> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.theredlighthouse.org/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # I Have Wanted a Texas Textbook to Say This About My Faith for Years. On Friday One Did. Then I Read What the Same Page Says About My Neighbor. - URL: https://www.theredlighthouse.org/discerner-texas-ninth-commandment/ - Published: 2026-09-09T18:59:20.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-09T18:59:20.000Z - Description: Texas will teach its students that Christianity built the West and that Islam began in brutality. The board's own experts said the second half does not hold up. A Christian reading of the ninth commandment. - Author: The Red Lighthouse - Tags: The Discerner, News Stories I will confess the first thing I felt when I read the new Texas standards, because it was not alarm. It was a small, warm satisfaction. Students in world history will be expected to describe "the roots of Western civilization in Christianity," the persecution under Nero, the Edict of Milan, the Nicene Creed, the monasteries and hospitals and orphanages. They will learn that William Wilberforce's faith drove him to end the slave trade. In government class they will meet Blackstone's view that human law should answer to God's. I have argued every one of those points at a dinner table. I have wanted someone with a gavel to agree with me. On Friday, September 4, the people with the gavel did. The fifteen member Texas State Board of Education gave final approval to a rewrite of what high school students learn in social studies, to take effect, depending on which report you read, in 2030 or 2033. Then I kept reading. The same standards require Texas teenagers to explain early Islam in terms of Muhammad's "brutal military campaigns against Jewish and Christian tribes," the normalization of slavery, and "the taking of female captives as harem slaves." A Republican member, Will Hickman, moved to strike the word brutal. His colleagues voted him down. Another member, Brandon Hall, said keeping it was a "moral imperative." Three of the experts the board itself had appointed told the members the passage would not survive scrutiny. The board approved it anyway. Let me be fair to the people who voted yes, because the point of this column is not to win but to find out what is true. The men who flew the planes on September 11 said Islam was their reason, and a standard that names "radical Islam" as their motive is not a lie. Muhammad's military campaigns are recorded in Islam's own traditional sources. Christianity did shape the West. A Christian who is glad to see that in a textbook is not a bigot. But listen to what the board's own experts said. Andrea Hutchison, who runs social studies curriculum for the Prosper school district, wrote that the Muhammad passage does not "hold up to close historical scrutiny." Robert Koons, a philosophy professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told the board that most nonreligious scholars find the sources for those claims "not very reliable." "I would warn us about including things that are not based on well-established secular sources," he said on Friday. So the state will require children to learn, as fact, a characterization its own advisers say rests on unreliable sources, on the same page where it describes my faith in the voice of its admirers. That is the thing I could not get past. Not the content. The two rulers. When the board wrote about Christianity it chose the Nicene Creed and the hospitals. It did not write "explain early Christianity in terms of the Crusades and the Inquisition." It could have. An eleven year old named Sarah, who plays softball and would not give her last name, told the board on Monday that slavery existed for thousands of years before Islam, and that it was unfair to call slavery Islamic without also discussing the Christian role in the slave trade to the Americas. She was not attacking my faith. She was asking for one ruler. Here is where Wilberforce, the board's own hero, turns on the board. He did not end the slave trade by telling Parliament that England was Christian and therefore good. He ended it by making the Commons sit through the evidence of what Christian Englishmen did in the holds of their ships. The truth about his own people was his weapon. A curriculum that credits his faith and refuses his method is not honoring him. One more thing is headed for those classroom walls, if the courts allow it: a poster of the Ten Commandments, required by a 2025 Texas law that the full Fifth Circuit upheld in April by a single vote, and that Texas families have asked the Supreme Court to review. Many of the people who voted on Friday fought for that poster. So take it on its own terms. The ninth commandment on it reads: You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. Not against your enemy. Your neighbor. Habiiba Quresh, who is fifteen, told the board, "I shouldn't have to defend my religion in the middle of history class because of one sentence someone on this board wrote." She is somebody's neighbor in Texas. The commandment does not ask the witness to be flattering. It asks it to be true, and true is the one thing the board's own experts would not certify. And there is a part of this that belongs to Christians in particular. We are a minority in most of the world. The argument we make for the church in Pakistan and India and China is that a state has no business teaching children that a faith is a danger by definition. We cannot make that argument abroad in a voice we refuse to use at home. I still want the textbook to say what it says about Nicaea and the hospitals. I have not changed my mind about a word of it. I want it said by a board that would write the same kind of sentence about its neighbor's faith that it demands for its own, because a truth only the majority gets to enjoy is not a truth. It is a privilege. Privileges get revoked. The poster on the wall will say: do not bear false witness against your neighbor. The textbook on the desk beneath it is the test of whether anyone in the room believed it. If you want a Christian press that reads the fine print on its own side, send this to one person who will argue with you about it. That is what it is for. ### Sources - [Jaden Edison, "State education board finalizes anti-Islamic rewrite of Texas social studies lessons," The Texas Tribune, August 31, 2026, updated September 4, 2026](https://www.texastribune.org/2026/08/31/texas-rewrite-social-studies-high-school/?ref=theredlighthouse.org) - [Bill Zeeble, "Texas State Board of Education approves controversial curriculum that Muslims call discriminatory," KERA News, September 4, 2026](https://www.keranews.org/education/2026-09-04/texas-state-board-of-education-approves-curriculum-islam-muslim?ref=theredlighthouse.org) - [Ryan Foley, "New Texas social studies curriculum will teach role 'radical Islam' played in 9/11," The Christian Post, September 8, 2026](https://www.christianpost.com/news/new-texas-curriculum-will-teach-role-of-radical-islam-in-911.html?ref=theredlighthouse.org) - [Texas State Board of Education, approved high school courses with amendments (PDF)](https://sboe.texas.gov/state-board-of-education/4-hs-courses-with-cofb-approved-amendments.pdf?ref=theredlighthouse.org)