Learning To Be Divided—An Analysis (1 May 2024) by Lawrence Davidson
Part I — Red States — Blue States
In early April, the Washington Post published an article entitled “America has legislated itself into competing red, blue versions of education.”* The piece describes “a blizzard of education laws” and official directives issued by state governments “…to reshape how K-12 schools and colleges teach and present issues of race, sex and gender.” These changes now “impact three-fourths of the nation’s school-age students.”
The article includes a map that shows which states are in the process of restricting what can be taught, which are expanding in this regard, and which remain unchanged. The states pursuing restrictive measures are largely those in the South and central portions of the country. There we find 66% of such laws and directives. Their target appears to be any information that might legitimize the status or practices of groups considered unacceptable to the state’s conservative white Christian plurality. While it might sound melodramatic, we will see that this effort has totalitarian implications.
Part II— The Interest Group Factor
An interesting aspect of this process: “almost 40 percent of these laws work by granting parents greater control of the curriculum—stipulating that they must be able to review, object to or remove lesson material, as well as opt out of instruction.” This demand was accepted in many places because the United States is not a democracy of individuals. We are a democracy of competing interest groups. Citizens and organizations form interest groups and approach the government with money and collective voting when they want something or wish to influence the state in a certain direction. The nation’s conservative white Christian plurality is, essentially, expressing itself through organized groups of like-minded parents.
Here is a brief history of how this group-based political strategy arose among Christian fundamentalists. The process of creating a collective began in the 1870s and oriented itself around Bible study (the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy) so as to counter modernist trends that sought to make Christianity integrate scientific developments.
By the 1920s, the fundamentalists were notably influential among Protestant sects and increasingly identified with the southern and central tier of states. Secular trends were probably representative of only a minority of the nation’s population at this time and identified (accurately or not) with northeastern urban areas.
The two national trends, fundamentalism and modernism, met head to head at the Scopes Trial in July of 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee—an event that drew national attention. At that time, one of the ways fundamentalism prevailed in the state of Tennessee was through the Butler Act, a state law that made the teaching of evolution illegal. Evolution was a modern scientific theory that called into question the creation story in the Bible.
The Tennessee trial was focused on John Scopes, a young biology teacher who had talked about evolution in his classroom. The trial became a national sensation thanks to the involvement of the ACLU, Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryant. Scopes was readily found guilty, but got off with a fine (which, in the end, was allowed to go unpaid). This conclusion initially encouraged fundamentalists who sought to replicate the Butler Act in other states, and eventually introduce the notion of “intelligent design” into science classrooms. However, they soon ran up against legal roadblocks. As a religious sentiment, anti-Darwinism and indeed religiously based ideas on social norms and standards became constitutionally barred from the classroom. Modernist views, mostly backed by science, which recognized issues of gender, race and sex as legitimately reflecting a nation of diverse needs and views, slowly gained acceptance.
Part III—Culture War
For decades the followers of fundamentalist movements in the U.S. retreated into their own communities. They instituted their own private schools, including colleges, and cultivated their own style of churches that were different from mainline Protestant ones. Through this strategy of keeping to themselves, they survived and prospered.
Indeed, by the 1960s, the number of mainstream Protestants started to shrink and the number of “born again” Americans was on the rise—reaching 40% by 1978. It was this demographic shift within the largest of U.S. religious denominations that facilitated fundamentalism’s return to national politics. Their return is seen as a religiously-based reaction against the alleged moral decline caused by liberal cultural trends on display in the 1960s. The result was a nationwide culture war: a war over whether fundamentalist religion, allied to the state, can enforce its brand of morality in the public sphere.
In the process of reentering politics, these religious folks organized into political interest groups. They approached sympathetic political leaders on the local and national levels with both money and a vocal voter base. Thus, by the second administration of Ronald Reagan (1985-1989) the “Republicans had cemented an alliance with evangelical White Protestants.“
President Reagan had made a career as a B-level actor. His choice of scripts hardly improved upon entering politics. In 1984, while campaigning for his second term, he addressed the Republican National Convention held in Dallas with this bit of problematic logic: “Religion needs defenders against those who care only for the interests of the state. The truth is, politics and morality are inseparable—and as morality’s foundation is religion, religion and politics are necessarily related.” So, his answer was to dump the rule separating church and state. That is why “the Republican platform that year reflected the agenda of White evangelicals…Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, closed the 1984 Republican convention by triumphantly calling the incumbent ticket “God’s instruments in rebuilding America.” Isn’t that the role Donald Trump has now inherited?
Part IV—Controlling the Information Environment
And this brings us back to the Washington Post report on “competing red and blue versions of education.” The fundamentalists who allied with Reagan in the 1980s are still out there and organized with them are millions of parents who want their children to be as “white bread” as they are, or as they imagine they are. And, they are ready to use the law to do this. Are their efforts really constitutional? Well that is what the push for a conservative supreme court is all about.
These conservative and religious parents are rounding the wagons to protect their schools from scary things, like progressives who, they think, mistake small ‘f’ freedom of thought and speech for the capital ‘F” freedom that somehow comes with the acceptance of Judeo/Christian “truths.” They are also scared of the ubiquitous and eternal “other,” the latest manifestations of which are migrants, feminists who want abortion rights, and the alphabet soup of gay, bi, trans, etc. Their kids have to be protected from all of this.
I mentioned above the totalitarian implications of this effort. Here is where it comes in. The demands of American Christian fundamentalists and their allied white bread school boards are, in terms of ambition, the same as ideologically committed movements in places like China, India, and Israel. Their ambition is to contain most citizens, inside an informational bubble or, at the very least, a mostly controlled information environment. If you can achieve this, and maintain it over multiple generations, you end up with a population of true believers.
Here are a couple of examples:
—To an outsider, someone like Donald Trump might appear a hopelessly flawed human being: a liar, a philanderer, a thief, and a whole lot more that should readily disqualify him as a national leader. However, from the point of view of many Christian fundamentalists, who for generations have diligently attended their bible study groups, none of this is necessarily a problem. That is because God likes these sorts of folks. Flawed personalities often show up as instruments of the divine. Remember King David? He was a philanderer who arranged the convenient death of the husband of a married lady he coveted. God seemed to favor him anyway. This is how Christian fundamentalists get around the fact that their man Trump is so repugnant.
— For generations Israel has taught its Jewish citizens that they possess a divine deed to the land of Palestine and, in addition, they need Palestine to be “safe.” Case in point is the Nazi Holocaust. Best way to prevent a repeat of that catastrophe is to have a state of their own in God-given Palestine. However, there have always been indigenous people in the “promised land” and they have long resisted foreign occupation. This resistance led to generations of Israeli Jews and Zionists being urged to see the Palestinians as stand-ins for Nazis. The result is an Israeli Jewish population perfectly capable of committing genocide in the Gaza Strip and repeated pogroms in the West Bank. In turn, many Christian fundamentalists, with whom the Zionists are now allied, have no problem with these acts because they see Israeli occupation and war foretold by biblical prophecy.
Part V—Conclusion
We are in an era when Americans are again increasingly at war within their own community. As a society, the U.S., at least in theory, is supposed to be able to accommodate conflicting views and hold the collective together with the idea that people have choices as to what to believe. But that seems to just be too much for multiple subgroups of the population—groups that have invented ideologies, doctrines, and mythologies to define themselves and their sense of nation. After World War II, the U.S. briefly made an effort to institute toleration through international law and human rights, but again, for too many of us the principles of toleration were seen as a community threat—like an invasion of progressives into today’s “red” state of Texas.
There can only be one general outcome if this process continues unchecked. As one professor of education put it, “When children are being taught very different stories of what America is, that will lead to adults who have a harder time talking to each other.” That is a formula for either eventual domination by one side over the other, or national dissolution.
What the nation needs is to introduce the notion of toleration into a set of national guideposts for education. There is a precedent for this in the Civil Rights legislation which was introduced into the public sphere in the 1960s. Effectively implemented, a requirement to teach toleration is not going to make the fundamentalists and their allies abandon their beliefs. However, it might push them back into the private world of their own insular communities. That would be a welcome relief.
*The division between “red” states and “blue” states was initially used by the ABC network in 1980. This was a time when the color red was solidly associated with communism, the Soviet Union, and “red” China. I can’t remember exactly when I initially heard the reference, but I do remember being astonished. After all, I grew up during the Cold War. One wonders if the network executives had sleepwalked through those same years.
