"Bringing Religion Back"

A Christian Right Trojan Horse

Mar 27, 2024

I had already planned on focusing on this theme for today when I got word that Donald Trump had an announcement endorsing the Lee Greenwood God Bless the USA! Bible. It is a King James Bible (because it’s in public domain) combined with the Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, The Pledge of Allegiance, and the Chorus to Greenwood’s 19841 God Bless the USA!

And I'm proud to be an American
Where at least I know I'm free2
And I won't forget the men who died
Who gave that right to me
And I'd gladly stand up next to you
And defend Her still today
'Cause there ain't no doubt
I love this land
God Bless the U.S.A.

Jemar Tisby’s Substack today has an important backstory on the Greenwood Bible. It was originally conceived to commemorate the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and would use the New International Version. But authors who published with Zondervan (publishers of the NIV), including Tisby, pushed back. An online petition included the following wording:

This is a toxic mix that will exacerbate the challenges to American evangelicalism, adding fuel to the Christian nationalism and anti-Muslim sentiments found in many segments of the evangelical church.

So now it’s coming out, not to commemorate any particular date, but because it’s the only Bible “endorsed” by Donald Trump. In his video clip announcing this “new” Bible, Trump says the following:

"Religion and Christianity are the biggest things missing from this country, and I truly believe we need to bring them back for us, I believe it's one of the biggest problems we have, that's why our country is going haywire, we've lost religion in our country," Mr Trump said. "All Americans need a Bible in their home and I have many, it's my favorite book. It's a lot of people's favorite book."

From one perspective, one might argue that the Greenwood Bible is a classic celebration of American Civil Religion as Robert Bellah described it in the 1960s. Take some historic and revered (if not read) documents, throw in a somewhat vacuous chorus about loving the country, and dress it up with scripture (also not read). In this sense, the heart of the God Bless the USA! Bible is all the non-Bible stuff. They take precedence, especially since most of scripture doesn’t elevate the nation-state above the Kingdom of God.

The 1950s that Bellah reflects upon was a period of sharp contrast with atheistic communists. That’s when we added “In God We Trust” to our currency and when “under God” was included into the Pledge of Allegiance. Affirming faith in the abstract was part of the American Creed. Get into specifics about that faith and you were a questionable dinner companion.

And yet there’s something more going on. There is a way in which today’s vague calls for “bringing back religion” are holding the door open for something far more specific that Bellah’s Civil Religion. While I don’t think all of it is a Christian Nationalist project, it does reflect a way to use benign language about religion and values to open the door for Conservative Christian activity in increasing areas of the public sphere.

This is where I planned on starting today’s newsletter but the Greenwood thing happened and needed to be addressed. Last week, the Washington Post’s Michelle Boorstein had story about how conservative states were writing legislation to put chaplains in public schools. Her story opens like this:

Lawmakers in mostly conservative states are pushing a coordinated effort to bring chaplains into public schools, aided by a new, legislation-crafting network that aims to address policy issues “from a biblical world view” and by a consortium whose promotional materials say chaplains are a way to convert millions to Christianity.
The bills have been introduced this legislative season in 14 states, inspired by Texas, which passed a law last year allowing school districts to hire chaplains or use them as volunteers for whatever role the local school board sees fit, including replacing trained counselors. Chaplain bills were approved by one legislative chamber in three states — Utah, Indiana and Louisiana — but died in Utah and Indiana. Bills are pending in nine states. One passed both houses of Florida’s legislature and is awaiting the governor’s signature.

She quotes Amanda Tyler of the American Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Liberty:

“This shows there’s a difference between having some of these loose ideas or inclinations about what the relationship should be between religion and government — especially Christianity and the government — and looking at what it looks like in a policy that impacts our kids,” said Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, a group defending the separation of church and state. “Most people are in the middle.”

Boorstein’s story cites Pew data3 suggesting that most people don’t support Christian Nationalism but are divided somewhat evenly on whether or not the Bible should have at least some influence on our laws. As one might expect, there are wide subgroup variations here. For White Evangelicals, 55% said that the Bible should have a great deal of influence on our laws. On the other hand, for non-evangelicals, Catholics, and other religions, less than 20% agreed.

This seems pretty significant. Whose “religion” are we “bringing back”? It’s likely not these latter groups.

Boorstein’s story isn’t a one-off. A few days earlier, NBC News posted this story on their webpage. Written by Michael Hixenbaugh, it tells of how organizations are making use of laws allowing off-campus religious instruction during the school day.

When LifeWise launched in 2018, the initial goal was to serve 25 schools by 2025, but it surpassed that long ago. By the start of this year, LifeWise had set up chapters in more than 300 schools in a dozen states, teaching 35,000 public school students weekly Bible lessons that are usually scheduled to coincide with lunch or noncore courses such as library, art or gym class.
LifeWise has won support from conservatives on the front lines of the new culture wars over LGBTQ inclusion, sexually explicit library books and the role of racism in American history. But it also has a growing foothold in some progressive suburbs and cities, including deep-blue Columbus, Ohio.

He goes on:

Its explosive growth has been celebrated by Christian groups and parents who’ve long decried the removal of religion from America’s classrooms — and denounced by those who believe there should be a hard line between religion and public education.

There’s that “removal of religion” phrase again. Not unlike the chaplains, the idea here is to have the right kind of instruction into the right values.

The story closes by describing the aspirations of LifeWise founder Joel Pelton:

Penton stood to the side, observing. Six years after launching LifeWise Academy, hoping then to share Jesus with public school children in at least a handful of Ohio school districts, Penton has discerned that God is now calling him and his team to a far bigger goal.
There are 13,000 public schools in America educating about 50 million students, Penton noted.
“It may sound a little wild,” he said, “but we would like to make Bible education available to all of them.”

Another story from the Washington Post’s Greg Jaffe focused on Linda Wenhold, who was elected to the school board in Bethlehem, PA after going through training from The Patriot Academy.

The Patriot Academy’s classes were tapping into a growing fear among some evangelical Christians that their faith and what they saw as its rightful place at the center of American culture and government were under siege. It’s a message sounded in recent years from church pulpits, conservative think tanks, right-leaning colleges and the 1776 Commission report, released in the final, chaotic days of Donald Trump’s presidency. This sense of loss has become a central part of Trump’s 2024 campaign and his outreach to conservative Christians. Like the former president’s “Make America Great Again” movement, the Patriot Academy was calling for a restoration.
The Patriot Academy classes urged participants to run for local office, especially school board, and to fight back against the “secular leftists” and “Marxists” in their country and their communities. In November, Wenhold won a seat on the Palisades School Board. The position was unpaid, but it gave her a little bit of power. She wanted to use it to make sure students in her school district were taught America’s “true history” as a Christian nation, as she had come to understand it.

Again, the desire is simply to “return faith” to society. The story goes on to explain the ways in which Wenhold wanted to incorporate her Patriot Academy training into school board operation.

Yet, as time went on, she became closer to the other board members and, even if she disagreed on particular issues, saw them as colleagues. A Jaffe concludes:

This was a version of American democracy that bore little resemblance to the horror show that Green and Barton described each day on their podcast.

Here’s one more interesting story about “religion” in the abstract, thanks to my friend James Ernst at Eerdmans. He shared a local story about how the Ottawa County (MI) county board was handling an opening prayer at their meeting in April:

A representative of The Satanic Temple of West Michigan is slotted to give the opening prayer at an upcoming Ottawa County board meeting after the board recently adopted a “first-come, first-served” rule for invocations.

Sometimes, “religion” means “religion” even when some might not think so. Still, most of the rhetoric about “bringing religion back” isn’t of that sort. It may sound like generic faith (Judeo-Christian values!) but seems far more likely to open the door for policies and programs that serve much more evangelistic ends, privileging particular groups of Christians to reposition church-state relations.

When folks say “bring religion back”, we need to ask 1) whose religion? 2) to what end? 3) what about those (26% in the new PRRI data) who are unaffiliated with religion? Life in a pluralistic society demands that we carefully consider these questions.

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