031 school year that include specific Bible stories and verses as required reading. Even though the board justified it as essential literary and cultural education rather than religious instruction, cries of “religious favoritism” and “separation of church and state” are dominating left-wing media.

“If you turn on CNN or the BBC or the Guardian or PBS, NBC, any of them, honestly, you'd think Texas had just crowned Jesus king of Texas and ordered every public school child to genuflect before a Bible on their teacher's desk,” scoffs Glenn Beck.

The truth, however, is that these standards do not in any way breach the First Amendment's Establishment Clause. They simply re-tether America — and the broader West — to her founding principles.

“There is no mandate to put a physical Bible in every classroom. There's no statewide requirement for devotional prayer or forced religious exercises. ... It’s literacy and historic study,” Glenn explains.

He points to the 1963 Supreme Court case Abington School District v. Schempp, in which the court ruled 8-1 that mandatory devotional Bible reading and prayer as opening religious exercises in public schools violated the First Amendment's Establishment Clause, while explicitly noting that objective, academic study of the Bible (for its literary and historic qualities) as part of a secular education program is permissible.

“Texas is not becoming a theocracy,” says Glenn. “They are walking through a door the Supreme Court left wide open and that our founders walked through with conviction.”

In 1782, Congress even officially endorsed the Aitken Bible (the first complete English-language Bible printed in the United States) for both religious study and literacy advancement in schools.

“One of the very first things that our representatives did ... was to put the Bible in the hands of American families and schools,” says Glenn. “That's not Christian nationalism. That's the actual founding character of our republic.”

For most of American history, he explains, the Bible was not only “not controversial in schools” but actually seen as “central” to public education.

The McGuffey Readers, first published in the 1830s by educator William Holmes McGuffey, were hugely popular 19th-century American schoolbooks that taught reading, morality, and character through stories, poems, and excerpts that heavily featured the Bible alongside classic literature.

“Children learned to read from the Bible. They learned character from the Bible. That was normal,” says Glenn. “What happened in the 1960s — that was the radical break, not Texas 2026.”

Texas, he argues, is “right” to require Bible readings because students “cannot understand Western civilization,” including its most cherished literature, without it.

“Remove the Bible and half of Shakespeare goes dark. Try reading Milton's ‘Paradise Lost.’ ... Try to understand Dante's ‘Divine Comedy.’ ... You cannot understand ‘Pilgrim's Progress,’ ‘Moby Dick,’ ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ Dostoevsky’s novels of sin and redemption — any of this,” Glenn exclaims.

Other forms of art crucial to the West become inaccessible too.

From Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” and da Vinci's “Last Supper” to European cathedrals and the great concertos, sonatas, and symphonies of Bach and Beethoven, the Bible is preeminent to the West’s greatest artistic achievements.

“The Ten Commandments are woven into the Western legal codes. ... You don't understand the Declaration of Independence if you don't understand the Bible. You don't understand the abolition movement in Britain and America ... Lincoln, the second inaugural address — what is that other than just one giant biblical meditation on sin and judgment and mercy?” Glenn adds, emphasizing Scripture’s foundational role in Western history.

“Trying to understand Western civilization — the art, the literature, the music, its laws, its ethics, the very language — without the Bible is trying to understand the Middle East without the Quran. It is the foundational text; remove it, and the culture becomes incoherent,” he declares.

He warns that when a civilization becomes untethered to its foundation, everything begins to unravel.

“The morals drift; the art loses meaning; the law loses anchor; and most importantly — and don't the progressives know it — the people lose their story,” he laments. “That's what's been happening for 60 years in American education.”

Glenn praises Texas for bringing Scripture back into academics where it rightfully belongs. “They are doing what they must do: simply refusing to continue the lie that the Bible is irrelevant to who we are.”

To hear more, watch the video above.

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