As a kid, I attended two elementary schools, three junior high schools and two high schools. Picture me this way: Scrawny, acne-faced, frizzy haired, shy. It is hard enough to make friends when you are 13; imagine always being the new girl.
While each school community was different, some things usually were the same. The cafeteria food was palatable, the band directors kindly pulled up another chair so I could join the clarinet section, and each morning began with the Pledge of Allegiance and the pledge to the state flag of Texas. From the early 1990s until my high school graduation in 2003, it sounded like this:
Honor the Texas flag
I pledge allegiance to thee
Texas, one and indivisible
Britt Luby
In any new classroom, I could stand up and recite these words with ease. Unlike my attempts to find my locker, I never was lost during this part of the day. I performed the ritual and sat back down in the same way that I crossed myself and kneeled before entering a pew at church for mass. Once you do something enough times, it feels like you sort of always have known how to do it.
In 2022, I visited my children’s elementary school for a PTA meeting and children’s program — a riveting performance of The Littlest Pet Shop. Before we began, the principal invited all of us to stand for the pledges. I grinned to myself, chuffed that I still had the words memorized as I pulled them from a back part of my memory.
So imagine my surprise when the children said this, instead:
Honor the Texas flag
I pledge allegiance to thee
Texas, one state under God,
one and indivisible
The children mumbled the words with as much familiarity as I had in the late 1990s, but these words were different!
A little detective work revealed the Texas Legislature had changed the pledge in 2007 under House Bill 1034. In the intervening years between my public education and my children’s, our representatives decided this was a crucial addition to the pledge. Now, nearly 20 years later, this change impacts the daily life of every student in Texas public schools, and the previous version seems long forgotten. Because once you do something enough times, it feels like that is the way it always has been done.
A quick review of history reveals this: The Pledge of Allegiance, while written in 1892, did not include the words “under God” until President Dwight Eisenhower inserted the phrase in 1954. And “In God we Trust” was not added to paper currency until the 1950s.
“Our country has a pattern of inserting God — or language referring to God — when the timing is just right.”
Our country has a pattern of inserting God — or language referring to God — when the timing is just right. Then, as the years pass, the false narrative that we were founded as a “Christian nation” swallows up this fairly recent history, catalogs it as tradition, and insists this is the way things always have been done.
But that is not true, is it? My work with BJC has taught me the history of religion in the United States is a complicated story and our founders recognized the need for both freedom for religion and freedom from religion.
That’s what our founders actually wrote into the First Amendment, after all: Two different protections for religion.
First, the protection of free exercise keeps the government from unnecessarily interfering with religious practices. This means my public-school fourth grader can wear a cross around his neck and my first grader can pray before she eats lunch. I am currently in school myself, and I led a prayer with my classmates before our first big exam this semester. This prayer, optional and completely student-initiated, was a release valve for us before we sat, sweating with nerves, in our seats to take the test.
The second protection — the prohibition against an establishment of religion — keeps the government from advancing or privileging religion. This means public schools cannot make students do any of these things: No required cross necklace, no required prayers.
This is what is so infuriating about Texas’ latest push to require schools to allot time for state-sanctioned prayer. Texas State Bill 11 reads:
The board of trustees of a school district (may) … adopt a policy requiring every campus of the district or school to provide students and employees with an opportunity to participate in a period of prayer and reading of the Bible or other religious text on each school day in accordance with this section.
Ken Paxton
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is a vocal advocate of this initiative. In addition to encouraging students to recite the Lord’s Prayer at school, he stated, “In Texas classrooms, we want the word of God opened, the Ten Commandments displayed and prayers lifted up. … Twisted, radical liberals want to erase Truth, dismantle the solid foundation that America’s success and strength were built upon, and erode the moral fabric of our society. Our nation was founded on the rock of Biblical Truth, and I will not stand by while the far-left attempts to push our country into the sinking sand.”
As a student, I prayed frequently in school: before exams, when I misplaced my keys (hey St. Anthony!), and during FCA meetings before school on Thursday mornings. My practice was mine and mine alone, and it was formed by my family and my local parish.
My moral compass guided me regardless of where I was physically because my identity as a Christian cannot be contained in a morning announcement or a few extra words in a pledge. And even if it could, I have said the words “under God” during the Pledge of Allegiance more than anyone born before the 1950s.
If someone told you the Pledge of Allegiance to the Texas Flag always has included the words “under God,” you now know this would be untrue. In the same way, Ken Paxton’s words are untrue: they omit the complexity of our nation’s founding, the addition and subtraction of policies over time, and the many interpretations of religious practice (including those within Christianity).
Picture younger me again: frizzy hair, acne, braces, a 14-year-old desperate to fit in at yet another new school. Or picture a young Muslim student, recently immigrated from Afghanistan with their parents because of the work they did supporting U.S. initiatives there. As you picture the halls of a junior high in 2025, maybe your mind pulls up an image of an LGBTQ-identifying stepson, an agnostic niece or a shy grandchild. Now, hear the school announcements calling for the time of quiet prayer. Perhaps the teacher even publicly states a preference for the New King James’ Version of the Lord’s Prayer as Paxton has. How might these students feel, and what choices do they actually have as they try to fit into their school community?
Can you hold this reality in one hand while you hold the First Amendment in the other? I cannot.
Each injection of religiously themed policy brings us closer to state-sponsored religion, and I will not allow the state to claim control over my faith or my children’s. The word of God lives in me and in how I love my neighbor, not in fickle political grabs dressed up as religion.
I invite you, rooted in your identity as a person of faith, also to reject such tricks. If we do not, the state will implement this policy, catalog it as tradition and insist this is the way things always have been done — again.
Britt Luby is an alumnus of the BJC Fellows program. She earned a master’s degree in religion (ethics and social theory) from the Graduate Theological Union in conjunction with the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, Calif. After years of service as a lay Catholic university chaplain, she now works in hospital chaplaincy. She is a member of Daughters of Abraham, an interfaith women’s group. She lives in Fort Worth, Texas. Read more of her writing here.
BJC Fellows come from diverse educational, professional and religious backgrounds to learn in an intensive education program that equips them for advocacy to protect religious liberty. Learn more about the program here.