“The greatest threat to religious freedom in America today,” former United States Attorney General Bill Barr said in a recent speech, is “the increasingly militant and extreme secular-progressive climate of our public education system. “

Barr, whose high-profile career has demonstrated a deep commitment to the US Constitution as it is written and intended, spoke to the religious freedom legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom. The Legal Lion has put together a strong argument that a half-century of Supreme Court rulings combined with the left’s long march through American institutions has pushed American public schools so far from religious neutrality that many now understand a preference established by the government for the atheist religion. The government’s preferences for some religious views over others are unconstitutional under the First Amendment.

“The brutal application of secular progressive orthodoxy in government-run schools is totally incompatible with mainstream Christianity and other major religious traditions in our country. In light of this development, we must face the reality that it may no longer be fair, practical or even constitutional to provide publicly funded education solely through schools run by the State, ”he said.

Government elevates anti-religious force No. 1

While many American adults believe that American public schools keep religion out of the classroom, that era ended with their childhood, Barr says. Too many Americans are dangerously unaware that today’s public schools forcefully teach children specific religious and political beliefs that openly undermine Christianity and, therefore, the private self-government necessary to preserve the regime’s basic natural rights. the United States.

The evidence is strong, both in the data and in personal testimonies. “[Ex]Organizations in the provision of government services and in particular the increasingly secularized government control of education… can explain virtually all of the increase in secularization in the developed world, ”writes sociologist Lyman Stone in a 2020 review. researching this topic.

A few weeks ago, conservative expert Dennis Prager said constantly meeting some of the “millions – yes, millions – of Americans whose children despise America, free speech and their parents because of their dating. from a college or even an American high school. . I meet such people with every speech I give and speak to them regularly on my radio show. Ask these parents, if they could start a new life, if they would keep their child in school.

I myself have seen and heard this countless times, both politically and religiously, usually when it is too late to do anything. A mother active in conservative politics recently described to me the tendency of her friends’ young adult children to lose their faith and conservatism in high school as “like an invasion of body thieves.”

Her fellow Conservative parents fear for their college-aged children, she told me, and with good reason. Ample data and human experiences support parents’ concerns that secular-progressive schooling distracts children of conservative Americans from their deepest religious and political beliefs.

How US government schools became anti-religious

Barr explains how the American public school, which was once explicitly Christian, has become the most powerful antagonist of religion in American life. He detailed a brief history of American education to make his point, in three historical phases. In the first phase, “advocates of public schools agreed that religion was an integral part of such education. You cannot separate moral education from religion, ”he said. So at the time of America’s founding, taxpayer-funded schools were explicitly religious.

In the second phase of the history of American education, Barr said, “the left embarked on a relentless campaign of secularization with the intention of driving every vestige of traditional religion from the public arena. Public schools quickly became the central battleground. It was the time when the Supreme Court cooperated with the political left to eradicate Christianity from public education, for example by banning prayer in schools.

Since it is impossible to educate someone without passing on their religious beliefs – Is there a God? Does it care about what we learn, or is it unrelated to learning? What is right and wrong, and how do we know it? – this myth of a religiously neutral education has quietly erased the American education of Christianity. This paved the way for a progressive and complete secular domination of American educational institutions. This is Barr’s “third phase” in American educational history, unfolding today.

“It’s hard to teach someone should behave in a certain way unless you can explain Why“Barr explained.” …[P]urging schools of all traces of religion has created a vacuum by eliminating the system of explanatory beliefs that underpin moral values. Now we are witnessing the attempt to introduce into schools an alternative explanatory belief system that is incompatible with and subversive of the religious worldview.

The New Government Sponsored Religion: Cultural Marxism

While many parents want to believe that secular propaganda in their children’s schooling is scarce, the truth is that anti-religious materialism saturates most public and private schools, even in content and teaching methods. For example, the seemingly neutral act of keeping Christianity banned in school teaches children that their faith is a private and secondary matter, instead of the most important thing in human existence and without which no one can. can not learn anything. Barr gave other examples.

“What is taking shape is a full-fledged – can I say ‘systemic’ – subversion of the religious worldview,” Barr said. “While the layman may view each lesson, such as transsexualism, as dealing with a separate topic, these lessons embody larger ideas that are fundamentally incompatible with the religious perspective. Telling school children that they can choose their gender – not just male or female, but anything else – and that no one else has a say in it – doesn’t just contradict particular religious teachings on gender and parental authority; it is a broad attack on the very idea of ​​natural law, which is an integral part of the moral doctrines of a number of religious denominations.

Barr noted that a fifth of Americans live in states that require public schools to teach LGBT ideology, through kindergarten. Many more Americans live in communities that do the same, all often with no opt-out allowed and with the LGBT ideology often mottled across the curriculum, so this anti-Christian ideology is also inseparable from public education. that Christianity should be from a Christian. education. This, he said, appears to be an unconstitutional violation of the free exercise of religion.

“As the Supreme Court has recognized, nothing is more fundamental than the right of parents to transmit religious faith to their children. It is monstrous for the state to interfere in this by indoctrinating children into alternative belief systems that are antithetical to those religious beliefs, ”Barr said.

This dynamic not only involves the violation of Americans’ constitutional right to exercise their faith freely, but also appears to include the government’s unconstitutional establishment of a preferred religion, Barr said.

“When we are no longer talking about simply taking religion out of the school curriculum, but are now talking about indoctrination into an affirmative belief and value system – a new creed – based on materialist metaphysics and taking the place of religion, then the question is whether this involves the establishment of a religion. I am not the first to observe that the principles of progressive orthodoxy have become a form of religion with all the traps and characteristics of a religion. It has its notion of original sin, of salvation, of penance, its clergy, its dogmas, its sensitivity to any puff of heresy, even its stake, ”he declared.

No more left-wing monopoly on education funds

Barr said the courts have subjected taxpayer funding to schools to a religious double standard, that “secularism has benefited from the protection religious clauses, [but] it has generally not been the subject of prohibitions of the Establishment Clause … If secular progressivism does indeed occupy the same space as a religion – as it does to all appearances – then how constitutional is it to have a state-run school system fervently to teach nothing else? And how on earth can these same institutions be allowed to use the state to punish traditional religious doctrines as hate speech? “

The only way to resolve these major difficulties, he said, was for states to resort to full school choice so that anti-religious education from Kindergarten to Grade 12 did not maintain an unconstitutional monopoly on the religious education of American children.

“If state-run schools are now waging war against the nation’s moral, historical, philosophical and religious foundations,” Barr argued, “then they seem to have lost their legitimacy as a suitable vehicle for carrying out the nation. mission with which the Americans charged them.