the evangelicals the struggle to shape america

In the spring of 2021, Richard Corcoran delivered a fire-breathing speech at Hillsdale, a right-wing Christian college in Michigan, touting the agenda he had helped implement as education commissioner in Florida. Schoolhouses are being conscripted into a cataclysmic war in which no compromise is possible - in which a child in a red state will be discouraged from asking questions about sexual identity, or a professor will be barred from exploring the ways in which white supremacy has shaped America today, or a trans athlete will be prohibited from playing sports. A wave of library purges, subject-matter restrictions, and potential legal threats against educators has followed.Įducation has become an obsession on the political right, which now sees it as the central battlefield upon which this country’s future will be settled. Over the past three years, legislators in 28 states have passed at least 71 bills controlling what teachers and students can say and do at school.

More ominously, at every level of government, Republicans have begun to act on these beliefs.

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida has called schools “a cesspool of Marxist indoctrination.” Former secretary of State Mike Pompeo predicts that “ teachers’ unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids,” will “take this republic down.” Against the backdrop of his party, Donald Trump, complaining about “pink-haired communists teaching our kids” and “Marxist maniacs and lunatics” running our universities, sounds practically calm.

Republicans have begun saying things about American schools that not long ago would have struck them as peculiar, even insane.

The evangelicals the struggle to shape america