Category Archives: Religious Liberty

The Phoenix Declaration

What–you may ask–is the Phoenix Declaration, recently adopted by Florida educators? 

The Declaration is a product of the Heritage Foundation, and a recent post in Lincoln Square pretty much summed it up.

The Phoenix Declaration smuggles a theocratic worldview through pleasant, familiar vocabulary—turning words like “truth,” “freedom,” and “the good life” into vehicles for a single religious ideology. Once you decode that language, the stakes clarify fast: a public education system where scientific method is replaced with biblical literalism, where civic history is rewritten through a sectarian lens, and where moral autonomy is redefined as submission to someone else’s theology. The danger isn’t just Florida’s adoption of the document—it’s how easy it would be for unsuspecting school boards in other states to nod along…

The Declaration is firmly rooted in Heritage’s Project 2025, which probably tells us all we need to know. Both documents are products of Christian nationalism. Both explicitly frame education as a process of eliciting a student’s “God-given potential,” and inculcating (their version of) virtue, moral formation, and the “Judeo-Christian tradition.” The Declaration says its educational mission is “helping children achieve their full, God-given potential,” by educating them in “truth and goodness,” civic virtue, character formation, and a love of country– echoing the Christian-nationalist belief that America is a “Christian nation,” and that public life should reflect that Christian “heritage.”

The Declaration appears to be part of Project 2025’s effort to institutionalize its worldview through a takeover of public education.  That certainly is the view of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, which has noted that several of the declaration’s principles echo those of Project 2025–for example, proposals to expand school vouchers, promote religious instruction with public funds, and curtail diversity and civil rights efforts.

The declaration includes several statements that appear benign on their face but reveal a deeper ideological agenda when read in context.

On “objective truth” and morality, the document states: “Students should learn that there is objective truth and that it is knowable. Science courses must be grounded in reality, not ideological fads. Students should learn that good and evil exist, and that human beings have the capacity and duty to choose good.”

Language like this has been routinely used by Christian nationalist groups to cast evidence-based teaching about gender, sexuality and modern science as “ideological fads,” while elevating religious beliefs about morality as neutral “truth.”

On cultural transmission, the declaration asserts: “True progress comes only by building on what has been learned and achieved in the past. Students should therefore learn about America’s founding principles and roots in the broader Western and Judeo-Christian traditions.”

This explicitly frames public education through a sectarian lens. The United States is not founded on “Judeo-Christian traditions” as a governing principle, and public schools cannot privilege one religious heritage over the nation’s actual pluralistic history.

FFRF points out that several members of the Declaration’s drafting committee and signatories are representatives of organizations openly committed to religious education, Christian nationalism or the dismantling of secular public institutions. (Moms for Liberty is a signatory. Need I say more?)

It isn’t surprising that Florida would adopt the Declaration–Governor Ron DeSantis has made his war on “liberal” education a high priority, in the process destroying the academic integrity of Florida universities. 10 Tampa Bay News has reported on responses to adoption of the Declaration, including that of the Florida Educational Association,

“This political campaign disguised as a declaration seeks to hand over control of our classrooms to political operatives and shift blame, pointing fingers rather than offering real solutions,” FEA stated. “Instead of chasing ideological agendas, the State Board of Education members should focus on what truly helps students: Making sure public schools are fully funded, addressing the critical teacher and staff shortage, and guaranteeing that every child has access to a strong, neighborhood public school.”

FEA was not the only organization to see past the Declaration’s ambiguous language. Julie Kent, the president of Florida National Organization for Women, pointed out that the Declaration’s standards “impose an ideology under the guise of neutrality, marginalize diverse perspectives, undermine public education and politicize curriculum reviews.”

The Declaration’s standards reveal the accuracy of the criticisms. That standard on “Truth and Goodness,” declares students must learn that there is “objective truth” –truth which the Declaration finds rooted in a particular version of Christianity.

I guess it’s not enough to send tax dollars to religious schools via vouchers. The Right wants to Christianize our public schools too.

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The Real Identity Politics

One of the many things that exasperate me about what currently passes for political dialogue is the substitution of labels for efforts to communicate. (And yes, I find myself engaging in that practice from time to time–it’s easier to call the administration “fascist” than to carefully describe the behaviors that lead me to affix that label. Mea culpa.)

Although people on all sides of the political divide indulge in this dismissive exchange of epithets, there’s one particularly dishonest label that is increasingly employed by MAGA and the Right: Identity politics. The accusation is a companion to the “woke” label and the persistent attacks on DEI and similar efforts meant to erase the bigotries that have made life more difficult for women and minorities.

If there is one tactic that the MAGA movement has perfected, it is calling out its opponents for behaviors that are actually its own. A recent article from the New Republic pointed out that it is the Right, not the Left or Center Left, that is consistently engaged in “identity politics.”  The article was a conversation with Kimberle Crenshaw, a noted scholar of America’s various forms of bigotry and their interrelationship.

Crenshaw began by discussing the anti-Black animus that is the core of Trump’s agenda and appeal–an animus that has become too obvious for the rest of us to ignore–and the way in which anti-Black and anti-woman bias worked to defeat Kamala Harris.

I found one observation especially “on target,” because it gets to the root of the way labeling often deflects reality. Crenshaw points out that when the Right screams “identity politics” it defines identity politics in “terms of women, queer people, and Black folks.”

When Trump and MAGA world say things like, If you want to get anything done, you have to put white men in charge, they don’t call that identity politics. When they take all the books off the shelves that they think are about identity politics and leave Mein Kampf on the shelves at the Naval Academy, that’s identity politics that they don’t talk about. So the identity politics that is at the core of the anxiety that MAGA builds itself into is never named.

So it’s clear that there’s a particular kind of identity politics that they are willing to wrap themselves in. And that’s an old-school, long part of the American faction that wanted to think about the United States as a white, male, Christian country, which has now shown up in white Christian nationalism. That is the identity politics of the moment.

It is in pursuit of protecting the prerogatives of that identity–White Christian male identity–that MAGA and the Trump administration are attacking any and all efforts to promote equity in what is, despite their hysterical denials, a multiracial society.

That is their identity politics now. It’s called the assault on improper ideology. And if you want to see what it looks like in real time, look at their assault on DEI. The assault on DEI is basically if people of color, if women, if any people who don’t look like us, are in any way involved in something that is bad, we can say that they are the fault of it.

And what does that mean? If you happen to be the mayor of Baltimore when a ship collides into your bridge, because you’re Black and you are there, we can pin the responsibility on you. If there’s an air disaster over Washington, D.C., we can pin it on DEI. No proof, no nothing. All we have to do is claim it.

When I read this, my first thought was “of course! Why didn’t I see this before?” When I thought about that question–why I hadn’t recognized the real identity politics–I had to (grudgingly) give the Right credit for learning the lessons taught years ago by Frank Luntz and first employed by Newt Gingrich.

Luntz advocated using vocabulary that was carefully crafted to produce a desired political effect (an effect that didn’t include descriptive accuracy). He counseled GOP strategists to use the term death tax instead of estate tax, for example. Luntz has described his specialty as “finding words that will help his clients sell their product or turn public opinion on an issue or a candidate.”

I don’t know whether Luntz was personally involved in the (mis)use of the term “identity politics,” but that tactic–accusing opponents of something you yourself are doing–certainly bears his hallmark.

And that hallmark is misdirection, not communication. 

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Trashing The First Amendment

Ten months into the Trump administration, the outlines of America’s cold civil war have become too stark to miss. MAGA is determined to remake the United States into a nation where White Christian Nationalists are legally privileged and in control. And they’re making progress.

The evidence is overwhelming. Masked ICE agents focus on people of color. Trump reportedly wants to “revamp” immigration rules in order to make it easier for Whites and harder for others to enter the country. From day one, the administration has pursued an all-out war on “DEI”–insisting that any effort to level the playing field for previously marginalized folks is really anti-White discrimination. Aided and abetted by a thoroughly corrupted Supreme Court majority, the hits have kept coming: universities prevented from continuing programs even slightly resembling affirmative action, the continued gutting of the Voting Rights Act…

And as we’ve recently seen, the racism motivating MAGA isn’t diminishing; it infuses the GOP’s young activists.

I have previously written about the faux-Christianity that motivates much of this. I particularly recommend Tim Alberta’s book, “The Kingdom, The Power and the Glory.” Alberta is a genuine Christian Evangelical, and his critique is informed by his own deep religiosity. More recently, David French–another committed Evangelical– has described what is happening in thousands of churches as a religious “revolution”–not to be confused with a true revival. In his telling, America is close to a religious revolution, and the difference between that revolution and a true religious revival is immensely important for both church and state.

Decades of scholarship, very much including scholarship by religious organizations, have attributed America’s religiosity–far greater than in other Western Democratic countries–to the fact that the First Amendment requires the separation of church and state. That understanding fails to persuade the MAGA folks who’ve turned religion into a political identity.

The Christian Nationalists who dominate Red state governments reject the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. They intend to indoctrinate the nation’s schoolchildren, and they aren’t satisfied with mandates to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms. In Texas, they’ve introduced a “revised” and bible-infused English curriculum.

A new state-sponsored English curriculum infused with lessons about the Bible and Christianity could reach tens of thousands of Texas schoolchildren this year.

More than 300 of the state’s roughly 1,200 districts signed up to use the English language arts lessons, according to data obtained by The New York Times through a public records request. Many are rural, and relatively small.

The curriculum was created as several states, including Oklahoma and Louisiana, fought to bring prayer or religious texts like the Ten Commandments into public school classrooms, blurring the line between church and state.

According to the analysis done by the New York Times, the Texas curriculum features content on Christianity, the bible and the life of Jesus. Lessons include the Biblical story of his birth in a Bethlehem manger, New Testament accounts of the angel who described him as the Messiah, and even stories about the miracles he was purported to perform.

Fifth graders examine a psalm in a poetry unit. First-grade students discuss the parable of the prodigal son alongside stories like “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” Kindergarten children learn in depth about the Book of Genesis in a lesson on art exploration that notes that “many artists have found inspiration for creating art from the words in creation stories in religious books.”

The Times analysis found that Christianity was heavily favored in the lessons. In the materials used in the second grade, for example, “Christianity, the Bible and Jesus are referenced about 110 times. By contrast, Islam, Muslims, the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad are mentioned roughly 31 times in lessons spanning from kindergarten to fifth grade.”

The Times article has much more detail, and it is worth clicking through and reading. The curricular changes were summed up in a quote by David R. Brockman, a Christian theologian and religious studies scholar at Rice University. After he reviewed all of the Texas materials, Brockman concluded that the lessons amounted to Bible study in a public school curriculum, and he worried that the state’s adaptation of its curriculum would send an implicit message to children “that Christianity is the only important religion.”

Well, duh! Of course that’s the message, and it’s intended. In MAGA’s America–a country distant from the one occupied by the rest of us–the only real Americans are lily-White and “Christian.” The rest of us–including genuine Christians–are intruders.

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I Told You So

Who really hates America?

In the run-up to No Kings Day, Republican leaders hysterically described participants as terrorists–as people who “hate America.” Those charges were never particularly effective; the first No Kings protest had brought out a cross-section of citizens who very clearly loved the America of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and who were prepared to defend it against the real “enemy within.” Grandmothers and veterans joined young and middle-aged people in an affirmance of genuine patriotism.

If there was any confusion about who loves and who hates the America envisioned by the Founders, it came just a couple of days before the second No Kings Day, in an expose from Politico.

Here’s the lede:

Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway.

They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.

Politico obtained 2,900 pages of Telegram chats–representing 28,000 messages– reflecting conversations among the leaders of national Young Republican groups. The chats  spanned more than seven months, and included Young Republicans from New York, Kansas, Arizona and Vermont. As the report summed up the discovery, the contents offered “an unfiltered look at how a new generation of GOP activists talk when they think no one is listening.”

And the way they talk is both horrifying and profoundly unAmerican.

Together, the messages reveal a culture where racist, antisemitic and violent rhetoric circulate freely — and where the Trump-era loosening of political norms has made such talk feel less taboo among those positioning themselves as the party’s next leaders…

The group chat members spoke freely about the pressure to cow to Trump to avoid being called a RINO, the love of Nazis within their party’s right wing and the president’s alleged work to suppress documents related to wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex crimes.

As Politico pointed out, the disgusting rhetoric employed by these Young Republican “leaders” reflects a widespread coarsening of political discourse and the increasing use of incendiary and racially offensive tropes. That coarsening comes straight from the top. The article referenced Trump’s post of an artificial intelligence-generated video portraying House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in a sombrero, while Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer proposed trading free health care for immigrant votes. Offensive as that post was, it was only the latest of a long string of repellant social media outbursts from the senile and wildly unPresidential occupant of the Oval Office.

In his 2024 campaign, Trump spread false reports of Haitian migrants eating pets and, at one of his rallies, welcomed comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” and joked about Black people “carving watermelons” on Halloween.

As the article quite accurately notes, the chat rhetoric, which spared few minority groups, essentially mirrored a number of popular conservative political commentators, podcasters and comedians, all of whom have participated in the erosion of what was previously considered acceptable discourse. It quoted a political science professor who attributed the increasing use of racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric to Trump’s “persistent use of hostile, often inflammatory language.”

In one astonishing exchange, a suggestion that they tie an opponent to neo-Nazi groups was discarded because participants noted that it might hurt more than help–because such ties would be viewed positively by their own voters. 

There is much, much more in the linked article, and it is sickening. It is also profoundly inconsistent with what I call the American Idea–the philosophy that permeates the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It is an example–as if one were needed–of what the participants in protests like No Kings oppose.

Compare the disgusting, hateful, pro-Nazi comments in the chat (including one that “loved Hitler”) with the sentiments on the signs at the No Kings events, and draw your own conclusions about who the patriots truly are.

The Young Republicans who participated in this disgusting chat truly do hate the America that is trying to live up to its original ideals. And despite the pro-forma claims of elected Republicans trying to distance themselves from this filth, we know where they learned both the language and the sentiments.

 

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The Label Is Wrong

Several media outlets recently reported on a Gallup poll finding that forty-three percent of Americans think the current Supreme Court is “too conservative.” Excuse me, but that finding is an example of a fundamental misperception that infests current American debates, and keeps our political arguments unilluminating and unproductive.

The current Supreme Court is many things, but conservative is certainly not one of them. Indeed, some of the most trenchant criticisms of the entirely corrupt Court majority have come from jurists and scholars with unimpeachably conservative bona fides. For example, J. Michael Luttig–a conservative icon  and former judge who consistently issued very conservative opinions when he was on the bench– called the Court’s bestowal of immunity for “official acts” of the President “irreconcilable with America’s democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law.” Legal scholars, including a number of conservatives, have argued that decisions rendered by the current majority break with centuries of understanding, lack textual support, and undermine accountability.

Several conservatives have warned that the Court is legitimizing a “kingship” rather than a presidency. 

The Court’s unprecedented use of the Shadow Docket–historically a mechanism reserved for matters requiring an urgent response–has drawn criticism from across the ideological spectrum. The Court’s majority has used the Docket to issue decisions that lack the sort of legal analysis that lower courts rely upon for guidance, and has issued those decisions without the benefit of briefing or argumentation, lending credibility to the impression that they are operating via prejudice rather than analysis.

In a string of unexplained decisions utterly inconsistent with precedent, the majority has eroded the independence of previously independent agencies and commissions. It has allowed Trump to withhold funds appropriated by Congress, despite the fact that the Constitution explicitly and exclusively grants funding decisions to the legislative branch. It has overturned the longstanding deference of the judicial branch to agency understandings of their own regulations, empowering judges to determine highly technical matters; the majority’s “religious liberty” decisions have significantly eroded the First Amendment’s separation of church and state in favor of a performative and illiberal Christianity, and–perhaps most shocking of all– it has allowed ICE to ignore the probable cause requirement of the Fourth Amendment.

The list goes on.

Words have meanings, or at least they should. A truly conservative Court follows–conserves–legal precedent unless faced with formidable evidence that the precedent is no longer consistent with modern realities. Stare decisis and respect for legal predictability have long been lodestars of the judiciary, including–indeed, especially–conservative members of that judiciary. Evidence of such respect is nowhere to be seen in the Roberts Court; for years, Clarence Thomas has signaled his desire to overturn decisions with which he personally disagrees, and Samuel Alito gave a metaphorical finger to both individual liberty and fifty years of precedent when he authored the Dobbs decision.

Conservatism has been defined as a philosophy of preservation and prudence; conservatives value continuity, social stability, and gradual evolution rather than radical change. Conservatives prioritize respect for institutions, the rule of law and moral and cultural traditions. In contrast, reactionary far right ideologies are fixated on a desire to “reclaim” a mythic past. Reactionaries reject checks and balances; they embrace nativism and define belonging in racial and religious terms rather than civic ones, and they detest the pluralism that defines today’s America.

 

Where conservatism sees order as compatible with liberty, reactionary and populist far-right movements define order as the suppression of difference.

 

The problem with labeling our reactionary Court as conservative is that such a label obscures reality. It’s akin to the misuse of other labels like Left-wing and socialism, but it’s arguably more dangerous, because it makes a very real threat–an ahistorical judicial deviation from the rule of law in favor of a very unAmerican authoritarianism– seem like a normal part of America’s ever-shifting political environment. We’ve always had courts and political parties that are properly understood to be more conservative or more liberal, but by mis-labeling this radical Supreme Court as “conservative,” we minimize the extent to which it has deviated from the political and constitutional norms to which both liberal and genuinely conservative courts have adhered.

 

If this Court was truly conservative, America wouldn’t be in the midst of an authoritarian coup.

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