Texas Senate passes bill to force Christian date labels (B.C. and A.D.) in public schools

The push to replace C.E./B.C.E. with B.C./A.D. is the latest effort to inject religion into education

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With the rise of Christian Nationalism, we’ve seen a number of attempts to shove Christianity into public schools. That includes shoving the Bible into history classes, putting the Ten Commandments up in every classroom, making religious invocations part of school board meetings, allowing students to skip class to get indoctrinated by religious leaders, and even trying to build a Mormon seminary on the campus of a public school.

Some are more insidious than others. Some have been shot down by judges. But the hits keep coming.

Now, in Texas, lawmakers want to force public schools to use B.C. and A.D. to denote historical time periods instead of the more neutral C.E. and B.C.E.

That’s the purpose of SB 2617, which the State Senate recently passed on a 22-9 vote.

EXPRESSION OF DATES. (a) The board of trustees of a school district or the governing body of an open-enrollment charter school shall adopt a policy requiring the use of the terms Anno Domini (AD) and Before Christ (BC) when expressing dates during student instruction.

(b) A school district or open-enrollment charter school may not purchase or select curriculum materials for the district's or school's curriculum that express dates in a manner inconsistent with the policy adopted under Subsection (a).

So not only would schools not be allowed to use “Common Era” and “Before Common Era” (as most historians do), they would be banned from buying textbooks that use those terms. Which means even students taking Advanced Placement classes could be in danger of not having access to the proper textbooks since those courses use the C.E./B.C.E. designations. Because even when it comes to dating things, Texas lawmakers want to shove Jesus into the picture, as if the birth of Christ is the default setting for human history, everywhere around the world.

The bill’s sponsor even implied that using C.E./B.C.E. amounted to liberal bias:

State Senator Brandon Creighton (screenshot via YouTube)

“By putting this into law, the Senate bill protects Texas' long standing approach to teaching history clearly, consistently, without political distortion—giving parents, teachers and students confidence in a consistent foundation for learning,” said Sen. Brandon Creighton, the Republican bill author who chairs the education committee.

As I’ve repeatedly argued, conservative Christians treat neutrality as oppression, and this is a perfect example. A secular demarcation of history is apparently “political distortion” while a Bible-based one represents “teaching history clearly.”

It’s unclear what the penalty would be for history teachers who don’t use “Before Christ” to talk about, say, ancient Egyptians.

It’s also not apparent what the reaction will be from Jewish students (who may not use the B.C./A.D. notation) or from other non-Christians.

Interestingly enough, a similar proposal—to adopt the C.E./B.C.E. usage—was in front of the Texas State Board of Education a few years ago, but they didn’t go through with it. That’s unlikely to happen now, with a more conservative board. And it won’t even matter if this bill passes, because Republican lawmakers are going to ban the secular option altogether.

It’s such a petty move. But the goal for these Christians is to push their religion everywhere they can, even when it makes no sense. The B.C.E. designation wasn’t causing any kind of problems. Yet these lawmakers see it as erasing their religious history. They’re constantly surrounded by persecution in a state entirely dominated by conservative Christians. Someone make it make sense.

It won’t surprise you that the bill’s sponsor, Brandon Creighton, has also defended Confederate monuments, opposed LGBTQ rights, and made it harder for women to access health care. He’s also backed a voucher program that will take taxpayer dollars out of public schools and send them to private (including religious) schools.

He doesn’t care about public education. So anything he can do to make it a little bit worse counts as a victory for him.

The bill now sits in the State House Committee on Public Education, though there are less than two weeks left in the legislative session.

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