Opinion: Is Abbott trying to co-opt faith leaders for his political ends?

Once again, the integrity of public education in Texas will be tested when Governor Abbott calls a special session of the state legislature focused on “school choice.”

In his announcement last week regarding another legislative effort, the governor appealed to religious leaders in our state to advocate for school choice as a means for making state education money available for those wanting to send their children to private schools. By calling for this special session the governor has now become a theologian intoning that “the fundamental principle that God created us for is to have family units- not state bureaucrats- make decisions for families."

RELATED: 'Go to the pulpit': Abbott calls on faith leaders to push for school choice in Texas'

To drive home his divinely inspired conviction about school choice, i.e. diverting tax dollars away from local public schools to private schools, the governor is threatening an additional special session and then to make this sanctified school choice idea an election issue in November. In support of his God-ordained school choice fixation, Governor Abbott is appealing to pastors and religion leaders statewide to “go to their pulpit” to advocate for school choice and parental rights.

As a Presbyterian minister, albeit retired, who has served three congregations around Texas since 1982 I get very concerned when politicians start asking clergy to promote their ideas in the name of God. Moreover, it sounds like the governor is now attempting to co-opt religious leaders for his political ends when he was unable to get the legislature to address his school choice wish in the regular session this past summer.

As a Christian minister I am more than willing to evoke the name of God in public policy matters that promote compassion and justice within our state and local communities. But this school choice idea our governor is preaching sounds like the same kind of narrow-minded and divisive thinking that occurred when the Supreme Court ordered immediate school racial integration in 1969 and many Southern public schools developed their “freedom of choice” educational option to allow white families to send their kids to all-white private schools rather than create equitable multi-racial public schools.

I have difficulty believing that God wants the state of Texas to abandon the challenges of providing quality public education for all children so that some parents can enable their kids to get a better education than others.  Roman Catholics have long exercised the option of sending their children to private parochial schools as both a religious and educational issue without asking the state to fund their decision.

So, I wonder what is driving this latest God-inspired school choice idea? White and wealthy resentments toward the 1990s court-mandated Robin Hood plan where the state of Texas recaptures excess local property tax from wealthier school districts that are able to pay their entitlement funding and distributes it to school districts that cannot?  From my reading of the Bible, wealth redistribution for the sake of the common good is a moral and religious principle more so than parental rights to do all they can to benefit their own children.

The governor must be reading a different Bible than I do.  

Snead is a retired Presbyterian minister living in Georgetown.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Opinion: Is Abbott co-opting religious leaders for his political ends?