Drawn, Not Dragged

What an eight-year-old king's reformation still has to say about the Bible in Texas schools.

Josiah was only eight years old when he was crowned king.

By then, Judah had spent the better part of a century rebelling against God. His own grandfather, Manasseh, had filled the temple itself with idols. Josiah inherited all of it as a child — a kingdom that had more or less buried its own Scriptures, almost literally.

Eighteen years into his reign, he ordered repairs on the temple. Somewhere in the rubble, the high priest found a scroll so neglected it was as if no one alive had ever read it: the Book of the Law.

When it was brought before the king and read aloud, the king tore his clothes — his heart having been pierced by its words. He understood, immediately and completely, how far he and his people had drifted from God.

What followed wasn’t a private, personal repentance. Josiah tore down every high place in the land. He burned the Asherah poles, ground the idols to powder, and removed the priests who had been serving false gods for generations.

He restored the Passover, keeping it the way it hadn’t been kept in centuries. Then he gathered the nation together, from small to great, and read the entire Book of the Covenant aloud to all of them, and every person present pledged themselves to it. No king before him or after him turned to the Lord with all his heart in the way King Josiah did (2 Kings 23:25).

Yet, when Josiah died, something unexpected—at least, it would have been to him—occurred.

The nation did not continue in the righteousness he had established. As quickly as he had restored it, it fell back into apostasy after he died.

Josiah wasn’t an evil theocrat. He wasn’t grasping control for its own sake. He loved God completely, and he wanted his nation to love Him as well. His desire was good — better than good. But we have to notice what his method produced the moment he was gone.

A king can tear down idols. But he cannot make a people love God.

A ruler can command reform. But he cannot create repentance.

He can put the Word of God before the people. But he cannot write it on their hearts.

I am reminded of Josiah today, in hearing about Texas adding a mandatory reading list to their schools and including sections of the Scripture in it.

The conversation, whenever something like this becomes politicized, always becomes the same thing. Two armies are formed, trading back and forth insults with one another.

“You hate God!”

“You’re an evil fascist theocrat!”

That is exactly what I don’t want to do here. I want to take a look at what each side is actually afraid of, because both fears are real, and neither side is the cartoon the other has drawn of it.

Start with those who would like the Bible taught in schools. Terms like “Christian Nationalists,” “Fascists,” and “Theocrats” get casually tossed around to demonize this group. But at their heart, their motive is no different from the motive of Josiah.

A lot of those who would like the Bible taught in school just love God and His Word. They believe it’s true, that it’s beautiful, that it’s powerful. They’ve had it convict them, pierce them, humble them, comfort them, and heal them. They know that without it, you cannot fully comprehend the true depths of beauty and life. And naturally, they want their children, and their neighbor’s children, to encounter that miracle for themselves.

That’s not a conspiracy. It’s devotion — the same devotion of the king who no other king could match in passion for God.

And let me just say as well, that there is nothing wrong, in principle, with a community freely choosing to have the Bible read in its schools. If a population is genuinely convinced together that this is good for them, then that isn’t oppression.

That’s a free people governing themselves according to their own convictions—something the United States has built and prided itself on.

But this is exactly where the concern of the other side becomes so vital — and why it shouldn’t be waved off merely as hatred of God, or contempt for religion.

There are those who hear “Bible passages required in school” and immediately worry about the state handling sacred things — about children being religiously formed by government authority, about one faction gaining enough political power to settle questions of conscience for everyone else by force.

That is anything but a wicked concern, and Christians, of all people, should be able to understand it.

Faith that is coerced is not faith at all.

A person cannot be legislated, mandated, or pressured into genuine belief, any more than a rock can be commanded to be a flower, as was shown in the story of King Josiah.

True conviction must come freely, willingly, sincerely from the heart, and this is not a secular idea. It is a deeply biblical one.

The separation of church and state wasn’t invented by people who hated God; it was built, in large part, by a Christian society that understood this exact principle: a state’s monopoly on legal coercion can never produce a free-will offering of the heart.

A state can require reading. It can put Scripture in front of a child. But it cannot create love, and it cannot make that child behold the beauty of Christ.

That is the honest concern underneath this side, at its best. It is not anti-Bible, but anti-coercion.

And this is where I think Scripture gives us a kind of political wisdom as well.

When Moses sat alone judging the disputes of Israel from morning until evening, Jethro warned him, “What you are doing is not good” (Exodus 18:17). The problem was not that Moses had authority. The problem was that too much judgment had become concentrated in one place.

How could one man possibly keep up with the diverse problems, burdens, and disputes of so many tribes, families, and households?

So Jethro counseled him to appoint faithful men over thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens, allowing smaller matters to be handled closer to the people while only the hardest cases rose upward.

Authority was not abolished. But it was properly ordered. The higher authority did not need to swallow every lower judgment into itself.

This is the wisdom federalism comes from: recognizing that the imposition of top-down governance on a diverse population inevitably breeds conflict and division. When power is centralized, politics becomes a zero-sum game where competing factions fight for control just to impose their values on others.

To prevent this, federalism insists that centralized authority remain limited, like Moses after Jethro’s correction, acknowledging that a distant authority cannot adequately understand or serve the unique needs of local communities.

Which is exactly where I struggle with what Texas is doing.

I would argue that Texas as a whole is not one cohesive community. It is Austin, El Paso, Houston, Dallas, Amarillo, Brownsville, and everything in between.

These places do not share one settled conviction on this question any more than the whole country does.

Texas contains Christians who want more Bible in schools. It contains Christians who love the Bible but are uneasy about the state handling it. It contains Jews, Muslims, atheists, agnostics, immigrants, secular families, Catholic families, Protestant families, progressive cities, conservative towns, and everything in between.

So when a state board mandates Bible passages across all of that, I have a hard time calling that “the people choosing it together.”

It looks more like one faction with state-level power making the choice for millions of people who never actually arrived at a shared “yes.” And I would say the same thing about a state mandating that the Bible be excluded everywhere.

Whether the decision is made by a school board in a small town or by broader public leadership, if a community is genuinely making that decision for its own children with clear public backing, that is one thing. But a centralized state authority handing down one answer for millions of children across wildly different communities is another entirely.

When we use power at the wrong altitude—operating from a state-level throne room rather than the ground floor of a local community—we bypass the slow, difficult, sacred work of persuasion. We do not have to convince our neighbors; we only have to outvote them. We do not have to live with disagreement; we only have to capture the mechanism that settles it for everyone.

That may feel like victory.

But it is a dangerous kind of victory.

We should want Scripture read. We should want children to know the Bible. We should want the Word of God in the ears, minds, and hearts of our people. But we should also know the difference between exposure and transformation. Between public victory and spiritual renewal. Between a law written on a reading list and the law written on the heart.

Jesus said, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him.”

Draws.

Not drags.

The One with full authority over every heart on earth still chose to woo rather than force. If God Himself does not manufacture love for His Word by decree, I do not know why we imagine a mandate can accomplish what only the Spirit can do.

Rules can bind the hands, but they cannot bend the heart.

I would rather see a child fall in love with this book slowly and freely than see them forced to recite a passage they spend the next twenty years resenting.

I would rather Christians persuade our neighbors by the beauty of our lives, the patience of our arguments, the depth of our love, and the integrity of our witness than reach for state power because persuasion feels too slow.

And that’s the deeper plague.

We’ve abandoned, on both sides, among both armies, the desire to persuade — and replaced it with demonization and the desire to capture the mechanism and enforce our convictions on everyone else.

A people can survive disagreement.

But they cannot survive contempt.

They cannot survive losing the ability to persuade one another through love, patience, argument, and good faith.

And if we reach the point where persuasion feels impossible and force feels like the only tool left, then the real crisis is not merely what appears on a school reading list.

The crisis is that we no longer know how to live together.

As Jesus so wisely said, “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand” (Matthew‬ ‭12‬:‭25‬).

Josiah could tear down the idols, but he could not make the people love God. And if one of Judah’s most righteous kings could not create faithfulness by command, then maybe we should be slower to imagine that our own mandates can do what only love, persuasion, and grace can accomplish.

God did not merely carve His law into stone and leave it there, demanding by force what stone could never give.

He promised hearts of flesh.

He draws.

He does not drag.

I pray we would extend one another enough patience to do the same.

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