Reactionary efforts to Christianize public schools
By 
The Republic of Texas says hello:
This month, Texas Senate Republicans passed three bills about religion in schools that have historians feeling déjà vu.
The first, SB 1515, would require public schools to display the Ten Commandments in a “conspicuous place” in classrooms. The other bill, SB 1396, would permit public schools to set aside time for students and staff members to pray or read the Bible and other religious texts. The third, SB 1556, would give employees the right to pray or “engage in religious speech” while on the job. The bills are on their way to the Texas House for approval. These bills follow Texas’s SB 797, which took effect in 2021 and requires schools to display “In God We Trust” signs.
The school culture wars have been burning hot in the past three years. Parents and school boards have fought over critical race theory, social-emotional learning, African American studies, the books on library shelves, and more. But unlike past controversies about what is taught in schools, these fights have not been explicitly religious. The Texas bills are, in that sense, throwbacks — and some historians are shocked by the reemergence of a culture war that reached its peak decades ago.
“I had believed that these religion wars had mostly cooled and even gone away,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, historian of education at the University of Pennsylvania and author of several books including, Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools. “But it’s different now because we’re battling over nation and nationhood, and who’s an American, not battling over God and prayer.”
When right wingers say they want to bring religion back into public schools, they mean they want to make public schools more Christian, and by more Christian they mean more white and Protestant.
This is all just an extension of the authoritarian ethno-nationalist theocratic project that is Trumpism, to the extent, which is now unfortunately considerable, that Trumpism is about something other than the self-aggrandizement of Donald Trump.
America has become very noticeably less religious over the past 20 years — weekly service attendance and religious self-identification are both down 20% overall, which translates to about 50 million fewer people than two decades ago — and the right wing backlash to that is exactly parallel to the right wing backlash to America becoming very noticeably less white.
This is ironic, because to the extent traditional religion has any future in this country it depends on importing traditional religious believers from the global south. Of course few of those people are white, as whiteness is currently defined in America, so that’s a problem for Trumpism and whatever succeeds it on the reactionary right.