WHERE WERE THEY RADICALIZED? NO ANSWER IS COMPLETE WITHOUT ADDRESSING EVANGELICAL CHURCHES AND SCHOOLING
As the United States prepares for the end of a nightmarish one-term presidency that seemed to drag on forever, Americans continue to unpack the January 6 insurrection that now even soon-to-be Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell admits was “provoked” by President Donald Trump. On January 16, NBC political analyst Mehdi Hasan tweeted, “#whereweretheyradicalized is a question we’re going to be asking of GOP lawmakers at federal and state/local levels for many, many years to come, sadly,” adding that the answer would lie primarily in “a combo of Fox/OANN/Newsmax and Facebook.”
As I like to say, however, the Christian Right has been doing “alternative facts” since before it was cool. It would be remiss of us to approach the “where were they radicalized” question without addressing how the Christian schooling and homeschooling movement, along with many white churches and other evangelical, LDS, and ‘trad’ Catholic institutions, fostered the subcultures that created the demand for hyper-partisan “news” outlets like Fox News.
Any serious answer to the question of radicalization will have to address Christian nationalism’s own longstanding (dis)information and political ecosystem, taking into account the feedback loops between it; overt white supremacist and right-wing extremist groups; elite right-wing lobbies like the Council for National Policy; digital technology; and the rise of talk radio and right-wing cable “news.”
From the very start, Christian schooling and homeschooling advocates have had powerful influence in the Trump administration, not least through the appointment of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. And more recently, we’ve observed the overlap between promoters of evangelical education and the events of January 6, in the person of newly-elected Illinois Representative Mary Miller (R), a born-again Sunday school teacher who became infamous for proclaiming “Hitler was right” about the importance of indoctrinating children at the pro-Trump rally before the insurrection.
As children’s rights advocate Ryan Stollar pointed out on Twitter, Miller is, unsurprisingly, “a leader in the Christian Homeschool Movement.” For those wanting to know more details about what’s taught to Christian homeschoolers and in Christian schools, a new HuffPost report by Rebecca Klein lays it bare, noting that the textbooks she examined are characterized by a skewed version of history and a sense that the country is experiencing an urgent moral decline that can only be fixed by conservative Christian policies. Language used in the books overlaps with the rhetoric of Christian nationalism, often with overtones of nativism, militarism and racism as well.
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