I am a Christian in Texas. Putting the Ten Commandments in my kids’ classrooms alarms me.

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(RNS) — It’s been nearly 10 years, but I still remember the poster — each hand-drawn bubble letter a joyful riot of color and pattern — hanging at the end of the hallway I was walking down with my 6-year-old daughter, tightly clutching her little hand as we both entered her new school for the first time together.

“Treat Others How You Want to Be Treated.”

There was no chapter and verse, but I instantly recognized it as Scripture hanging on the wall of her new public school: the Golden Rule, rendered in English plain enough for the first graders who’d soon be trying to read it for themselves.

As my oldest was starting public school, I was learning to let go; seeing the Bible in her school that day settled me. I imagined that it came from a kind teacher’s heart who would teach my daughter the same sort of lessons I desired her to learn.

But now, about a decade later, as Texas legislators have adopted curriculum changes  and laws to increase Christian content in our state’s public schools — like hanging the Ten Commandments in public schools — I feel something different: alarm,…