Organizing as If Social Relations Matter: Cindy Milstein, SEAT, and Youth Leadership in Texas, by Angela Valenzuela July 3, 2026

Organizing as If Social Relations Matter: Cindy Milstein, SEAT, and Youth Leadership in Texas

by

Angela Valenzuela

July 3, 2026

Cindy Milstein’s essay, “Organizing Social Spaces as If Social Relations Matter,” is destined to be a classic, a must-read because it names something I have been witnessing first hand among youth organizers with whom I am associated, particularly Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, or SEAT—as well as among others in LULAC and the community work with youth with whom I work directly. Milstein’s central insight is deceptively simple and deeply profound: movements cannot be built only around strategy, demands, protest, or opposition. They must also cultivate new social relations—new ways of being with one another—if they are to prefigure the more democratic and caring world they seek.

I, in fact, first learned of her essay from youth in SEAT.

Milstein describes resistance, rebellion, and revolution as incomplete without a fourth “R”: reorganization. By this she means not simply reorganizing institutions, but reorganizing how people relate to one another. Without that relational transformation, movements risk reproducing the very hierarchies, exclusions, and harms they oppose. This is one of the essay’s most important contributions: it reminds us that social justice work is not only about what we are against, but also about how we practice what we are for. It is as much or more about beingness as about doingness.

This is precisely what I see in SEAT’s leadership. These young people are not simply organizing around issues that matter to them; they are building a culture of care, trust, shared responsibility, and collective courage. Their work is strategic, yes. It is political, yes. But it is also deeply relational. They listen to one another. They make room for vulnerability. They show up for each other. They understand that leadership is not domination, performance, or individual charisma, but a shared practice of building capacity, confidence, and belonging. It's about fun and enjoying the process.

Milstein’s essay helps us see why this matters so much. She cautions that movements often fail not only because of external repression, but because we fail each other. We carry into our organizing spaces the wounds and habits of the very society we are trying to transform—individualism, hierarchy, competition, shame, exclusion, and the temptation to retreat when conflict arises. 

Milstein asks us instead to, in effect, “fail well,” by making "better mistakes" and to treat these and the discomfort that comes along with them not as reasons to abandon one another, but as opportunities to grow in honesty, humility, compassion, and repair. These are tall orders, no doubt, but they are achievable when we commit to practicing them together.

That lesson is especially important for youth organizing. Young people are often expected to perform courage in public while receiving too little care behind the scenes. They are asked to testify, march, mobilize, speak truth to power, and defend democracy, all while coming of age in a world marked by political hostility, ecological crisis, racial injustice, economic precarity, and attacks on education itself. SEAT’s work matters not only because of the policies it contests, but because of the human and democratic relationships it nurtures along the way.

In this regard, SEAT embodies Milstein’s thesis. Its leadership practices suggest that organizing is not merely about occupying public space, but about transforming social space. It is about creating conditions where young people feel seen, heard, trusted, and capable of acting together. It is about learning how to disagree without dehumanizing, how to lead without dominating, how to struggle without losing tenderness, and how to build power without sacrificing care.

For those of us in education, this is a profound lesson. Democracy is not learned only through textbooks, civics lessons, or formal institutions. It is learned in the lived experience of collective work. It is learned when young people discover that their voices matter, that others have their backs, and that public life can be organized around dignity, mutuality, and shared purpose rather than fear or one-upmanship. SEAT’s leadership offers a glimpse of this kind of democratic formation in action.

Milstein gives us language for recognizing what is easy to overlook: the greeting, the check-in, the shared meal, the patient conversation, the willingness to stay present through discomfort, the refusal to reduce one another to mistakes, and the commitment to keep building together. These are not soft additions to the “real” work of organizing. They are the work. They are the ethical infrastructure that makes sustained movement possible.

In a Texas political climate where young people are too often treated as problems to be managed rather than democratic actors to be respected, SEAT offers a different vision. Its members remind us that youth leadership is not future leadership. It is leadership now. And when that leadership is grounded in care, courage, and collective responsibility, it does more than resist the present. It rehearses a freer and more humane future.

That is why Milstein’s essay matters to me. It helps me name what I see in SEAT and other youth organizing: young people organizing as if social relations matter—because they do. We have much to learn from them.

Reference

Milstein, C. (2014, June 14). Organizing social spaces as if social relations matter. Outside the Circle. Originally published in shorter form in ROAR Magazine. https://cbmilstein.wordpress.com/2014/06/14/organizing-social-spaces-as-if-social-relations-matter/

Organizing Social Spaces as If Social Relations Matter




by Cindy Milstein | June 14, 2014 | Outside the Circle

This essay was originally published, as a shorter version, in ROAR Magazine, “an online journal of the radical imagination providing grassroots perspectives from the front-lines of the global struggle for real democracy,” at http://roarmag.org/2014/06/milstein-social-spaces-relations/.

The Four Rs

Throughout the history of resistance, rebellion, and revolution—the three Rs that should be taught alongside the traditional ones of reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic—there has always been a fourth R, consciously or not: reorganization. Such reorganization has sought to establish not simply new social structures but also, critically, new social relations.

That has not always ended well. In fact, it has frequently ended badly, with different forms of social organization, to be sure, but ones that ultimately—or too quickly—entailed new forms of domination and terror. If we humans have learned anything from these moments, it’s that the reconstitution of people up to the challenge of enacting goodness in the good society that they are trying to create takes time and practice. Moreover, the time and practices needed far exceed the duration and acts of toppling a king, despot, or dictator, overthrowing colonial, military, or statist rule, or overcoming internecine struggles among radicals.

Various “horizontal” or “from below” experiments, as they’ve been called, have struggled openly during the past two decades in particular with this problematic. They’ve humbly aspired to focus on the social relations side of the puzzle versus—and also within—those exhilarating, necessary instances of popular uprisings.

Some appear to have done it better than others, such as the Zapatistas (recently celebrating twenty years since their first public entrance on the world stage) and Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement (which became a national movement thirty years ago), at least according to the stories told by some of those born into these autonomous communities, and thus who’ve never known another world and have been socialized by other ways of attempting to live together.

Most of the shorter-lived recent occupations of squares, plazas, and parks, too, quickly set about this task, reveling—at least initially—in the transformed ways people began relating to each other within the myriad of self-organized structures intended to meet everyone’s needs as well as desires.

The same could easily be said of the power of contemporary social movements such as the massive, relatively long-lasting student strike in Quebec in 2012. In that case, months of blockades and nightly illegal street demonstrations, coupled with a plethora of assemblies and collective culture-making, wove a magical fabric of hitherto-unimaginable social interactions across generations and at least two languages.

Here in the United States, the Occupy uprising, in its heady beginnings, created spaces where social-media-isolated people could suddenly “find each other” and (re)discover human(e) connections (see, relatedly, my essay “Occupy Anarchism,” https://cbmilstein.wordpress.com/2014/03/15/occupy-anarchism-musings-on-prehistories-present-imperfects-future-imperfects/). But also here in the United States, where looking through the lens of “I” first and then “we” down the road is so deeply ingrained in us, it too quickly became clear that the ties that bound us Occupiers were spider-web fragile. We torn each other apart in so many varied ways, along so many lines of hurt already scribed into our bodies by white supremacy, heteronormativity, patriarchy, ableism, settler colonialism, classism, overdetermined identity politics, and a long lineage of other violences.

The conundrum of remaking ourselves as we attempt to remake society appears to stymie us here so much faster than in places with greater vestiges of communal lifeways.

It also erects an extra-high hurdle for US social struggles and movements: Can we rise above the learned behaviors inculcated by the mythical origin story and its related American dream of the lone individual making it against all odds, pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, as entrepreneurial pioneer? Can we surmount the way we tend to instrumentalize each other, “valuing” other people as mere things in relation to our cost-benefit analysis and accountability ledger sheet of strategic organizing and movement needs—relations that have been naturalized in us, made subtle and almost invisible, by capitalism? Can we avoid brushing off the ways that we lack empathy for each other, as ourselves “products” of this damaging society too, with uncompassionate phrases such as “We need to focus on the real enemy”?

It’s too easy to blame the police or state repression alone for why our projects, much less movements, fail. They fail us, and we fail them.

We’ll always fail in ways, of course. But if we don’t allow others—and ourselves—to make mistakes; if we see mishaps as aberrations or, worse, a condemnation of the whole of someone’s being; if we believe that failure and success are separate, stable moments; and if we think that being human, being imperfect, is in itself wrong, then we’ve already lost. We’re already lost.

There are many forces that can be blamed for making most of us, and indeed most of humanity, feel lost at this time in history, from the new layers of alienation heaped on us by high-tech innovations to the palpable sense of “no future” that military-industrial ecological devastation instills. This list, like all the painful -isms, unfurls too far. We don’t just feel lost, though. More to the point, we are tangibly experiencing much loss, and at faster and faster rates, ranging from communities to climates, from homes to loved ones.

This is all the more reason that it’s imperative to rediscover each other, yet in the fullness and complexity of our imperfections, and recognize that such imperfection will be inherent in the revolutionary transformation of present-day society—made up not merely of hierarchical institutions and systemic exploitation but also damaged social relations. It is, then, our perspective on failure that matters.

To conjure up the insight of a teacher-artist friend, Arthur, during a history-oriented study group recently, the point of revolutions is not to achieve some permanently perfect world, or a utopia in the most caricatured of definitions. It is to find ourselves having different, less horrendous conflicts—say, why the delegation of tasks related to community health care isn’t working in an autonomous, directly democratic region as opposed to when and where to go to war as a nation-state. It is to be better equipped to walk toward and through those conflicts in increasingly egalitarian, compassionate ways.

In short, it’s about making better mistakes, and utilizing our better failures as moments of transformation in pursuit of an ever-freer society, filled with ever more dignity and freedom, among other lovely practices.

Another teacher-artist friend, Carla, observed that her goal is, in fact, to have projects fail. That is, she remains open to the likelihood of failure and hence how we might do that well. Her clear-eyed notion grasps the generative attributes of missing the intended mark. Carla’s failures-in-action are amazing to behold, drawing out the best in people, for themselves and toward others. She creates spaces of collaborative empowerment with others, without knowing what will emerge, and strives to curate various contexts in which people can discover the potential of those spaces and themselves together.

A Word of Thanks to Gina Hinojosa—and a Hope for Texas, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

 A Word of Thanks to Gina Hinojosa—and a Hope for Texas 

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

July 2, 2026

Gina Hinojosa, Martha Cotera & me

I have hesitated to write about this because I do not like to toot my own horn.

Those who know me know that I am much more comfortable lifting up the work of students, educators, communities, colleagues, and movements than calling attention to my own recognition.

But this one is special.

I write with a full heart and deep appreciation to thank State Representative Gina Hinojosa of House District 49, Democratic nominee for Texas governor, for authoring a resolution, passed by the Texas State Legislature, recognizing my inclusion in the 2025 Rick Hess Straight Up EDU Scholar Public Influence Rankings. This annual list recognizes 200 university-based scholars across the United States whose work has had significant influence on educational practice and policy.

I am grateful for the honor itself, but I am especially moved by the fact that this recognition came through the Texas Legislature and from Representative Hinojosa, whose public service has consistently reflected a deep commitment to children, families, public education, civil rights, and democratic governance.

The resolution notes my work as a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas at Austin, my role as director of the University of Texas Center for Education Policy and the National Latino Education Research and Policy Project, my founding of this blog, Educational Equity, Politics, and Policy in Texas, and my scholarship on urban education, minority youth, bilingual education, and educational justice. It also recognizes my book, Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring, and the honors I have received across the years, including the Henry T. Trueba Award for Research Leading to the Transformation of the Social Contexts of Education and the 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Texas Association for Bilingual Education.

To see this work named in a formal legislative resolution is humbling. Public scholarship is often a labor of persistence, conviction, and faith. It means writing, researching, testifying, organizing, teaching, and speaking in ways that do not always fit neatly within conventional academic metrics. It means believing that knowledge should circulate beyond the university; that communities have a right to research, history, policy analysis, and critical interpretation; and that educational equity is not an abstract ideal, but a public obligation.

For more than two decades, this blog has sought to serve precisely that purpose. It has been a public archive, a policy resource, a space of reflection, and a site of democratic engagement for those committed to educational justice, bilingual education, Ethnic Studies, academic freedom, and the freedom to learn. In that sense, this recognition is not mine alone. It belongs to the many students, educators, parents, scholars, community leaders, advocates, and organizers whose struggles and insights have shaped my work and given it meaning.

I also want to say a special word about Representative Hinojosa herself. Gina Hinojosa has long been a principled and courageous advocate for public education and for a Texas that honors the dignity of all its people. As a civil rights and labor attorney, former Austin ISD school board president, and state legislator, she has brought intelligence, moral clarity, and a steady commitment to the public good into every arena of her service.

I truly hope—and expect—that Gina Hinojosa will be Texas’ next governor. Texas needs leadership rooted in care, fairness, public education, democratic accountability, and respect for the diverse communities that are the future of this state. Her authorship of this resolution is, for me, not only a personal kindness, but also a reflection of the kind of leadership she offers: one that sees education as central to democracy and recognizes the scholars, teachers, students, and communities working every day to defend it.

So, thank you, Representative Hinojosa, for this generous recognition and for your continued service to Texas. I receive this resolution with humility, gratitude, and renewed commitment to the work ahead.

At a time when public education, academic freedom, bilingual education, ethnic studies, and truthful curriculum are all under attack, such recognition matters. It reminds us that the work of educational equity is not marginal. It is central to the future of Texas. It is central to democracy. And it is work that we must continue together.

And that means showing up—not only in classrooms, community meetings, hearings, and public conversations, but also at the ballot box. As November approaches, I hope we will all make sure that we, our families, friends, neighbors, students, former students, and loved ones of voting age are registered, informed, and ready to vote. Democracy is not self-executing. It depends on our participation, our vigilance, and our willingness to act on behalf of the Texas we know is possible.

The Texas SBOE’s Bible mandate is Not Religious Literacy. It is State-Sponsored,Taxpayer Funded, Religious Favoritism, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

The Texas SBOE’s Bible mandate is Not Religious Literacy. It is State-Sponsored, Taxpayer Funded, Religious Favoritism

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

June 28, 2026

Last Friday’s decision by the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) to require Bible stories and Christian instruction in Texas K–12 public schools should alarm every Texan who cares about public education, religious freedom, democracy, and the constitutional separation of church and state (Yu, 2026)

This is not religious literacy. It is not a neutral study of religion. It is not a good-faith effort to help children understand the Bible’s influence on literature, history, or culture. A serious academic curriculum would introduce students to multiple religious traditions, secular traditions, Indigenous knowledge systems, and the diverse intellectual inheritance of a state where children come from every corner of the world. Instead, the SBOE has approved a state-mandated reading list and social studies framework that privileges Christianity, narrows the story of humanity, and forces teachers and students into a curriculum shaped less by scholarship than by ideology.

Let us be clear: the issue is not whether the Bible may be studied in public schools. It can be—and, in the appropriate context, should be—studied as literature, as history, and as a text with enormous cultural influence. But it should be studied alongside other sacred, philosophical, ethical, and cultural traditions. 

As a product of Texas public schools, I would have welcomed the opportunity to learn about the world’s religions in school—not in a reductive way, but in an expansive one. Indeed, if this curriculum is anything other than expansive, pluralistic, and intellectually honest, it is dead on arrival.

The real issue is whether the state should use public schools—and exorbitant taxpayer dollars—to elevate one religious tradition above others and present that tradition as the moral foundation of civic life. That is not education. That is state-sponsored religious favoritism. It is constitutionally suspect, pedagogically flawed, and morally dangerous in a state as religiously, culturally, racially, and linguistically diverse as Texas.

Ironically, this approach may also fail on its own terms. A shallow, politicized, and coercive treatment of the Bible may not deepen students’ understanding of scripture. It may turn them away from it. When sacred texts are reduced to political instruments, they lose the very depth, mystery, and moral seriousness that make them meaningful to believers and worthy of study by nonbelievers. A curriculum built on such a flawed foundation does not honor the Bible. It weaponizes it.

This is where Katherine Stewart’s work is so helpful (Stewart, 2012, 2020, 2025). Stewart reminds us that Christian nationalism is not simply a matter of private faith or religious devotion. It is a political project. It operates through donor networks, legal organizations, advocacy groups, media platforms, think tanks, and elected officials who seek to capture public institutions and bend them toward an authoritarian vision of society. 

In this sense, the SBOE’s decision is not an isolated curriculum dispute. It is part of a broader movement to remake public education in the image of Christian nationalist power.

That movement is also visible in Project 2025 and in the larger effort to weaken public institutions, centralize executive authority, privatize public goods, and subordinate democratic deliberation to ideological control (Dans & Groves, 2023). In Texas, this matters enormously because governors appoint key officials, including the Commissioner of Education, who oversees the Texas Education Agency. These appointments help shape the direction of public schooling for millions of children. Curriculum, therefore, is not merely a classroom matter. It is a governance matter. It is a democracy matter.

A democratic public school system should not be argumentative in the narrow sense of imposing one worldview on everyone else. It should be deliberative. It should teach students how to think across difference, how to ask hard questions, how to understand history in its complexity, and how to live ethically in a pluralistic society. 

The SBOE’s decision moves us in the opposite direction. It turns curriculum into a vehicle for religious and political domination.

Texas children deserve better than this. They deserve schools that respect their families, their faiths, their questions, and their futures. They deserve a curriculum capacious enough to include the Bible without turning public school into Sunday school; rigorous enough to study Christianity without privileging Christian nationalism; and democratic enough to honor the full humanity of every child in the classroom.

Recent testimony before the SBOE made this danger plain. Parents, educators, religious freedom advocates, historians, and community members warned that the proposed standards and required reading list distort education by subordinating academic integrity to a sectarian political agenda. Texas Freedom Network President Felicia Martin captured the problem forcefully:

 “The Bible isn’t a history book, public school isn’t Sunday school, and ignorance is not a Texas value.” 

That line deserves to be remembered because it names the issue exactly. Public schools belong to all children—not only Christian children, not only conservative Christian children, not only children whose families accept the state’s preferred theological worldview.

This decision also comes in the shadow of a broader restructuring of public education in Texas. We have seen attacks on books, on Ethnic and Gender Studies, on LGBTQIA+ students, on honest teaching about racism, on teachers’ professional autonomy, and on local democratic governance. 

We have seen vouchers pushed as “choice” while public schools remain underfunded. We have seen the Ten Commandments elevated in classrooms, chaplains invited into schools, and now Bible stories mandated as required reading. These are not isolated developments. They are pieces of a larger project.

That project is legible through the Seven Mountains Mandate (Boedy, 2025), a Christian dominionist framework that calls on believers to exercise influence—or dominion—over seven spheres of society: family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government.

 Education is one of the mountains.

Government is another.

Business is another. 

Texas is now witnessing the convergence of all three: billionaire money, state power, and public school curriculum being aligned to serve a Christian nationalist vision.

Katherine Stewart’s work helps us understand what is happening. In The Power Worshippers 2020) and Money, Lies, and God (2025), Stewart shows that Christian nationalism is not primarily about private faith, prayer, or religious devotion. 

It is about power. 

It is about networks. It is about donor money, legal infrastructure, media ecosystems, political candidates, think tanks, and policy shops working together to transform democratic institutions from within. The movement does not merely want a seat at the table. It wants to own the table, write the rules, choose the curriculum, discipline dissent, and call the result “freedom.”

This is why today’s SBOE decision must be understood alongside the political influence of West Texas billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks. As I wrote previously in “Texas: Two Billionaires Want to Destroy Public Education and Replace It With Christian Schools,” the attack on public education is not incidental to their politics. It is central to it. 

As you can view and see for yourselves, CNN’s reporting made plain that former associates and critics view Dunn and Wilks as especially focused on education, with the long-term goal of replacing much of public education with private Christian schooling. Former Republican state senator Bob Deuell put it bluntly: they “want to destroy the public school system as we know it and, in its place, see more home-schooling and more private Christian schools.”

That is the context for today’s vote. This is not simply about whether a first grader hears “David and Goliath” or a high school student reads Job. It is about who controls the moral and intellectual formation of more than five million Texas public school students. It is about whether the state will honor the religious diversity of Texas families or treat non-Christian children as guests in someone else’s public school system. It is about whether teachers will be trusted as professionals or reduced to instruments of ideological compliance.

As I recently blogged (Valenzuela, 2026), supporters will say this is about “Judeo-Christian values.” That phrase, however, often functions as a political shield. It collapses Jewish traditions into a Christian nationalist story, erases the profound diversity within Christianity itself, and excludes Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Indigenous spiritual traditions, atheists, agnostics, and many others, including Jews themselves—who are also part of Texas. It also misrepresents Christianity. 

That is not what Texas has chosen.

Many of us grew up in Christian traditions rooted in social justice, humility, hospitality, care for the poor, and love of neighbor. The Christianity being smuggled into public policy today is not that faith. It is a politicized, exclusionary Christianity aligned with hierarchy, conquest, privatization, and punishment.

This is why the phrase “religious freedom” is being turned upside down. True religious freedom protects families from state-imposed religion. It protects Christian families, Jewish families, Muslim families, Hindu families, Buddhist families, Indigenous families, nonreligious families, and interfaith families alike. It means the government does not get to decide whose sacred stories become mandatory and whose traditions disappear. It means public schools do not become Sunday schools by legislative design.

The irony is painful. Texas leaders claim to be defending parents while overruling millions of parents whose religious and moral commitments do not align with the state’s preferred theology. Many, if not most, among them believe in the separation of church and state.

Let’s unmask this nefarious, anti-democratic agenda for what it is: a coordinated effort to capture public education, weaponize faith, and shrink the democratic imagination of Texas children.

They claim to support local control while imposing sweeping curriculum mandates from Austin. 

They claim to respect teachers while stripping them of professional judgment. 

They claim to strengthen history while narrowing it. 

They claim to teach freedom while modeling domination.

The damage will not fall evenly. Black, Latino, Indigenous, Asian American, Muslim, Jewish, immigrant, LGBTQIA+, and nonreligious students will feel most sharply what it means to be written to the margins of the curriculum. So will Christian students whose faith teaches them that coercion is not discipleship and that the Gospel should never be reduced to a state lesson plan. 

Public schools should be places where children learn to think critically, encounter complexity, and develop civic respect across difference. 

They should not be laboratories for Christian nationalist social engineering.

Texas is a pluralistic state. It is young, multilingual, multiracial, multi-faith, and globally connected. Our curriculum should prepare children for that reality. Instead, the SBOE has chosen retreat: less world history, less diversity, less intellectual honesty, and more state-sponsored religious favoritism. This is not educational excellence. It is ideological containment.

We should refuse the false choice between faith and public education. Many people of faith support strong public schools precisely because public education is one of the few institutions where children from different backgrounds can learn together. A democracy—at least in theory—public school does not require children to abandon their faith. It protects their right to have one. It also protects their right not to have one. That is the genius of public education at its best.

The SBOE's decision moves Texas in the opposite direction. It brings us closer to the world envisioned by the Seven Mountains Mandate, where education is not a public good but a terrain to be conquered. It advances the agenda Katherine Stewart has warned about: a donor-funded, anti-democratic movement that uses the language of faith to seize institutions and the language of freedom to justify domination.

Texans should see this for what it is. The SBOE has not merely approved a reading list. It has opened the door wider to the religious capture of public education. It has placed the state’s power behind a narrow theological and political worldview. And it has done so in a state whose children deserve so much better.

This orchestrated, well-heeled “culture war” reveals what has been true all along: the struggle is not only over curriculum. It is over democracy itself. Public schools are among the last remaining civic spaces where we can still imagine and build a common good. That is precisely why they are under attack. They hold the promise of an animated, well-informed, and educated citizenry—one capable of questioning power, resisting domination, and participating fully in democratic life. 

And that is why we must defend them—with clarity, courage, and an unwavering commitment to religious freedom, educational justice, teachers’ freedom to teach, and students’ freedom to learn.

Reference

Boedy, M. (2025). The seven mountains mandate: Exposing the dangerous plan to Christianize America and destroy democracy. Westminster John Knox Press.

Dans, P., & Groves, S. (Eds.). (2023). Mandate for leadership: The conservative promise. The Heritage Foundation [pdf]. 

Stewart, K. (2012). The good news club: The Christian Right’s stealth assault on America’s children. PublicAffairs. 

Stewart, K. (2020). The power worshippers: Inside the dangerous rise of religious nationalism. Bloomsbury.

Stewart, K. (2025). Money, lies, and God: Inside the movement to destroy American democracy. Bloomsbury.

Tackett, C. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B3PTuADIHQ

Valenzuela, A. (2026, June 26). When ‘Judeo-Christian’ Means Christian: The Texas State Board of Education and the Politics of Curriculum [Blog], Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas. https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2026/06/when-judeo-christian-means-christian.html

Yu, I. (2026, June 26). Texas becomes first state to require students read the Bible with required literary list, Austin American-Statesman. https://www.statesman.com/politics/texas/article/social-studies-overhaul-bible-christianity-22320559.php 

When ‘Judeo-Christian’ Means Christian: The Texas State Board of Education and the Politics of Curriculum, by Angela Valenzuel, Ph.D.

When ‘Judeo-Christian’ Means Christian: The Texas State Board of Education and the Politics of Curriculum

by

Angela Valenzuela, PH.D.

June 26, 2026

Please read Ellie Ashby and Chloe Landen’s important Texas Tribune/Religion News Service article, “As supporters praise Texas’ proposed “Judeo-Christian” curriculum, rabbis say it dismisses Judaism” posted below. The piece reports on this week’s State Board of Education hearings over proposed changes that would require Texas public school students to read Bible stories and passages as part of a statewide reading list. Supporters repeatedly invoked the phrase “Judeo-Christian values” to defend the proposal, claiming that such readings simply acknowledge the nation’s religious and moral origins.

Yet the testimony from rabbis and Jewish leaders revealed something much more troubling: the term “Judeo-Christian” is doing ideological work. It is not functioning as an inclusive recognition of Judaism. It is functioning as cover.

As Ashby and Landen report, Jewish leaders criticized the proposed biblical selections as overwhelmingly Christian in framing, translation, and interpretation. Rabbi Joshua Fixler of Houston’s Congregation Emanu El captured the problem with painful clarity when he described the use of “Judeo-Christian” as “a fig leaf at inclusion.” In other words, Judaism is being rhetorically invoked in order to make a Christian-centered curriculum appear broader, more ecumenical, and more constitutionally palatable than it actually is.

This is precisely the fiction behind the concept of “Judeo-Christian.” The phrase sounds generous. It sounds like partnership. It sounds like interfaith harmony. But historically and politically, it has often served to absorb Judaism into a Christian civilizational story while excluding Muslims, secular people, Indigenous spiritual traditions, and the many other religious and nonreligious communities that make up our society. It is a phrase that points at pluralism while narrowing the public imagination.

Robert O. Smith, associate professor at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, usefully reminds us that the term “Judeo-Christian” was popularized during the Cold War as part of a U.S. civilizational narrative that joined Protestants, Catholics, and Jews against supposedly “godless” enemies abroad, while excluding Muslims and others from the nation’s moral imagination (Ashby & Landen, 2026).

In this sense, “Judeo-Christian” is less a neutral description of shared religious heritage than a political construction. If anything, a Protestant or more specifically—Christian nationalist—reading of the Bible often subtracts from Jesus’ Jewishness by lifting him out of the Jewish world that formed him. 

Were this not so, Christians would more fully acknowledge the Jewish festivals, practices, scriptures, and interpretive traditions embedded throughout the New Testament, rather than glossing over them—or treating them as mere background to an otherwise Christian story. The irony is that those who invoke “Judeo-Christian values” often do so in ways that diminish Judaism itself, using Jewishness symbolically while centering a distinctly Christian interpretation of scripture, history, and nationhood.

This is why the Texas debate matters far beyond the reading list itself. What is at stake is not simply whether students should learn about religion. Of course students should learn about religion, history, literature, culture, and the many traditions that have shaped human life. Religious literacy has a legitimate place in public education. But there is a profound difference between teaching about religion and using public schools to advance a particular religious worldview.

The proposed Texas reading list crosses that line. As the article notes, many of the selected passages draw from Christian translations and interpretations, with Jewish texts treated thinly, awkwardly, or in ways that Jewish leaders themselves find troubling. Particularly alarming is the proposed pairing of Lamentations 3 with Holocaust literature, a pairing that rabbis warned could invite students to consider whether the Holocaust was divine punishment for Jews. Whether born of ignorance or intent, such a curricular choice is pedagogically irresponsible and morally dangerous.

This is how Christian nationalism enters the classroom: not always through an explicit declaration that Christianity should rule, but through curricular choices that quietly normalize one religious tradition as the foundation of American identity. It happens when “heritage” becomes a substitute for historical accuracy. It happens when “values” becomes a code word for exclusion. It happens when public schools are asked to carry theological assumptions that belong in families, congregations, seminaries, and houses of worship—not in state-mandated curriculum.

Texas is home to more than 5.5 million public school students. They are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Indigenous, secular, questioning, and more. They come from families with deep faith commitments and from families with none. A public school curriculum worthy of them must not narrow their world. It must broaden it.

Moreover, those adhering to traditional Protestant faiths—that are themselves diverse—should be just as concerned. A state-mandated curriculum that instrumentalizes the Bible for nationalist purposes does not honor Christianity; it distorts it. It reduces scripture to a civic ornament and treats faith as a tool of political formation rather than as a living moral and spiritual tradition. For Christians who take seriously the prophetic tradition and the separation of church and state that protects all faith communities, this should be deeply troubling.

That is why this debate is also about democracy. Public schools belong to the public. They should not be used to launder sectarian politics through the language of tradition. Nor should Jewish communities be conscripted into legitimizing a Christian-centered project that many Jewish leaders explicitly reject.

The phrase “Judeo-Christian” may sound inclusive, but in this context, it conceals more than it reveals. It masks power. It rewrites Jewish experience. It excludes whole communities from the story of Texas and the nation. And it asks public schools to do the work of religious formation under the banner of civic education.

The Texas State Board of Education had already given preliminary approval to the contested mandatory reading list that includes Bible passages, with final adoption scheduled for today, June 26, 2026 (Vertuno & Stengle, 2026). The proposal, if finally approved, would take effect in 2030 and would make Texas a national outlier in requiring a state-mandated reading list that includes biblical passages in public school instruction.

Texas students deserve better. They deserve honest history, constitutional fidelity, and a curriculum that respects the full diversity of our state. They deserve to learn about religion without being taught religion. They deserve schools that cultivate understanding rather than impose belonging on sectarian terms. They should also actually be taught the origins of so-called "Judeo-Christianity."

And above all, they deserve leaders who understand that pluralism is not a slogan. It is a democratic obligation.

References

Ashby, E. & Landen, C. (2026, June 25). As supporters praise Texas’ proposed “Judeo-Christian” curriculum, rabbis say it dismisses Judaism. Texas Tribune/Religion News Service. 

Vertuno, J. & Stengle, J. (2026, June 26). Texas school board to vote on required Bible readings in public education, Associated Press. https://apnews.com/article/texas-curriculum-bible-board-vote-06530403ff91c10462382422003e109f

As supporters praise Texas’ proposed “Judeo-Christian” curriculum, rabbis say it dismisses Judaism
A required reading list before the State Board of Education would present a predominantly Christian perspective to public school students, Jewish leaders say.

By Ellie Ashby, The Texas Tribune, and Chloe Landen, Religion News ServiceJune 25, 2026, 5:00 a.m. Central

Rabbi Joshua Fixler speaks at the State Board of Education meeting in Austin on Monday, 

June 22, 2026. Fixler argued that the required reading list is full of Christians texts that are 

inappropriate for public school classrooms. Aiden Gonzalez/The Texas Tribune

The Vanderbilt Report and the Manufacture of Suspicion Toward the Humanities, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

The Vanderbilt Report and the Manufacture of Suspicion Toward the Humanities

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

June 25, 2026

View Report Here.

The controversy over the Vanderbilt/Washington University report on the humanities (Boghossian et al., 2026) should concern all of us who care about higher education, academic freedom, and the democratic purpose of universities. Presented as a sober defense of rigor, objectivity, and scholarly standards, the report has instead become a flashpoint in the larger struggle over who gets to define legitimate knowledge in the academy (luckyuston@gmail.com, 2026). 

At a time when humanities departments, ethnic studies, gender studies, and other justice-oriented fields are already under political attack, the report risks doing more than diagnosing a problem. It risks furnishing a vocabulary for administrative scrutiny, budgetary austerity, and ideological policing.

This is why Dwight A. McBride’s (2026) critique is so important. He asks us to consider whether the report’s anxiety about “politicized” scholarship is really anxiety about a changing academy—one in which women, scholars of color, queer scholars, Indigenous scholars, and scholars from historically excluded communities are asking questions that earlier generations either ignored or suppressed.

The irony is also evident to me in light of a face-to-face conversation I once had with Dr. Randy Diehl, a former dean of the University of Texas College of Liberal Arts. He shared that he regarded much of the work in Mexican American and Latina/o Studies as cutting-edge—a characterization that, in my view, extends equally to African American and African Diaspora Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies. These are precisely the critical humanities fields now under attack. My, how things have changed.

In any case, McBride’s central question is clarifying: what if the academy did not become less scholarly when it became more diverse? What if it became more intellectually honest because new scholars brought new archives, new methods, new communities, and new moral urgencies into view (McBride, 2026)?

The report appears to rely on a nostalgic idea of the university as a place where knowledge once existed above politics, untouched by power. But that imagined university was never neutral. It was a university structured by exclusion—by who was admitted, who was hired, whose work was cited, whose languages counted, whose communities were studied, and whose experiences were dismissed as particular, emotional, or political. Fields such as Black studies, ethnic studies, women’s and gender studies, queer studies, Indigenous studies, and postcolonial studies did not emerge as departures from scholarship. They emerged because scholarship had failed to ask whole categories of questions about power, empire, race, gender, labor, sexuality, land, and inequality.

To cast these fields as inherently suspect because they engage social justice is to confuse subject matter with scholarly failure. There is poor scholarship in every field, including fields that describe themselves as neutral, empirical, classical, or objective. But serious inquiry into racism, colonialism, sexism, inequality, or state violence is not automatically activism masquerading as scholarship. Often, it is simply scholarship refusing to avert its gaze.

The danger is not merely intellectual. The report is addressed to university leaders, and it arrives in a political climate where administrators and governing boards are already being pressured to discipline faculty, reorganize departments, restrict curriculum, and eliminate programs deemed too critical or too “political.” This is especially alarming in states like Texas and Florida, where anti-DEI laws, attacks on shared governance, and efforts to narrow the curriculum have already reshaped higher education. In such a context, even a report that claims to oppose external political interference can become useful to those who seek precisely that interference.

A report on the humanities that truly centered rigor would begin with humility. It would ask whether its own evidence is sufficient for its claims. It would engage the scholars and fields it criticizes in good faith. It would distinguish between advocacy, public scholarship, community accountability, and poor method. It would recognize that the humanities have always been contested because meaning, memory, culture, language, and history are themselves contested terrains.

Instead, the Vanderbilt/Washington University report risks laundering a political anxiety through the language of standards. It treats the diversification of questions as a decline in quality. It treats scholarship attentive to power as evidence of ideological capture. It treats the old exclusions of the academy as if they were signs of intellectual purity.

The humanities do not need to be rescued from scholars who study justice. They need to be protected from those who mistake justice-oriented inquiry for intellectual corruption. The real crisis is not that the humanities have become too political. The real crisis is that, at the very moment when democracy needs deeper historical memory, ethical imagination, cultural understanding, and critical thought, powerful actors are working to narrow what can be studied, taught, funded, and known.

That is why this report matters. Not because it settles anything, but because it reveals the terms of the struggle before us. The question is not whether scholarship should be rigorous. Of course it should. The question is who gets to decide what rigor means—and whether rigor will be used to deepen democratic inquiry or to silence the very fields that have helped us understand democracy’s unfinished promises.

References

Boghossian, P., Appiah, K. A., Fine, K., Henrich, J., Fleming, K. E., Merchant, J., Morson, G. S., Rosen, G., Rubin, A., & Wilentz, S. (2026, April 5). Report on the state of scholarship in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences. https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-wpfsx/wp-content/uploads/sites/51/2026/06/State-of-Scholarship_Report_Final.pdf

luckyuston@gmail.com. (2026, June 11). The Vanderbilt report: A flashpoint in the battle for the humanities, Chronicle Beat. https://chroniclebeat.com/the-vanderbilt-report-a-flashpoint-in-the-battle-for-the-humanities/

McBride, D. A. (2026, June 15). The question haunting that humanities report,  Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2026/06/15/question-haunting-vanderbiltwash-u-report-opinion

Texas Is Legislating Growth on a Drying Planet—and the $174 Billion Bill for Texas’ Growth Machine Is Coming Due, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Texas Is Legislating Growth on a Drying Planet—and the $174 Billion Bill for Texas’ Growth Machine Is 

Coming Due

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

June 24, 2026

Chris Tomlinson’s recent column posted below, “Texas is running out of cheap water, and will need to make salty water sweet,” should land like an alarm bell across the state. His central point is simple and sobering: Texas is outgrowing its freshwater supply. Population growth, drought, fracking, semiconductor production, data centers, and the vast water needs of artificial intelligence are converging into a crisis that can no longer be deferred.

Link to PDF here

According to the Texas Water Development Board’s Draft 2027 State WaterPlan, implementing the recommended water management strategies is estimated to cost $174 billion, more than double the $81 billion estimated in the 2022 plan (Texas Water Development Board, 2026, p. 28). That number should stop us in our tracks. It tells us that the old bargain—grow endlessly, build endlessly, extract endlessly, and assume water will somehow be there—is breaking down.

Tomlinson rightly points to Corpus Christi as the canary in the coal mine. There, the city’s surface water supplies are running low, new groundwater wells have not delivered as hoped, and desalination remains expensive. 

Meanwhile, the endless drive to attract industry is increasingly ill advised, stretching the water supply beyond what residents can reasonably bear. The result is a familiar Texas pattern: public resources get promised to private growth, and ordinary people are left to pay the bill.

This is where the water crisis becomes more than an infrastructure problem. It is a democracy problem. Who gets to decide how much growth is too much? Who benefits from water-intensive development? Who pays when systems fail? Who is asked to conserve while industries expand? And whose communities are treated as sacrifice zones in the name of “economic development”?

These questions echo themes I have raised in other posts about the Hot Earth, climate disruption, and the extractive logic that governs so much of our public policy. Climate change is not some distant abstraction. It is arriving through heat, drought, flood, fire, migration, insurance costs, utility bills, and water scarcity. It is arriving through the quiet violence of unaffordability. It is arriving through the realization that the poor, the elderly, rural communities, and working families will be the first to experience what policymakers long treated as someone else’s future.

Tomlinson’s column is especially important because it pierces the illusion of cheapness. Texas has “run out of cheap water,” as Sen. Charles Perry put it. That statement deserves our full attention. Cheap water was never really cheap. It was subsidized by aquifers, rivers, ecosystems, Indigenous dispossession, rural extraction, underpriced infrastructure, and future generations who were never asked for consent. Now the bill is coming due.

Desalination may become part of the state’s water future, but it is not a magic wand. Making salty water sweet requires enormous energy. It also produces concentrated brine that must be handled carefully to avoid serious environmental harm. If desalination becomes another excuse for unrestrained growth, we will have learned nothing. We will simply be using more energy to solve the water crisis while worsening the climate crisis that intensifies drought in the first place.

The same concern applies to artificial intelligence and data centers. As I have written elsewhere in reflecting on AI and extraction, artificial intelligence is not weightless. It is not merely “in the cloud.” It is physical infrastructure: land, water, energy, minerals, labor, servers, cooling systems, and communities asked to absorb the costs. The language of innovation often hides the material reality of extraction. In Texas, that reality is becoming increasingly visible as rural communities confront large-scale data centers that demand huge amounts of water and electricity.

It is telling that even Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller has called for a moratorium on new data centers, warning that rural communities that have conserved water and land for generations are now being asked to compete with corporate giants whose demands could overwhelm local resources. 

That alone should widen the conversation beyond partisan politics. This is not simply a left-right issue; it is a question of stewardship, fairness, and whether Texas will protect the communities that have long sustained the state before handing scarce resources over to the highest bidder.

Water also forces us to rethink what we mean by prosperity. For too long, Texas leaders have equated growth with success. More highways. More subdivisions. More warehouses. More data centers. More fossil fuel extraction. More tax incentives. More ribbon cuttings. But growth without ecological limits is not prosperity. It is debt. It is risk. It is a form of policy denial.

And as with so many policy debates in Texas, inequality sits at the center. Wealthier households will absorb higher water rates more easily. Poor and working-class families will not. Rural communities may see their aquifers strained by development they did not invite. Colonias and historically underserved communities may face the worst infrastructure deficits. Urban residents may be told to conserve while industry receives favorable treatment. This is how environmental crisis becomes social crisis.

We should be deeply concerned that Texas is discussing water scarcity largely as an engineering challenge rather than a justice challenge. Pipes matter. Treatment plants matter. Desalination facilities may matter. But governance matters, too. Public voice matters. Conservation matters. Climate policy matters. Land-use planning matters. Accountability matters. Without these, water policy will reproduce the very inequities that brought us here.

The Legislature will have to confront this in 2027. But Texans should not wait for lawmakers to frame the issue for us. We need a broader public conversation now—one that includes educators, scientists, farmers, Indigenous communities, rural residents, environmental advocates, labor, students, and families already struggling with the cost of living.

Water is life. It is also memory, land, culture, food, health, and public trust. It is the connective tissue of ecology and democracy.

Texas can still choose a different path. We can invest in infrastructure, conservation, reuse, repair, and fair pricing. We can scrutinize water-intensive industries before granting them public support. We can protect communities from being overrun by extractive development. We can treat climate disruption as real rather than optional. We can insist that economic development serve the public good rather than private accumulation alone.

But we cannot keep pretending that endless growth is compatible with finite water.

Tomlinson’s column is a warning. Corpus Christi is a warning. The draft State Water Plan is a warning. The Hot Earth is warning us, too.

The question is whether Texas will listen before scarcity becomes policy, before crisis becomes normal, and before ordinary Texans are told—once again—that there is no alternative but to pay for decisions they did not make.

References

Texas Water Development Board. (2026). 2027 state water plan: Draft, phase 1. https://www.twdb.texas.gov/waterplanning/swp/2027/docs/DraftSWP27-Water-For-Texas.pdf

Tomlinson, C. (2026, May 21). Texas is running out of cheap water, and will need to make salty water sweet. Houston Chronicle. 

Texas is running out of cheap water, and will need to make salty water sweet

Texas faces a costly water crisis as growth, drought and industry outpace freshwater supplies statewide, writes columnist Chris Tomlinson.

By Chris Tomlinson,ColumnistMay 21, 2026

Texas is outgrowing its freshwater supply.

Communities across the state need billions of gallons more water for growing populations and thirsty industries like oil and gas fracking, computer chip etching and artificial thinking. What happens this summer in Corpus Christi is a sign of what’s coming for all Texans.

The price of creating freshwater and keeping the economy growing will leave consumers with sticker shock, state lawmakers recently acknowledged. A draft of the 2027 State Water Plan says Texas will need to spend $174 billion to meet the water needs of the next 50 years — twice as much as lawmakers estimated just four years ago.

“The taxpayer is going to pay for this stuff one way or the other, be it property tax or be it fees, or be it insurance cost increases,” state Sen. Charles Perry, chairman of the Senate Water, Agriculture and Rural Affairs Committee, said during a hearing last week. “There is no free lunch here, or if they don’t pay, we end up with a Third World state.”

Inconvenient truths

Lawmakers will need to have “a big conversation” when they gather in Austin next year, Perry predicted. The level-headed Lubbock Republican is not prone to hyperbole or known for rhetorical flourish. When he speaks up, Texans best listen up.

Droughts and floods have complicated life in Texas for eons. The population and economy only began to grow once people started damming rivers and drilling into aquifers. But experts say those water sources are insufficient for a growing state.

Corpus Christi is the canary in our coal mine. The city’s surface water supplies are running low, new groundwater wells have disappointed, and citizens can’t afford to make seawater drinkable.

In the City Council’s drive to attract industry and bring in new jobs and revenue, it stretched the water supply too thin. Now that the inevitable drought has arrived, the council will likely declare an emergency and impose strict rationing.

Experts told the Senate committee on May 11 that while 57% of city-owned water utilities say they have long-term plans with sufficient funding, 10% have no plan, and 43% do not have enough money.

This year was the first time the State Water Implementation Fund for Texas fell short, capable of providing only $1.28 billion of the $4.2 billion that water utilities requested. The Legislature created the fund 11 years ago to help local authorities pay for water projects.

The Texas Water Development Board, which administers the fund, rejected the Nueces River Authority’s request for help financing a Corpus Christi desalination plant, claiming it had to prioritize other projects. 

Statewide, Texas doesn’t know where it will find 10 million to 12 million acre-feet of the 17 million the state will need over the next 50 years, Perry warned (an acre-foot is about 325,000 gallons). Making existing water treatment plants and pipelines more efficient will only meet 3% of the need.

“If I have to pick between spending all of my dollars on leaky pipes or all my dollars on supply, I will pick supply every day,” Perry said.

Water users will need a lot of dollars.

Well runs dry

Producing drinking water from ground or surface sources typically costs between $1.10 to $4.30 per 1,000 gallons, according to the Texas Comptroller’s Office. Desalination costs range from $7.50 to $11 per 1,000 gallons.

“Everyone in the audience is going to say, ‘That’s too much, that’s double what we’re paying,’” Perry said. “But that’s the cost of new water in Texas … we have run out of the cheap water.”

If Texans will pay those rates, utilities will deliver. Companies are working to permit three seawater desalination plants, with state officials anticipating seven plants along the coast over the next decade.

Arid nations around the world use desalination, but in addition to requiring a lot of energy, they produce a brine that is twice as salty as the water going in. If the waste stream isn’t handled properly, it can cause severe environmental problems.

Critics question the wisdom of trying to grow Texas beyond what its natural resources can sustain. Community activists want to prioritize residents’ quality of life over industrial development, and environmentalists want conservation over development.

Sid Miller, the Republican agriculture commissioner, called for a moratorium on data centers to conserve water.

“They draw massive volumes of water for cooling, even amid ongoing drought,” Miller wrote in a press release on Monday. “Rural communities that have conserved resources for generations now compete with corporate giants.”

Should a higher power grant South Texans' prayers and bring a week or more of steady rain, a heaven-sent storm will not solve the state’s long-term water shortage. We’ll still need to turn salty water sweet.

“We have a lot of poor people that aren’t going to be able to live in Texas much longer if we don’t figure this out, and there needs to be a sense of urgency about it,” Perry warned. “The status quo has to break.”

Award-winning opinion writer Chris Tomlinson writes commentary about money, politics and life in Texas. Sign up for his “Tomlinson’s Take” newsletter at houstonchronicle.com/tomlinsonnewsletter or expressnews.com/tomlinsonnewsletter.

Chris Tomlinson

Business Columnist

Chris Tomlinson writes commentary about money, politics and life in Texas for Hearst Newspapers. He can be reached at ctomlinson@hearstcorp.com.

In 2025, Tomlinson was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters, an honor society that recognizes distinctive literary achievement. In 2021, the Texas Association of Managing Editors awarded him columnist of the year, and the Headliners Foundation named him Texas's Star Opinion Writer. He’s authored two New York Times Bestsellers, “Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth” and “Tomlinson Hill: The Remarkable Story of Two Families Who Share the Tomlinson Name - One White, One Black.”

Before joining the Houston Chronicle in 2014, he spent 20 years with The Associated Press reporting on politics, economics, conflicts and natural disasters from more than 30 countries in Africa, the Middle East and Europe.