01/11/2026
On the Matter of SB11 and Our Community: A Statement from StandUp Lamar CISD
There is a particular kind of confusion, at once willful and tragic, that occurs when people who speak loudly of liberty reveal themselves to have no genuine interest in it. The 160 Texas faith leaders who signed that letter opposing Senate Bill 11 understand something that those who drafted the bill apparently do not: the moment the state takes custody of your child's prayer, it has ceased to protect faith and begun to suffocate it. This is not a difficult distinction. It is merely an inconvenient one.
Let us be precise, because precision matters when civil rights hang in the balance.
StandUp Lamar is not an anti-Christian organization. We are, many of us, Christians ourselves. We believe in the transformative power of prayer, in the sustaining grace of Scripture, in the essential right of every American to chart the terms of their own spiritual journey. What we do not believe, what the Constitution itself forbids, is the state's assumption of that journey's direction. When a child bows their head in the hallway before a test, or when students gather at the flagpole before dawn to lift their voices together, they are exercising a liberty as old as this republic. When the school board schedules that moment, selects the text, and allocates the time, something else entirely has occurred.
The faith leaders who signed their names understand this. Rabbi Gideon Estes, who remembers the pressure he felt at "See You at the Pole" rallies as a Jewish student in California, understands what it means to be the child who does not participate, who must explain their absence, who learns early that belonging in American public life comes with conditions. The coalition includes Baptist, Jewish, Muslim, and secular voices because all of them recognize the same truth: a prayer led by the state is not a prayer at all. It is an edict dressed in the clothing of devotion.
Consider whom this policy would serve in Lamar CISD, a district where no single ethnicity constitutes a majority, where 40% of students are Hispanic, 23% are Black, 23% are white, and 10% are Asian, where Fort Bend County itself ranks among the five most diverse counties in America. "Fort Bend County is the new America," a Houston political strategist once observed. It is. And "the new America" does not have a single faith tradition waiting to assume dominion. It has families from Mexico City and Manila, from Lagos and Lahore, from Rosenberg and Richmond, each carrying their own scriptures and their own silences, their own prayers and their own doubts.
We have watched this board before. We watched when they voted to sanction Christianity courses. We listened when board members declared publicly that no separation exists between church and state, a claim so historically illiterate it would embarrass the founders they claim to revere. We documented when they acknowledged that their book removal policies were biblically centered, as though the Constitution contained an asterisk permitting viewpoint discrimination so long as it wears a cross. Seven hundred books disappeared from Lamar CISD shelves last fall, including "Beloved" and "Slaughterhouse-Five," including "Where the Wild Things Are," Maurice Sendak's Caldecott Medal winner, voted the number one picture book in America by the School Library Journal, a book about a child's imagination that has sold nineteen million copies and been read at bedsides for sixty years. The pattern is not subtle. The pattern is the point.
The Lamar CISD Board of Trustees has not yet voted on SB 11 implementation. They may, in their wisdom, choose not to adopt a policy that will inevitably face constitutional challenge, that will consume resources defending the indefensible, that will mark their district as a laboratory for theocratic overreach. We genuinely hope they do.
StandUp Lamar supports the student who prays before the bell. We support the student who organizes a Bible study in the cafeteria at lunch. We support the teacher who attends church on Sunday and the coach who wears a cross beneath his whistle. We support the Muslim child who unfurls her prayer rug at noon and the Jewish child who lights candles on Friday night and the child who believes in nothing but her own conscience. All of them. What we will not support, what we will resist with every legal instrument available to us, is a government body leading that prayer, scheduling that moment, selecting that text. The line is not blurry. The line is bright. And we intend to hold it, because no one else will, because that is what it means to love a country enough to hold it to its own promises.
The Republic was not founded so that some citizens could impose their faith on other citizens' children. It was founded so that no one could. That distinction is the entire American experiment. Lose it, and you have lost everything.
StandUp Lamar CISD
A new state law requires school boards to vote on establishing a period of prayer and “reading of the Bible or other religious text" at public schools.
