A Republican running for reelection to Congress in Colorado recently told a Christian congregation: “I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk.”
The words of Rep. Lauren Boebert, who beat back a primary challenge last week, may appear inconsequential in Florida. But foolish are those who dismiss her as just a right-wing fanatic.
There is a concerted effort to blur the line between religion and state and interpret the history of the United States through a conservative Christian lens that whitewashes our past of slavery and segregation.
That effort begins with public education. It ends with the conservative reshaping of the nation’s highest court.
Florida, thanks to Gov. Ron DeSantis, is ground zero for such experimentation. As Richard Corcoran, former state education commissioner and DeSantis appointee, prophesied, “Education is our sword.” Or a scalpel Republicans are carefully manipulating in Republican-led states. They claim to be fighting indoctrination by “leftist academics” while giving their own spin — yep, indoctrination — on the nation’s founding.
It’s no coincidence that Corcoran uttered those words at a seminar last spring organized by Hillsdale College, a 1,500-student private Christian college in a small town in Michigan. The school has strong connections to Republicans and an outsize influence in efforts to reshape K-12 education.
The college’s “1776 Curriculum” — apparently, a spin-off of Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission, chaired by the college’s president — has been criticized for minimizing slavery and climate change.
Hillsdale College is among the organizations partnering with Florida to train teachers on how to administer a new state civics initiative. Some of the teachers who attended a three-day training session in Broward County told Miami Herald reporters they were alarmed at how “skewed” it was toward “a very strong Christian fundamentalist way toward analyzing different quotes and different documents,” as a 12th-grade government teacher described.
The push to insert Christianity into government isn’t new. But as the nation becomes more racially and culturally diverse, and less religious that push is in overdrive — in 2011, about 18% of Americans were not affiliated with any religion, according to the Pew Research Center. That number grew to 29% last year. As Confederate monuments are taken down and names of slave owners are taken off buildings, there’s a counter effort to brush over the bad parts of our history.
The point isn’t to deny slavery, but to make it sound like it wasn’t so bad or as widespread. For example, teachers told the Herald the state’s trainers emphasized that most enslaved people in the country were born into slavery, and not trafficked through the trans-Atlantic slave trade. One of the slides used in the training shows quotes from Presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson saying they wanted to outlaw slavery but doesn’t mention both were slave owners, the Herald reported.
The catch is that no one can accuse the state trainers of lying. Their strategy lives in the nuances of history, where data and facts can be interpreted, or obscured, to support a point of view — as all sides of this debate do. The problem is the state of Florida is sanctioning one side. It is trying to coerce teachers — lured to training sessions by a $700 stipend — that there is only one right way to look at history. That point of view ignores the perspectives of the millions of Americans who aren’t Christian or white.
Another training slide called it a “misconception” that the Founding Fathers “desired strict separation of church and state.”
The reality is more complicated. The Founders didn’t necessarily have a monolithic view on this topic, said David Hudson, a First Amendment fellow with the Freedom Forum Institute, a group that works to raise awareness of First Amendment rights.
“At least certain Founders cared deeply about the separation of church and state,” Hudson told the Herald Editorial Board.
In an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, Thomas Jefferson wrote the First Amendment’s religion clauses built a “a wall between church and State.” The U.S. Supreme Court cited his writing in key cases, including a 1947 ruling that applied that clause to the states. But ever since then, there’s been debate over whether the wall of separation metaphor accurately reflects the meaning of the First Amendment, according to Middle Tennessee State University’s First Amendment Encyclopedia.
The now conservative Supreme Court has chipped away at that wall of separation in recent rulings, including a decision to allow taxpayer dollars to pay for students to attend religious schools in Maine.
The remaking of the judiciary and public education is all part of the Republican plan to reshape the nation into one that is less pluralistic or tolerant of different ideas.
At the state level, Florida has taken the lead, unfortunately.
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