Nathalie Baptiste writes for Huffington Post about efforts to inject conservative Christianity into schools, starting with the Texas mandate to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms.
“Why would you post the Ten Commandments?” asked Fred Clarkson, a senior research analyst at Political Research Association who focuses on far-right Christianity. “Because you have a theocratic vision of what should be taught in public schools.”
A Christian nationalist movement — one that seeks to remake the secular American government into a religious one — has been bubbling just under the surface of the broader conservative movement for decades.
“They believe America was once a Christian nation, things have gone astray and that Christian nation needs to be restored,” Clarkson said.
Its adherents see schools as an opportunity to weave Christianity into public life. “The church, as they understand it, is in competition with public schools for the minds of their children,” Clarkson said.
The goal, ultimately, is to dismantle the existing school system and remake it in a Christian nationalist image, which includes not just inserting religion but white supremacy, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and an ability to censor and control the information provided to students.
There have long been complaints about the United States’ public school system. When the U.S. Supreme Court ordered schools to be racially integrated in the 1950s and ’60s, white conservative parents looked for ways to avoid having their children attend schools with Black kids. They set up segregation academies, or private schools where they would not have to comply with pesky federal mandates.
And in 1986, Robert Thoburn, a Virginia pastor and Christian school founder, wrote in his book “The Children Trap” that Christians’ must work “to shut down the public schools, not in some revolutionary way, but step by step, school by school, district by district.”