Star Trek Actor Tim Russ Is Outraged That Texas Is Teaching the Bible

The Texas State Board of Education voted 9-4 on June 26 to add Bible passages to the required reading list for all K-12 public school students in the state. Elementary students will read picture-book versions of David and Goliath and Daniel in the Lion’s Den. Fifth graders will study sections of Exodus. Seventh graders will read the Twenty-Third Psalm. High schoolers will study Adam and Eve and the parable of the Prodigal Son. The passages sit alongside Charles Dickens, E.B. White, Shel Silverstein, Kurt Vonnegut, and Elie Wiesel on a list of approximately 200 mandated texts. The changes take effect in the 2030-31 school year. Texas parents retain the right to opt their children out.

Tim Russ saw this news and went to X.

“The Texas (Christian Nationalist) School board has mandated that Bible passages will soon be required reading in public schools. Not only is it a blatant violation of the Constitution but more importantly, it’s replacing actual science and history with mythology.”

He followed up: “Christian Nationalists keep arguing that the country was founded on Christian principles. It was not!! The founding fathers omitted any reference to religion in the constitution for an obvious reason. I’m sure the Texas schools won’t be reading from the Koran or Torah also.”

Both posts contain factual errors as to the nature of America and even what’s going on with this ruling.

Texas is teaching the Bible as literature, alongside Dickens and Vonnegut, in an English and reading curriculum. It is not replacing science with mythology. No science class is affected. No history class is being restructured around Genesis. The required reading list is exactly that, a literature reading list that includes biblical texts alongside secular ones. Russ either did not read the actual policy or chose to misrepresent it.

The constitutional claim requires more unpacking because it is more widely believed and more consequential. The First Amendment’s Establishment Clause reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Two things are immediately apparent to anyone who reads that sentence carefully. First, it applies to Congress, not to state boards of education. The Fourteenth Amendment extended many federal constitutional protections to the states through incorporation, but the Supreme Court’s Establishment Clause jurisprudence has evolved significantly and continues to be contested. Second, the clause prohibits the establishment of religion, meaning the government cannot create or impose an official state church. It does not prohibit the teaching of religious texts as literature, history, or cultural context.

The founders Russ invokes as evidence of secular intent were operating in a country whose colonial governments were explicitly religious by design. Massachusetts Bay was founded on Puritan theology. Virginia had an established Anglican Church with state tax support well into the founding era. Connecticut’s Congregational Church was state-supported until 1818. The idea that the founders were constructing a secular public square is a reading of American history that requires ignoring the religious establishment that every single original colony maintained.

What the founders were actually protecting against was the kind of ecclesiastical tyranny that had plagued Europe, a state church with the power to imprison, tax, and execute dissenters. Thomas Jefferson’s famous “wall of separation between church and state” phrase does not appear in the Constitution. It appears in a private letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802, written to assure Baptists that the federal government would not favor Congregationalists in Connecticut over them. The Danbury Baptists were not asking Jefferson to keep religion out of public life. They were asking him to keep the government from picking one denomination over another. That is a very different thing from what Russ is describing.

The current interpretation of the Establishment Clause as requiring the removal of all religious expression from public education is a 20th-century judicial development, not an original founding intent. It emerged primarily from Engel v. Vitale in 1962, which prohibited government-sponsored school prayer, and Abington School District v. Schempp in 1963, which prohibited state-mandated Bible reading as devotional practice. Neither case prohibits teaching biblical texts as literature. The Supreme Court has explicitly held that “the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities” and that its inclusion in an academic curriculum is constitutional. Teaching the Sermon on the Mount as a literary text alongside Dickens is not the same as opening school with a devotional prayer.

Texas is also a sovereign state with the right to set its own educational standards. The federal government does not control curriculum. The Texas State Board of Education is the elected body whose mandate includes precisely this kind of decision. If Russ or anyone else believes the policy violates the Constitution, the courts are available.

Russ is not engaging with any of this. He is posting that the founders were secular, that Texas is teaching mythology in science class, and that the policy is a “blatant violation of the Constitution,” three claims that range from oversimplified to factually wrong.

This is not the first time Russ has posted about religion with this level of inaccuracy and heat. In 2021, following the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, he posted: “The Taliban are as fanatical about their beliefs and culture as the millions of people right here in the U.S. who believe in religion, conspiracy theories, and alternate reality.” Equating American Christians to the Taliban in a post about a regime that was executing women for showing their faces. In 2019, he responded to a Christian commenter on abortion by writing: “You fanatics don’t give a damn about anybody AFTER they’re born, never have and never will.” In response to Sarah Sanders saying God wanted Trump to be president, Russ declared that America already has “Sharia law... Christian Sharia law. There is no difference.” In 2024, he posted an image suggesting he would drink Drano if Trump won the election. In September 2025, days after Charlie Kirk was shot and killed, Russ posted an image of Captain Kirk with the caption “The only Kirk that matters.” His Voyager co-star Robert Beltran had called Kirk “first a Christian” who “spread the gospel with patience and love.” William Shatner, who actually played Captain Kirk, expressed condolences and said “assassination is so senseless.” Russ made a joke of a horrific death.

Most Star Trek fans who know Russ know him as Tuvok, the Vulcan security officer on Voyager whose entire character was built around logic, discipline, and emotional restraint. Tuvok’s defining quality was the ability to set aside personal feeling in order to think clearly. He would not have approved of his actor’s X account.

Texas teaching the Prodigal Son alongside Great Expectations is not the imposition of a theocracy. It is a state board making a curricular decision that reflects the overwhelming influence of Western Christianity on the literature, history, law, and culture that public school students are supposed to understand.

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