Do you want your taxes funding Christian Nationalism?

Although Philadelphia is home now, I am mostly proud to hail from Michigan. 

The Lions and lighthouses, Motown and Madonna, arguments about exactly where “Up North” starts… I could go on. But I have to say “mostly” because I am not proud to share a home state with Hillsdale College. 

It’s a comparatively small private college near the bottom of the mitten — just a 30 minute drive from where I went to college — but it has a hugely outsized influence on our nation’s politics and, in particular, what children across the country are being taught. 

Hillsdale infamously developed the Trump-approved 1776 Curriculum, which sought to portray America as “exceptionally good.” Now, this week, it’s released the first volume of its new Golden Thread Curriculum for high school students as part of a broader push for so-called classical education.

Adopting classical curriculum will, as one proponent recently wrote, make education “more Roman, more civic, and perhaps more authentically Christian as well.”

The term “classical education” can mean many things, but the kind we’re seeing aggressively advanced by Christian Nationalists promotes a particular story about who we Americans are and which voices matter. Spoiler alert: They’re white, patriarchal, capitalistic, and, you guessed it, Christian. 

It’d be one thing if this ideology was confined to private schools, but it isn’t. Hillsdale has spent years pushing its curriculum into a rapidly growing national network of publicly funded and privately operated charter schools.

Now, this is interesting because Hillsdale has a long history of refusing to accept federal funds, and they like to mention it — a lot. It’s a principle thing, they say. But in the largely unregulated charter school system, Hillsdale has found a convenient way to use state dollars to advance their Christian Nationalist agenda. 

And charter school curriculum is just one spoke in this wheel.

There’s also the Classical Learning Test, an alternative college entrance exam that emphasizes biblical passages and is increasingly recognized by state and federal institutions.

There are “Great Books” initiatives and new state standards that give Christianity privileged treatment. Earlier this year, Texas became the first state to institute a mandatory reading list for K-12 public schools, and the only religious text on it is the Christian Bible. 

Piece by piece, these efforts are building an education system in which one particular religiopolitical view is favored above all others.

Every day, American Atheists is fighting across the country to keep public education public, expose religious indoctrination, and defend students’ rights. This legislative session alone, our policy team tracked 18 classical learning bills in 10 states, and we helped defeat 12 of them. 

We don’t have the vast resources and power that Hillsdale does, but we’re still taking them on and winning. Please donate now to help us defend public schools, public funds, and every student’s right to an education that teaches them how to think — not what to believe.

In solidarity,

Nick Fish
President