Recent spats over the proper role of religion in public schools, such as allowing schools to hire chaplains and integrate the Bible into lesson plans, are often portrayed as a clash between Protestants and everyone else.
It’s not that simple. Even if you limit American Christendom to Protestant sects, you’ll still find plenty of disagreement on theology and how the Bible is to be interpreted. As I used to say during speeches, the United Church of Christ and the Church of Christ, both Protestant denominations, are separated by one word and a theological gulf the size of the Grand Canyon.
It’s important to keep this in mind when we’re examining proposals put forth by Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s superintendent of public instruction, and other Christian Nationalists. Walters and his confederates toss the word “Christian” around a lot because they know most Americans don’t find that to be a threatening term. Yet the Christianity they want to force into our schools is of a very particular stripe – far to right and fundamentalist – and would exclude millions of their fellow Christians.
Is Jesus a bootstrap capitalist or a quasi-socialist? Many Christians, aware of how often Christ spoke of the need to care for the poor, would lean to the latter. Yet an entire theology has arisen, the so-called “prosperity gospel,” that says God gives special blessings to the rich.
Consider this as well: Thomas Jefferson created a private devotional, “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth,” that removed all the miracles performed by Jesus and anything that smacked of his divinity. At the end of Jefferson’s testament, Jesus dies on the cross and is entombed. There is no resurrection. Yet Jefferson considered himself a Christian in the sense that he greatly admired the moral teachings of Christ. How would Walters react to Jefferson’s version of Christianity being taught in Oklahoma’s public schools? What would a school district in Florida do if a chaplain espoused it?
During my travels in the world of Christian Nationalism, I have noticed the constant use (and misuse) of the word “Christian.” At these gatherings, the term is casually employed as if everyone agreed on its meaning, because, at these meetings, most people do. But in larger society, that’s clearly not the case. There is a reason why, as some research indicates, we have more than 200 Christian denominations in America alone; people don’t agree.
Many non-Christians, secularists, atheists, humanists and so on instinctively get this. They know that when Walters and company talk about “Christian values” they mean a certain type of Christianity – theirs. One of the challenges we face at Americans United is letting the millions of progressive and moderate Christians out there know that when Walters and his pals scheme to get the Christian faith in our schools and other public institutions, they plan to exclude plenty of people who deeply revere and follow the teachings of Jesus Christ.
