Writer Danny Cherry writing for The Progressive about the work of protecting public education from Christian nationalism.
In his 2022 book, Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wrote that the U.S. education system is a 16,000 hour battle “for our kids and our country.” This view is popular within the Christian nationalist movement, of which Hegseth is a proponent—advocates see children as blank vessels for their worldview that the United States is God’s chosen land, and that Christians are meant to have dominion over it. Since the United States told white evangelicals they had to desegregate their schools, Christian nationalists have turned education into a political lightning rod and treated schools as ideological war zones, leaving hardworking teachers and impressionable students to suffer collateral damage.
This push for more religion in school comes on the heels of the “parents rights movement,” which makes transgender people, “wokeness,” and teachers deemed liberal scapegoats for all societal ills. This was intentional on the part of a handful of conservative and religious organizations. That’s why places such as Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana have seen a rise in bills meant to tear down the wall between church and state. Lawmakers in Louisiana, for example, have explicitly stated they want to expose kids to Christian morals through the public school system. Who better to help with that than a local hate group?
After the state passed a law mandating the display of the Ten Commandments in classrooms last year, Louisiana Family Forum (LFF), a conservative advocacy organization deemed a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, started passing out Ten Commandments displays to local schools. In a brief phone conversation, LFF’s office manager told The Progressive that the group’s displays are in “about fifty classrooms,” while WAFB reported in February they had printed out enough for four of Louisiana’s sixty-four municipal areas, which are known in the state as parishes rather than counties. Louisiana has stated that compliance is voluntary, and it is not clear exactly how many schools have chosen to put the displays in class.
The rollout of the mandated displays has been slow, but one teacher in LaSalle Parish tells The Progressive that most in the school district are “excited to violate the Constitution.” The teacher, who requested to remain anonymous for fear of backlash, added that just about every school in the parish leads prayers with students before class, lunch, and football games, and that one school in the parish puts on an annual Christmas celebration that involves “girls as young as six portraying pregnant Mary.”
Louisiana is far from the only state attempting to erode the separation of church and state in public schools. In Iowa, Governor Kim Reynolds is expected to sign a bill into law that would require schools to teach that life starts at conception using mandatory ultrasound video presentations. Under a proposed West Virginia law, the Bible would be considered “historically accurate” classroom material. In Texas, public schools that adopt the Bluebonnet Learning curriculum—which teaches young children to read using Bible stories and presents biblical events as historical fact—receive an extra $60 in funding per student.