The Christian nationalist attack on truth, secular teaching and church-state separation

The Washington Post writes:

New civics training for Florida public school teachers comes with a dose of Christian dogma, some teachers say, and they worry that it also sanitizes history and promotes inaccuracies.

Included in the training is the statement that it is a “misconception” that “the Founders desired strict separation of church and state.”

Other materials included fragments of statements that were “cherry-picked” to present a more conservative view of American history, some attendees said. In a possible effort to inoculate some Founding Fathers against contemporary political complaints, some slides in a presentation pointed out that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson repudiated slavery; unsaid is that both men held enslaved people and helped worked toward a Constitution that enshrined the practice.

“My takeaway from the training is that civics education in the state of Florida right now is geared toward pushing some particular points of view,” said Broward County teacher Richard Judd, who attended the three-day training. “The thesis they ran with is that there is no real separation of church and state.”

The First Amendment prevents the government from “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” which scholars widely interpret to require a separation of church and state.

Non-republican scholars interpret the Establishment Clause as requiring a separation of church and state, but Christian nationalists (CNs) do not. Those fascists see no basis for any separation. In essence, CNs believe either that, 

(1) the Establishment Clause has no meaning and no legal vitality, or arguably more likely, 

(2) the Establishment Clause empowers Christianity in government, but disempowers other religions and non-believers in government. 

The latter interpretation is more aligned with core CN dogma, which holds Christianity above all other beliefs and ideologies, religious or not. 

In other fascism news, the ex-president is giving off smoke signals that he plans to run for president again in 2024: "Republicans are bracing for Donald J. Trump to announce an unusually early bid for the White House, a move designed in part to shield the former president from a stream of damaging revelations emerging from investigations into his attempts to cling to power after losing the 2020 election."

It's coming baaack!