Smithville residents signaled their firm Christian faith last week after some parents raised concerns that a local first grade teacher at Brown Primary School was leading her class in reciting daily Bible verses.

The hashtag #istandwithsusan, referring to teacher Susan Schobel, gained momentum after an article about the ritual was published by the Times. A rally was quickly organized to show support for Schobel; T-shirts bearing the hashtag and Bible verses Romans 12:9-10, the ones Schobel and her class would read aloud, were sold around town by the screen printing shop The Rack Clothing Co. Some residents threatened to boycott the Comfort Café, an eatery run by a drug and alcohol recovery nonprofit associated with the parents who complained about the Bible readings.

The rally was later called off “due to the sensitivity of the situation,” the event organizer announced on Facebook, and the screen printing shop declined to say how many shirts it had sold. But the swift displays of support for Schobel’s daily Bible ritual indicated that the rural town of 4,200 has a Christian-leaning soul.

The controversy was ignited Nov. 1 when Schobel posted a video to Facebook showing her first-grade class reciting verses from the book of Romans: “Love from the center of who you are; don’t fake it. Run for dear life from evil; hold on for dear life to good,” the kids begin saying. In the video’s caption, Schobel describes the ritual as their “daily Bible verse” and later wrote in a comment that if she got fired for teaching about Jesus, she’d be “getting fired for a great reason!!”

Irked by what they saw as a public school-sponsored church lesson, some district parents sent their concerns to the superintendent and, after feeling unsatisfied with the district’s transparency in how it was intervening, to the Times.

Smithville’s devout culture is writ large. There are about three churches for every 1,000 residents, according to those listed on the Smithville Chamber of Commerce’s website. And it is exactly that faith-heavy culture that has kept Hope Mosqueda and her family in town since 1997.

All of Mosqueda’s kids have been educated in the Smithville public school system, and while she’s never seen religion or faith expressed in classroom curriculum, she gets the sense that the campus community shares her Christian faith. The fact that God has not been “forced completely out of our schools,” she said, is comforting.

“You can just kind of feel it, but not in a forced way,” she said.

Often that’s felt through the prayers before football games, or the prayers the school community will send when tragedy has struck a student, or when a teacher gifts children’s books telling the Nativity story to a class around the holidays.

“In a place like this, where there is almost literally a church on every corner, it’s going to come out somehow,” Mosqueda said. “Maybe not even trying intentionally to influence anyone.”

But, Mosqueda said she can see how some families can be bothered by daily Bible verse readings in the classroom, especially if they don’t share her same faith. She said it’s something that should be handled strictly between parents, school administration and the teacher.

Attorneys and experts on religious liberty in public schools agree that the facts of Schobel’s ritual are directly contrary to the Supreme Court’s 1963 ruling in Abington School District vs. Schempp, which struck down public school-sponsored Bible readings and prayer as unconstitutional. The ruling does allow for teaching of the Bible in a strictly objective sense that emphasizes its historical and literary importance.

“Teaching about religion or the Bible in public school from an objective and neutral manner is tricky even for high school students, and usually such courses are voluntary,” said David Barkey, senior counsel of the National Religious Freedom Counsel. “Here, the students are six (years old) and attending the readings appears to be mandatory. There is nothing to suggest that (the teacher) is reading passages about morality and character from multiple faiths and secular texts.”

In a statement issued on Friday, Superintendent Cheryl Burns acknowledged the misstep and the district’s duty to maintain neutrality toward religion by public school districts.

“We encourage and celebrate these freedoms and welcome the diversity of thought, worship, ideas and speech in our community,” Burns wrote. “We support the right of students to express themselves. We support our employees’ free speech and free exercise rights as well, while being mindful of their on-duty responsibilities.”