The Jan. 6 violent assault on our nation’s Capitol and New Hampshire’s assault on public education, as encoded in HB 20, are grown from the same seed: white Christian nationalism.
In a Feb. 7 Sunday Valley News column headlined “Assault on public education shifts to the states,” Randall Balmer deftly summarized the rapidly increasing number of similar efforts around the nation. While he, I, and many others breathed a sigh of relief at the end of Betsy DeVos’ reign as secretary of education, the campaign to privatize and sectarianize education is, and always has been, primarily at the state and local level.
Regarding the Jan. 6 insurrection, Yale sociologist Philip Gorski wrote: “Many observers commented on the jarring mixture of Christian, nationalist and racist symbolism amongst the insurrectionists: there were Christian crosses and Jesus Saves banners, Trump flags and American flags, fascist insignia and a ‘Camp Auschwitz’ hoodie. Some saw apples and oranges. But it was really a fruit cocktail: White Christian Nationalism.”
Gorski describes the Christian nationalist movement “as a loose confederation of people and institutions that share a certain narrative about American history. In rough outline: America was founded as a Christian nation; the Founding Fathers were evangelical Christians; the Nation’s laws and founding documents were indirectly based on ‘biblical’ principles, or even directly inspired by God, Himself. America’s power and prosperity are due to its piety and obedience.”
Gorski added, “The history curricula used by many Christian home-schoolers are organized around a Christian nationalist perspective. Christian nationalist activists also seek to influence the history curricula used in public schools.”
This Christian narrative is the impetus for many charter school and voucher schemes. If one listens to or reads the rhetoric of many conservatives, the public education system indoctrinates or brainwashes America’s children into a Godless, leftist, socialist worldview, where prayer is prohibited, kids are made to feel guilty about racism, Christmas is banned, perverts use bathrooms and political correctness reigns.
This is the essence of the “culture wars” that divide America.
If one sees this as a threat to the pluralistic secularism promised in the Constitution, as I do, the outlook is troubling. The combination of federalism and the Christian, conservative Supreme Court does not bode well for the separation of church and state as it applies to education. Case law regarding public funding of religious schools is mixed, but a great many cases are winding their way to the Supreme Court, where the freedom of religion is nearly certain to trump the prohibition on establishment of religion.
It is both plausible and fair, based on prior opinions and personal history, to suppose that five current justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh — are highly sympathetic to a Christian nationalist view.
As to federalism, roiling beneath the generally good news of the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris victory and the slim Democratic majorities in Congress, is a very dangerous backlash arising in local and state governments. Wyoming Republican censured the conservative Rep. Liz Cheney for supporting impeachment. The Arizona Legislature introduced a bill allowing the Republican majority to arbitrarily throw out the presidential votes of citizens and award electors to the candidate of their own choosing. Other states are introducing voter suppression laws — at least 106 bills in 2021, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
These are just a few symptoms of the dangers of federalism, beginning of course with the curse of the Electoral College, which disfigures the notion of representative democracy every four years. Consider, for one example, the absurdity of 60 million citizens in California and New York, who preferred Biden to Trump by vast majorities, watching in fear as results were counted in Nevada. Changing the Electoral College’s glaring disenfranchisement of the majority would take a Constitutional amendment ratified by three-quarters of the states. But 55% of state legislatures are in Republican control, so “a snowball’s chance in hell” is an apt characterization of the odds.
These compounded factors nearly assure the shattering of the public, secular system in many states and communities. Voucher schemes suck the lifeblood from public schools, as well as dismantling the coherence of curricula from place to place.
With a nation deeply divided, our historic public education system offers perhaps the only path out. The possibilities of integration, if we are bold enough to press for them, can ease bigotry through familiarity. But school choice and vouchers allow citizens to avoid “the other” and stiffen their resistance to diversity and inclusion.
We will never have powerful democratic insistence on facing climate change if the rising generations have wildly different understandings of science.
We will never address social injustice with national unity if families can opt out of all truths they find uncomfortable.
If schools imbue students with very different versions of our past they will have very different visions for our future.
New Hampshire residents have one more opportunity, on Wednesday, to make public comment on the latest Republican effort to eviscerate public education in the state. It seems clear that public opinion opposes this crude bill that has no accountability. It is less clear that the newly ordained Republican majority cares.
Directions for public comment on HB 20 can be found at this link: https://legiscan.com/NH/bill/HB20/2021.
Steve Nelson lives in Boulder, Colo., and Sharon. He is the author of First Do No Harm: Progressive Education in a Time of Existential Risk (Garn Press). Email him at stevehutnelson@gmail.com.