In June, the Texas State Board of Education decided that the best way to teach five million public school kids about literature was to assign them Scripture — David and Goliath for the eight-year-olds, the Sermon on the Mount for the middle schoolers, and the Book of Job for the teenagers who’ve already lost enough sleep over algebra.

Nobody’s mad about the Bible being good literature. It is. Hemingway himself turned to it for inspiration — The Sun Also Rises, anyone? The problem is a small detail: the state of Texas is assigning these biblical texts to kindergartners on up. Not parents or their faith leaders; the state of Texas — a government entity who is now apparently more adept on deciding how to teach the Gospels to schoolchildren.

And in a state where roughly a third of residents aren’t Christian, the list somehow found room for Protestant translations of everything, plus one lonely, outdated Jewish translation, and nothing else. No Quran, no Bhagavad Gita, one faith’s Scripture, stamped with a state seal, handed to every kindergartner in Texas whether their family wanted it or not.

Supporters insist this isn’t proselytizing — just “introducing kids to the wealth and breadth of a canon of Western literature.” Nothing says objective literary survey quite like assigning 9th graders the Parable of the Prodigal Son and calling it Tuesday.

Supporters have also been generous enough to explain that choosing the King James Bible had nothing to do with theology and everything to do with “cultural and literary relevance” — a genuinely creative way to describe picking the translation most associated with one Protestant tradition and insisting, with a straight face, that this was a curriculum decision and not a religious one.

BJC and its partners in Texas pointed out the actual problem — translation exclusivity, zero representation for other faiths, the state taking the role of a parent or faith leader — with a fact sheet, nearly 200 clergy signatures across faith traditions, a busload of Texans who drove to Austin to testify, and a biblical analysis handed directly to Board members who asked for it.

The vote passed 9-5 anyway. Somewhere, a kindergartner is about to learn the Bible from the state of Texas — whether they’re Christian or not and whether their parents want it or not. Somewhere else, that’s being filed under objective literary education.

For more, visit BJConline.org/TXSBOE.