see: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/magazine/14texbooks-t.html?pagewanted=3&em

N.B.: I might note that one cannot simultaneously support the First Amendment and the First Commandment.

The Texas Bd. of Education chooses textbook content, and as it has a large market, it has influence on all textbooks.  The board is conservative, and one issue now under debate is “Christian Nation”.

From the above: ” The one thing that underlies the entire program of the nation’s Christian conservative activists is, naturally, religion. But it isn’t merely the case that their Christian orientation shapes their opinions on gay marriage, abortion and government spending. More elementally, they hold that the United States was founded by devout Christians and according to biblical precepts. This belief provides what they consider not only a theological but also, ultimately, a judicial grounding to their positions on social questions. When they proclaim that the United States is a “Christian nation,” they are not referring to the percentage of the population that ticks a certain box in a survey or census but to the country’s roots and the intent of the founders.  The Christian “truth” about America’s founding has long been taught in Christian schools, but not beyond. Recently, however — perhaps out of ire at what they see as an aggressive, secular, liberal agenda in Washington and perhaps also because they sense an opening in the battle, a sudden weakness in the lines of the secularists — some activists decided that the time was right to try to reshape the history that children in public schools study. Succeeding at this would help them toward their ultimate goal of reshaping American society. As Cynthia Dunbar, another Christian activist on the Texas board, put it, “The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.”

Member Don McLeroy – a dentist who makes no bones about the fact that his professional qualifications have nothing to do with education – states”

The men who wrote the Constitution were Christians who knew the Bible. Our idea of individual rights comes from the Bible. The Western development of the free-market system owes a lot to biblical principles.”

For McLeroy, separation of church and state is a myth perpetrated by secular liberals. “There are two basic facts about man,” he said. “He was created in the image of God, and he is fallen. You can’t appreciate the founding of our country without realizing that the founders understood that. For our kids to not know our history, that could kill a society. That’s why to me this is a huge thing.”

As one reads this long article, they can note: whatever influence religion had on the founders,:

• The laws that they created are based on the Enlightenment, not any religion.
• That religion was meaningful to many of the colonists during the Revolutionary period does not translate into our only source of Law: the Constitution.