The Christian right is emboldened and on the march
Beware when they speak of "tolerance."
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Last Friday, the right-wing majority on the Texas board of education voted to approve new social studies standards for the state’s five million public school students.
Texas students already have the Ten Commandments posted in every classroom and schools have been allowed to replace counselors with unlicensed “chaplains.” Now the state will require Bible readings for students’ entire progression through the education system.
Members of both the Republican-controlled legislature and the board were clear that they hope to inject not just religion but as much Christianity as possible into public education.
“We’re going to stop watering down American history. We’re going to teach the truth. Our nation was founded as a Christian nation, and Texas is a Christian state,” said board member Brandon Hall, a pastor from an intensely conservative part of rural north Texas.
What does this less-watered-down version of American history consist of? Among other things, it is animated by the venomous hatred of Muslims that has poured over GOP politics in Texas like a plague. Lessons on the theology and historical contributions of Islam are eliminated and replaced by discussion of radical Islam and the Prophet Muhammad’s “brutal military campaigns against Jewish and Christian tribes, the normalization of slavery, and the taking of female captives as harem slaves.”
And as the Texas Tribune noted, while the prior standards said that students should learn about post-World War I racial violence “including the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and the Tulsa Race Massacre,” the new standards “instead suggested that students learn about the Klan’s ‘intolerance’ of Catholics, Jews and immigrants but did not specify Black Americans. They also changed the ‘Tulsa Race Massacre’ to the ‘Tulsa Race Riots.’”
It may not have garnered as much notice as the Bible stories, but the word “intolerance” is an important one.
The problem with the KKK, of course, was not their inability to tolerate people of different religions and races; it was their decades-long campaign of terrorism. But the ascendant Christian nationalists in today’s Republican Party not only want credit for their willingness to tolerate at least some of those who are not like them, they claim that tolerance is the limit of what Christians should extend to everyone else.
In other words, their political vision is one in which Christians and Christian ideas rule, and all other Americans should expect no more than to be tolerated in a country that does not belong to them.
Conservative Christians unbound
It was a big week for the religious right in politics, since it also saw the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority” conference in Washington.
The gathering of Christian political activists featured appearances by a parade of Republican members of the House and Senate, multiple Trump cabinet members, and the president himself. As usual, Trump’s speech rambled almost incoherently from topic to topic, but he did return multiple times to the supposed oppression of Christians, both past and future.
“These ruthless communists,” Trump said — by which he meant Democrats — “will attack all religions, but in particular, Christianity. They always do. They’re after Christianity more than any other religion. It seems to be more and more throughout the world, maybe because we’re doing so well.”
However well “we” are doing vis-a-vis “them,” in Trump’s description, the threat liberals pose to Christians is positively genocidal.
“They will close your churches in this country,” he said. “They go communist, and they’re trying to. They will kill your people. And that’s what they’re about. They want to end religion. They have to end religion because their ideology doesn’t work if you have strong religion.”
Afterward, some participants gathered in the Oval Office, where Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick — who once said “we were a nation founded upon not the words of our founders, but the words of God because He wrote the Constitution” — insisted that “the separation of church and state is not in the Constitution.”
It actually is — the First Amendment’s establishment clause and free exercise clause create that separation — but the Christian right believes it has never had a better opportunity to weave support for Christianity into all levels of government policy and make its tendentious reading of the Constitution a reality. Not only do they have a president happy to do so, but the Supreme Court has for years been waging an attack on church-state separation — as long as Christians are the ones being protected.
A long succession of cases has defined ever-more ways that Christians can exempt themselves from laws they don’t like, and required government to fund their ideas, their expression, and their institutions. With each new religious liberty case, the court makes its perspective clear: If you are a football coach who was punished for holding Christian prayers at the 50-yard-line at games you’ll find a court eager to defend your rights, but if you’re a Rastafarian whose dreadlocks were forcibly shaved by prison guards, don’t expect sympathy.
Certain that the court’s conservative supermajority will continue dismantling that wall of separation, red states are seeing how far they can push their own policies. Four states — Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas — have passed laws in the last few years requiring the Ten Commandments to be posted in public school classrooms, and other states may follow. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that the posters have produced an upswing in the virtue displayed by their students. Though in fairness, it’s difficult to know whether middle schoolers in these states are now less likely than they used to be to make graven images or covet their neighbor’s wives, asses, oxen, or slaves (the coveting is all part of the Tenth Commandment).
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is stocked with unapologetic Christian nationalists like OMB Director Russell Vought, the architect of the administration’s dismantling of the federal government.
“Part of being a nation is a shared religious heritage. And in America, that historical heritage is, of course, Christianity,” Vought wrote in a 2021 column defending Christian nationalism. The secretary of defense has multiple Crusader tattoos, and has instituted monthly Christian prayer services featuring far-right clerics, including at least one who advocates the establishment of a Christian theocracy. Official government social media accounts regularly send out sectarian Christian messages.
And as Vice President JD Vance said at a Turning Point USA event in December, “the only thing that has truly served as an anchor of the United States of America is that we have been, and by the grace of God, we always will be, a Christian nation.”
A rejection of pluralism
What all these efforts amount to is an emphatic rejection of religious pluralism, the principle that was embedded in the founding and has defined the American religious context for 250 years.
America, today’s right says, may include people of many religions, but is fundamentally of, by, and for Christians — and only Christians. Everyone else is merely tolerated, here at the sufferance of those who believe in the country’s true religion.
It’s the same way that Vance implicitly describes immigrants and their descendants in the multiple blood-and-soil speeches he has given over the last few years, insisting that the heart of America lies not in its ideals but in those who have been here, as his family has, for multiple generations. They are the truest Americans, Vance wants us to believe, and those who came more recently can at best expect only to be tolerated.
But the whole point of establishing religious pluralism — one of the things that made the American experiment so radical in the late 18th century — was that people of various faiths would not merely be tolerated by the Protestants who ran the country. Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, or followers of any other religion — or no religion at all — would be full citizens in every sense, because the country belonged to everyone.
That may have only sometimes been true in practice. But the ideal of religious pluralism — and the labor of those who would force the country to live up to it — not only helped the country survive, it’s the primary reason why America today has higher rates of religiosity than most similar countries that watched their moribund state churches steadily lose adherents.
In August 1790, Moses Seixas, leader of the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, wrote a letter to President George Washington expressing his gratitude for the Constitution which guaranteed people of all faiths an equal place in this new nation. Washington replied a few days later, reiterating to Seixas the importance of that equality, and specifically rejecting the notion of toleration.
“All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship,” Washington wrote. “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.”
Today, toleration is spoken of plenty, by those who view it as a generous favor they do for the Americans who do not share their beliefs. They know well that the country is growing more religiously diverse all the time; Christians now make up around 63 percent of Americans, while just a few decades ago they were over 90 percent.
So the religious right claims to be oppressed victims, while pushing harder every year to give their religion official government status. They seek the power not just to worship as they wish but to impose their beliefs on the rest of us. If only they understood what the tradition of American religious liberty is actually about.
That’s it for today
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Funny, I thought Madison wrote the Constitution but now I learn from Dan Patrick that God did. God didn't even write the Bible!! By the way Mr. Patrick, the Founders left England to escape religious persecution. As for JD, I can trace my ancestry back to the beginning of the US. I guess that makes me super special. I am a white woman and I reject their bigotry!! I am sick and tired of old, white men telling us that they're f*cking special and the rest of us must bow down to them.
Loved the George Washington quote. This notion of mere tolerance equates to some TV ad I saw on TBS - "I am better than you, and you know it"