News chunks: Indian authoritarians officially whitewash inconvenient history; Etc.

From the Dying Democracies Files: The NYT writes about how authoritarians routinely deal with inconvenient history: 

When Indian children began the school year this week, students in thousands of classrooms were issued new textbooks on history and politics that either watered down or purged key details from India’s past that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling party finds inconvenient to its Hindu nationalist vision for the country.

The changes took aim at references to the links between Hindu extremism and the assassination of Mohandas K. Gandhi; the secular foundation of post-colonial India; and the 2002 riots in Gujarat, where hundreds of Muslims were killed in days of indiscriminate retaliatory violence at a time when Mr. Modi was the state’s top leader. Chapters on Mughal history, covering hundreds of years of Muslim rule, were either slashed or removed.

Among the deleted passages from 12th-grade history and politics texts:

• Gandhi’s “steadfast pursuit of Hindu-Muslim unity provoked Hindu extremists so much that they made several attempts to assassinate” him. 

• “Instances, like in Gujarat, alert us to the dangers involved in using religious sentiments for political purposes. This poses a threat to democratic politics.” 

The governing party’s leaders have also tried to minimize the founding fathers’ arguments for why India’s diversity could survive only under a secular umbrella, co-opting the legacy of many secular leaders as they push to remake India into a Hindu-first nation.

With that divisive campaign, anti-Muslim hate speech has proliferated, holy sites have been aggressively contested and Hindu lynch mobs have killed Muslims on suspicion of slaughtering or even just transporting cows, which are considered holy by Hindus.

If anyone thinks that things like this cannot happen in modern America today, then they would be wrong. Completely, undeniably, flat out wrong. 

The corrupt, authoritarian theocratic Christian nationalist (CN) movement has already rewritten inconvenient American history. Millions of American adults today firmly believe blatant CN lies that constitute core, unquestionable CN dogmas. The CN movement has created and spread its creation myth for American history. CN myths constitute an aggressive cancer that is spreading its deeply immoral poison to millions of minds.

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Book review: The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American: The Founding Myth is a 2019 book by Andrew Seidel. Seidel is a constitutional law attorney who argues church-state separation lawsuits for the Freedom From Religion Foundation.  

Roberta Winter wrote a review of The Founding Myth for the New York Journal of Books, which includes these quotes and remarks:

“This political environment, in which the separation of church and state is treated as a kind of heresy rather than the real rock upon which our government stands, is what makes the timing of Seidel’s book so fortuitous.”

The Founding Myth is an invigorating double-shot espresso that reveals how the original Constitution and the version slathered in religious tomes to serve political purposes are not the same document. [note the similarity to what the Hindu nationalists deleted from their falsified version of history] The former adheres to the principles of separation of church and state, freedom of speech, and the recognition of the people in the democracy. The latter is best exemplified by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who explained the imprisonment of children at the southern border by invoking God, “Every soul should be subject to the governing authorities because there is no higher authority except that which God has established.”

The founders of the first Congress were in fact free thinkers and more inclined to agnosticism, especially Washington. The portrait of his kneeling at Valley Forge was in fact an artist’s rendering not based on fact. The Declaration of Independence is opposed to biblical law and draws from democracies of cultures much older than Christianity, such as the ancient Greeks.

Since the McCarthy era of the 1950s Christians have lobbied successfully for constitutional exceptions to the Constitution, inserting God onto the currency, on public buildings, and even into the pledge of allegiance that children were required to cite daily in public schools. The latter would seem to be treasonous, citing a loyalty to God, rather than to the nation. And of course, there are plenty of healthcare exemptions in the name of religion, vaccine exemptions, birth control exemptions, and even withholding medical care from children in the name of God.

Christian nationalism views religion as a substitute for morality and above the law, so aptly demonstrated by Trump and his followers, who view themselves as the chosen ones. Secular people were more likely to demonstrate altruism in assisting the Jews in the Holocaust. As Steven Weinberg observed, “but for good people to do evil things that takes religion.”

On the first Fourth of July following Trump’s presidency, National Public Radio tweeted the entire text of the Declaration of Independence, 140 characters at a time. Many Trump supporters lost their minds, because they assumed that NPR was calling for a rebellion against Trump.

Jefferson and Madison were incredibly critical and suspicious of organized religion. Jefferson wryly observed, “priests dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of day-light.”

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Public opinion about Christian nationalism: Pew Research Center published the following poll data and findings in Oct. 2022.

45% of Americans Say U.S. Should Be a ‘Christian Nation’

But they hold differing opinions about what that phrase means, and two-thirds of U.S. adults say churches should keep out of politics

Growing numbers of religious and political leaders are embracing the “Christian nationalist” label, and some dispute the idea that the country’s founders wanted a separation of church and state. On the other side of the debate, however, many Americans – including the leaders of many Christian churches – have pushed back against Christian nationalism, calling it a “danger” to the country.

Most U.S. adults believe America’s founders intended the country to be a Christian nation, and many say they think it should be a Christian nation today, according to a new Pew Research Center survey designed to explore Americans’ views on the topic. But the survey also finds widely differing opinions about what it means to be a “Christian nation” and to support “Christian nationalism.”

For instance, many supporters of Christian nationhood define the concept in broad terms, as the idea that the country is guided by Christian values. Those who say the United States should not be a Christian nation, on the other hand, are much more inclined to define a Christian nation as one where the laws explicitly enshrine religious teachings.