Thom Hartmann is a prolific author and public school supporter. Here he outlines the disturbing use of taxpayer dollars to proselytize about One True God.
Proselytizers for evangelical Christianity believe they are on the verge of taking over our country, from our schools to our courts to Congress itself. History warns us — as did the Founders and Framers of the Constitution — that, if successful, this will be deadly to American democracy.
Religious evangelism can be a deadly thought virus. It explicitly posits that, “There is only one right way to live and we know what it is” along with, “There is only one true god and he is the one we worship — and now you must, too.”
From the Crusades of the High Middle Ages, to Hitler anointing as Reichsbischof (Reich’s Bishop) Ludwig Müller and outfitting his entire army with belt-buckles declaring Gott Mit Uns (God is with us), to the persecution of women in early New England colonies, evangelical Christianity has distorted the history of western societies and often led to rivers of blood. A similarly destructive dynamic plays out today with evangelical Islam across the Middle East and parts of Southeast Asia.
Judaism, Buddhism, and most forms of Hinduism are not evangelical; only Christianity and Islam have historically called for conversion, sometimes under threat of violence, imprisonment, or even death.
In this regard, one could compare the crusade associated with the Appeal to Heaven flag — which is so far successfully using the force of law to control American women and school curriculum in multiple Republican-controlled states — to the Iranian and Saudi imposition of Sharia law on their own people.
Cancer describes a biological system where one group of cells rises up and seizes control over all the resources of the rest of the cells in a body. When evangelical religions rise up to take control of political systems — the mechanism by which people govern themselves — they act as a political cancer within the society they’re attacking.
Native American tribes learned this lesson early on during their 20,000-year occupation of the Americas, which is why thousands of different tribes and language groups, most practicing their own unique religion, viewed evangelism and coerced conversion as a cultural sin that had to be punished.
