In 1521, in the ancient city of Worms, Germany, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V called an assembly of important personages to figure out what to do about Martin Luther’s rebellion against the authority of the Roman Catholic Church.

The meeting was called the Diet of Worms — the word “diet” meaning an assembly or parliament — and it accomplished nothing. Except perhaps to suggest to generations since that it might have something to do with people eating worms. Or a catalog of things that worms eat.

In 2026, in the very modern Salt Lake City, the Utah Legislature passed, and the governor signed, a bill that requires public school students in the state to learn about certain concepts from the Christian Bible, at least as they relate to American thought and the creation of its government.

That legislation might properly be referred to as the Can of Worms, in honor of all the confusion and conflict it is likely to cause.

The measure, House Bill 312, tasks the State Board of Education with creating, and all local school boards with implementing, an integrated social studies curriculum. It includes some reasonable, if micromanaging, standards mandating certain courses in civics, history and literacy.

Where alarm bells go off, in a red state with the rise of Christian Nationalism across the country, is in the passages where the new law requires students to be made familiar with “analysis of religious and philosophical references contained in founding documents, including: the reference in the Declaration of Independence to ‘Nature’s God,’ ‘Creator,’ ‘Supreme Judge of the world,’ and ‘divine Providence.’”

Those terms do indeed appear in Mr. Jefferson’s essay, and their meaning is worth dissecting and understanding, even if the conclusions may not be as straightforward as some of the bill’s supporters may expect.

The bill also requires that students be taught about other philosophical approaches, then and now, “including Enlightenment philosophy, Protestant and Catholic thought, deism, and natural law theory.” This is, fortunately, anything but an indoctrination into the view, rising on the American right, of any kind of Christian Nationalism, the (thoroughly bogus) idea that the United States was founded as Christian nation and must be run by supposedly Christian precepts.

Recognizing the importance of deism among the founding generation is heartening, as it indeed a common belief among such leading thinkers as Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Paine, author of “Common Sense” and “The Rights of Man,” was among the more vehement deist thinkers, insisting that although God obviously exists — just look at the wonders of the universe — the Bible itself was a collection of myth and claptrap unworthy of thinking humans.

More than a few conservative Utah families may be troubled by the lessons their children bring home on those topics.

Then there is the inconvenient truth of how many of the signers of the Declaration owned slaves and how Biblical “truth” was used to justify (and to oppose) slavery, the genocide of Native Americans, the oppression of women, etc., etc.

The bill also mandates the teaching of the historic Frederick Douglass orations, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,” and “What the Black Man Wants.” Which are about as woke as it comes.

Other bits and phrases in this hodgepodge of a bill push the idea that our “compound constitutional republic” is clearly the best of all possible worlds. That it is better than direct democracy and, perhaps, by implication, the state’s process of citizen initiative and referendum that the Legislature’s Republican supermajority clearly despises.

It also wants the schools to take regular digs at communism, which is blamed for human rights abuses from China’s Cultural Revolution to violent unrest in Central America. No mention here of the untold human suffering imposed by capitalist America’s covert and overt meddling in Latin America, Iran, Southeast Asia, etc., etc.

The law also falls into the trap of promoting “free market capitalism,” ignoring, as most people do, that the term is an oxymoron. Capitalism, the goal of which is monopoly and rule by the wealthy, is the sworn, if sometimes secret, enemy of the free market, which lives by competition and the ability to make and do new things.

Those who promoted this bill probably worry that religion has become such a hot button issue that schools might ignore it altogether rather than risk the wrath of one ideology or another. And the contention that religious thought has influenced American governance from the beginning is certainly true.

But these folks may find out that, once the religious genie is out of the public education bottle, the many branches of thought and history that will have to be faced will make a lot of people very uncomfortable.

George Pyle, opinion editor of The Salt Lake Tribune, always paid attention in history class. In Sunday school, not so much.

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