cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/15908405
Training materials produced by the Florida Department of Education direct middle and high school teachers to indoctrinate students in the tenets of Christian nationalism, a right-wing effort to merge Christian and American identities. Thousands of Florida teachers, lured by cash stipends, have attended trainings featuring these materials.
A three-day training course on civic education, conducted throughout Florida in the summer of 2023, included a presentation on the “Influences of the Judeo-Christian Tradition” on the founding of the United States. According to speaker notes accompanying one slide, teachers were told that “Christianity challenged the notion that religion should be subservient to the goals of the state,” and the same hierarchy is reflected in America’s founding documents. That slide quotes the Bible to assert that “[c]ivil government must be respected, but the state is not God.” Teachers were told the same principle is embedded in the Declaration of Independence.
Freedom of religion =/= freedom to amass power and tax free hoarding of resources. Both history AND our current times shows what happens when we let religion organize unchecked. If you want to go pray at your friends house, have fun - but its time to end the corporatization and socialization of faith once and for all.
Our “freedom of religion” is inherently by definition incompatible with freedom from religion. Anybody who approaches public policy from a religious place should be removed. Any institution with religious undertones should be dismantled. Churches should be deconstructed. Religion should be exclusively private because any other arrangement means that religious people are allowed to exert their religion upon me via media, government, policy, public display, etc, etc.