The Great Christian Creep

By James Moore

“Pretending to know things one doesn’t know is a betrayal of science – and yet it is the lifeblood of religion.” (Sam Harris, author, neuroscientist).

There has always been a nonsensical element to religious beliefs that seem completely absurd in the 21st century of computers and AI. Stories that form the foundation of the world’s leading religions originated 2000 years ago, told by illiterates living in the desert. In the Bible’s Gospel of Matthew, he narrates what happened after Jesus’, (allegedly might be the most forgiving descriptive here), walked out of his tomb after dying on the cross. In Matthew 27:51–53, he wrote:

“The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. After his resurrection they came out of the tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many.”

Jesus, it appears, had spawned a zombie apocalypse. There is no record of such a thing happening, because, of course, it did not. The dead do not rise, no matter how many times we tell such a story. Did these saints go and visit family; have dinner before they had to return to their previous roles as cadavers. Were they doing last good-byes that had not been possible at their passing. Jerusalem, a city of record keepers under the Roman Prefect, has no mention of Matthew’s madness, nor did the Jewish High Priest or the Temples record such a scene. No Roman source mentions it.
No Jewish source mentions it. No other gospel mentions it. Paul never mentions it.

Acts never mentions it.

Yet such tales sustain modern evangelical Christianity and Islam, and all global religions. The tendency among religious scholars is to explain Matthew’s assertions as the symbolic breaching of death, which only makes sense when it is considered that Jesus is believed by the faithful to have been the first to accomplish the impossible of rising from the dead. There is neither logic nor science to suggest any such horror described in Matthew ever happened, and to hold onto that story, a person living in the year 2026 must suspend all of history’s evidence that humans are born, they live, they die, and they stay dead. Only faith can argue differently, and faith is proof of nothing beyond what you “believe” to be true.

Instead of waning significance, these absurdist tales are gaining cultural power; especially here in Texas. Christian religion has been ever-present in this state’s culture, but, until the past couple of decades, has been handled with a kind of unspoken restraint by those holding the power of public office. I’ve been reporting Texas politics since Democrats ran the state, when courthouse cliques mattered more than cable news hits, and faith was personal. Historically, political coalitions succeeded when they were transactional, and the idea that the governor of Texas would one day try to insert specific Christian doctrine directly into public school classrooms would have seemed, if not impossible, at least impolitic.

That era is deader than Matthew’s Biblical zombies.

Texans did not suddenly become religious, though. Texas has always been religious. What has changed is that state leadership has increasingly treated Christianity not as a protected personal belief, but as a governing framework, something to be actively promoted, funded, and enforced by public institutions. Watching this unfold over time, the shift feels less like a sudden break than a slow, deliberate creep, which has become increasingly creepy.

I’ve watched this process closely as a journalist and Texas taxpayer and the modern timeline really begins in the early 2010s, when Greg Abbott was attorney general. Even then, future Texas Governor Greg Abbott, formerly a liberal Houston lawyer, framed himself as a defender of religious liberty, but that defense was almost always aligned with conservative Christianity. He fought to preserve a Ten Commandments monument on state grounds and defended public prayer practices that courts elsewhere were beginning to question. These moves were rationalized as symbolic or historical, not doctrinal. The argument was that Christianity was part of Texas’s heritage, not its law.

As governor, however, Abbott has overseen a series of actions that move from symbolic acknowledgment to active endorsement. By 2025, the Texas Legislature, with Abbott’s full support, began passing laws that explicitly invited religious practice into public schools. One bill allowed daily prayer or Bible reading during the school day. Another required that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom. The State Board of Education, recently, has gone further, approving curriculum frameworks that require students to read Bible passages as part of their core education.

Supporters insist this is about “cultural literacy” or “religious freedom.” I’ve heard that argument for decades in Texas, and it’s worth taking seriously, up to a point. People have a right to believe what they want, even when those beliefs are not borne up by rationality. But when the state mandates religious texts, when it posts explicitly Protestant commandments on classroom walls, and when it incentivizes Bible-infused curricula while offering no comparable support for other faith traditions, neutrality disappears. What’s left is preference, teaching the young the magical thinking of a specific religion.

I’ve also sat through enough State Board of Education meetings over the years to know that these decisions are not accidental. The board has long been a staging ground for culture-war politics, and religious conservatives have used it effectively. The current push is not about teaching the Bible as literature in an elective course, which has long been permitted. Instead, it’s about embedding biblical authority into the daily life of public schools, where attendance is compulsory and peer pressure is real, especially for children. Because Texas has so many public schools, what they order in textbooks tends to be inserted in curricula used in other states, if only to avoid the costs of separate printings without the religious dogma.

In theory, participation in prayer or Bible reading is voluntary in public schools. In practice, though, any teacher or parent knows how thin that protection can be. A child who opts out marks themselves as different. A family that objects also risks being labeled hostile to “Texas values.” The law may say one thing while the social reality says another. What ten-year-old has the self-confidence to ignore what his teachers are saying?

How does this intellectual garbage manifest in Texas? The state has launched a sweeping education voucher program, which has been rebranded as “education savings accounts,” and it will direct billions of taxpayer dollars toward private schools. Unsurprisingly, most of those schools are Christian, and that’s where Governor Abbott went to campaign for his school choice law. That is structural, not incidental. Texas has relatively few secular private schools, especially outside major cities. The result is a massive public subsidy for Christian education, paid for by taxpayers of all faiths, and none.

I spent years reporting on the constitutional unfairness of Texas public schools. The law says they must be equally funded, but property taxes, which pay for our schools, make financial parity almost impossible. Poor districts end up with poor schools. The state has been locked in lawsuits over this since the late 60s with the filing of Rodriguez v Board of Education. In 2026, our public schools continue to struggle with underfunding, teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms, and growing student needs. Diverting money away from those schools will not deliver improvements. The outcome will be weakness, while strengthening a parallel system that is explicitly religious and largely unaccountable to the same transparency standards.

The most stunning characteristic of these latest Christian incursions into Texas public education is how openly Christian evangelism now coexists with fear-based rhetoric about Islam. Abbott has repeatedly warned Texans about “Sharia law,” insisting it is not allowed in Texas and suggesting, without evidence, that Muslim communities pose a legal or cultural threat. Utter crap, from a man whose constant rhetoric remains a diarrhetic stream. His latest fatuous nonsense came to a head with the proposed development of a Muslim-centered neighborhood near Dallas, a planned community that would include a mosque alongside homes, schools, and businesses. Abbott and other officials framed the project as suspect, implying it was an attempt to impose Islamic law.

No, it wasn’t, and it isn’t.

Like Christians, the Muslims were only looking for a place to practice their religious beliefs and live in a community of like-minded. The developers made clear they were complying with U.S. and Texas law. No parallel legal system was proposed. No effort to replace civil authority existed. Federal investigators ultimately found no basis for enforcement action. What remained was the political value of the accusation itself, the fear mongering that conservative Texas Republicans, led by Abbott, have turned into the driving wheel of their politics.

Abbott’s schemes are patently cruel and hypocritical The pattern is familiar, even to the casual observer. He deploys a fear of the “other,” which has always been a powerful mobilizing tool, whether the target was immigrants, communists, or, now, Muslims. What’s different is the contrast. While the Abbottollah aggressively warns against an imaginary Sharia threat, he is simultaneously working to embed Christian texts, symbols, and practices into public institutions. The inconsistency is hard to miss. A Muslim community building a mosque is portrayed as dangerous. The state placing Bible verses in public classrooms is portrayed as benign, even necessary. One is framed as subversion while the other is branded to believers as heritage.

That framing has spread beyond the governor’s office. Politicians now campaign in Texas on warnings about Sharia law as if it were an imminent threat. U.S. Senator John Cornyn, a career politician who has drawn only a handful of paychecks in his life that did not come from taxpayers, is presently airing ads invoking fear of Islamic Sharia law. Cornyn never addresses Texas’ real problems like energy, infrastructure, healthcare access, water scarcity, or education quality. Nor does he bother to confront the current White House’s dissolution of the rule of law. Instead, the cowardly Cornyn sells an enemy that does not exist. Fear works best when paired with religious identity politics.

Texas has flirted with this line before. In the late twentieth century, conservative Christians pushed for prayer in schools, creationism in science classes, and religious language in public ceremonies. Courts pushed back. Moderates restrained the excesses. What feels different now is the confidence that the old guardrails no longer apply. The U.S. Supreme Court has signaled a greater tolerance for state-sponsored religious expression, and Texas leaders are eager to test those limits. They are acting to service the political impulses of an amoral president, who never attends a church, and has not ever read anything longer than one of his own tweets, but who recognizes the power to be acquired by pandering to people who believe ancient fairy tales. They are also likely to believe him.

The cumulative effect of this descent from logic is a reshaping of public life. Christianity is no longer merely protected and instead becomes privileged. Other faiths are tolerated at best, viewed with suspicion at worst. Public institutions, meanwhile, schools, agencies, even zoning decisions, are increasingly used as vehicles for cultural enforcement. This state’s strength has always been its diversity, even when it struggled to acknowledge the value it offered. Public schools, especially, have been one of the few places where children from different backgrounds encountered one another on equal footing. There is not now, however, any religious equality under Texas law.

When the state tells students what religious texts to read, when it funds religious education with public dollars, and when it singles out minority faiths as threats, a clear message is delivered about who belongs and who does not. Nobody needs an editorial to understand what’s happening. The decline of science and facts is written into our laws. There is no longer any separation of church and state in Texas. The church is the state and the state is the church.

And the result is a diminished future for the children of Texas.

This article was originally published on Texas to the world.

 

James Moore is the New York Times bestselling author of “Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential,” three other books on Bush and former Texas Governor Rick Perry, as well as two novels, and a biography entitled, “Give Back the Light,” on a famed eye surgeon and inventor. Mr. Moore has been honored with an Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for his documentary work and is a former TV news correspondent who has traveled extensively on every presidential campaign since 1976.

He has been a retained on-air political analyst for MSNBC and has appeared on Morning Edition on National Public Radio, NBC Nightly News, Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, CBS Evening News, CNN, Real Time with Bill Maher, and Hardball with Chris Matthews, among numerous other programs. Mr. Moore’s written political and media analyses have been published at CNN, Boston Globe, L.A. Times, Guardian of London, Sunday Independent of London, Salon, Financial Times of London, Huffington Post, and numerous other outlets. He also appeared as an expert on presidential politics in the highest-grossing documentary film of all time, Fahrenheit 911, (not related to the film’s producer Michael Moore).

His other honors include the Dartmouth College National Media Award for Economic Understanding, the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio Television News Directors’ Association, the Individual Broadcast Achievement Award from the Texas Headliners Foundation, and a Gold Medal for Script Writing from the Houston International Film Festival. He was frequently named best reporter in Texas by the AP, UPI, and the Houston Press Club. The film produced from his book “Bush’s Brain” premiered at The Cannes Film Festival prior to a successful 30-city theater run in the U.S.

Mr. Moore has reported on the major stories and historical events of our time, which have ranged from Iran-Contra to the Waco standoff, the Oklahoma City bombing, the border immigration crisis, and other headlining events. His journalism has put him in Cuba, Central America, Mexico, Australia, Canada, the UK, and most of Europe, interviewing figures as diverse as Fidel Castro and Willie Nelson. He has been writing about Texas politics, culture, and history since 1975, and continues with political opinion pieces for CNN and regularly at his Substack newsletter: “Texas to the World.”

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