Subject: Making us dumber...
...as a society.

A gift article, so not behind the paywall:

https://wapo.st/4cjtVfN

Linda Wenhold closed her eyes, bowed her head and offered a prayer. “Lord, let us see that the further we move from biblical truth, the further we move from our liberty and freedom,” she began.

Wenhold is an example of what conservative Christianity is doing to our society. These people truly believe we should have a government based on their particular brand of Christianity. They somehow, despite all evidence to the contrary, believe that we were founded AS a Christian nation. This is dangerous.

These may be nice people in many aspects of their daily lives, but I despise them for their ignorance and the harm it is doing.

Wenhold got herself elected to the local school board to promote her views of schools as religious institutions. She homeschooled her 3 children.

The 60-year-old grandmother stood at the front of a modest stone church in this former steel town just beyond the exurban sprawl of Philadelphia. About a dozen people had turned out on a cold February night for the fourth week of a 10-week course she was leading on the Constitution and America’s Christian roots, one of 500 that were underway at churches and community centers across the country.

Wenhold hit play on a video that opened with soaring music and scenes of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. The classes were the product of the Patriot Academy, a Texas-based nonprofit whose mission is to “restore our Constitutional Republic” and the “Biblical principles that cause” the United States “to thrive.”

A crowd of about 1,000 filled a large church sanctuary where they waved American flags and chanted “USA! USA!” A Christian rock band played and pyrotechnical devices shot plumes of smoke into the air. Green called for the church to once again become “the epicenter of the community … and permeate the culture.” The event’s moderator then led Green, the other panelists and the crowd in something called the “Watchman Decree,” which includes vows to “take back our God-given freedoms” and “stand against wokeness, the occult and every evil attempt against our nation.”

To make his case, Green relies heavily on the work of David Barton, an amateur historian and influential figure inside today’s GOP. Barton offers a largely de-racialized history of American slavery, maintaining that it wasn’t rooted in white supremacy. He supports his thesis by asserting that some free Black people and Native Americans enslaved people during Colonial times. He also argues that some Black patriots held positions of influence in early America.

His narrative doesn’t account for the fact that the vast majority of the half-million enslaved people at the time of the American Revolution were Black. Nor does it acknowledge that the country’s slave market was created and sustained by Whites who “bought their independence with [African] slave labor,” in the words of Edmund S. Morgan, a renowned professor of Colonial American history at Yale University who died in 2013. Morgan called this the “American paradox of slavery and freedom … the rights of Englishmen supported on the wrongs of Africans.”