There’s a story by Will Morris in the Columbia Missourian from yesterday entitled Lawmakers close to approving law promoting teaching the Bible in public schools. Basically, this comes down to the State of Missouri requiring public schools to teach Christianity. The far-right extremists pushing this bill pretend that the Bible is some kind of neutral document in public statements, but they believe that reading the Bible will convert your children into a far-right extremist like them. (It won’t.)
I doubt the bill will pass into law, but given how crazed the Republicans have become in the last 5 or 6 years, it’s entirely possible that they could succeed. Success would mean millions of dollars in lawsuits against the state for violating the rights of non-Christian parents, including the many Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, atheists, and, yes, even Satanists who live in our area. Without doubt, the Church of Satan or one of its offshoots will sue to force Missouri’s public schools to also teach their completely neutral and historical (wink, wink) texts — and they would be well within their rights to do so.
Once public schools are tasked with teaching between 10 and 20 holy books to students, I imagine it will be pretty hard to find time to teach them things like reading, writing, arithmetic, and especially science and history. (The destruction of real education is an additional goal of this kind of extremist lawmaking.) If teachers were required to teach the story of Jesus, my guess is that most children would end up internalizing a message that directly contradicts far-right culture, which is based on cruelty and selfishness.
Finally, we all know that the reason Christian extremists need to cram their ideology into the public schools is because they are losing the culture war — badly. The decline of Christianity continues at a rapid pace — despite the fact that US population increases are largely coming from Catholic immigrants. My explanation would be that right-wing extremists have made Christianity so repellent for their own children that they are destroying their own religion from within.
Just to clarify: It isn’t the left that is winning the culture war. Rather, it’s the other right-wingers — the neoliberals with their obsessive bean counting, relentless consumerism, and dreams of a technological utopia ruled over by a naturally superior billionaire class.