The current default for TextSecure is to display the keyboard when you go to view an SMS. This takes up a lot of screen real estate and makes reading the messages a little more difficult than it should be. This is down to the text area being in focus when you go to read a message

The ideal solution to this would be not to defailt to having the text entry area in focus and instead let the end user decide whether they need to type a response and in which case the keyboard will open.