"Christian nationalism… was just baked into everything,” said one teacher about the state’s civics initiative

May 29, 2024

In 2022, Florida began indoctrinating public school teachers with Christian Nationalism in the hopes that they would spread the misinformation to their students.

In 2023, new evidence shows, they kept doing it.

Thousands of teachers have now gone through the program, and there’s no telling how many of them went back and spread those lies to their students.

All of this is the result of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ multi-million-dollar “Civics Literacy Excellence Initiative.”

(Follow above article link to view photos/PDFs that accompany this article.)

In the summer of 2022, several voluntary three-day training seminars took place across the state. Teachers who attended were told they would receive a $700 stipend for coming and would be eligible for a $3,000 bonus if they completed additional tasks. That meant many educators were likely to attend one of those sessions if they could find time to do so.

They goal of the seminars, in theory, was to give these teachers professional development on the state’s K-12 civics goals. The goals themselves weren’t alarming—they included studying primary sources, teaching kids about government participation, and making sure they knew their rights and responsibilities as citizens. But the alarm bells should have gone off when teachers saw who was putting together the sessions.

According to the Miami Herald, which first broke this story that summer, the workshops were “developed with the help of Hillsdale College,” a conservative Christian school in Michigan known for spreading historical David Barton-esque misinformation. Also helping? The “Bill of Rights Institute” founded by one of the right-wing Koch brothers.

But that’s all behind the scenes. What were they actually teaching? A sampling of 200 pages’ worth of slides from the workshops are below. They clearly endorsed the Christian Nationalist beliefs that conservative Christianity is the bedrock of our country, that church/state separation as we know it is a myth, and that the Christian God gave us the rights we have:

None of that ahistorical indoctrination escaped the attention of teachers who attended the first seminar in June of 2022, saw the slides, and listened to the trainers inject their own brand of Christian lies into the sessions:

“It was very skewed,” said Barbara Segal, a 12th-grade government teacher at Fort Lauderdale High School. “There was a very strong Christian fundamentalist way toward analyzing different quotes and different documents. That was concerning.”

…

Several presentation slides emphasized that it was a “misconception” that the “Founders desired strict separation of church and state and the Founders only wanted to protect Freedom of worship.” During breakout sessions, the state’s presenters repeatedly mentioned the influence Jesus Christ and the Bible had on the country’s foundation.

“There was this Christian nationalism philosophy that was just baked into everything that was there,” [Richard Judd, 50, a Nova High School social studies teacher with 22 years of experience,] said.

It was heartening to hear these teachers recognize the manipulation in play here. A lot of veteran educators would no doubt be able to sniff out the bullshit. But the fear was that many newer, younger teachers who didn’t pay attention to the culture war battles over history would have no clue they were being lied to by Christian Nationalists who had every incentive to spread lies about history to make their conservative vision of America look far better than it actually is.

This was all about indoctrinating the next generation of teachers, so they could inadvertently indoctrinate the next generation of students.

The same workshops also downplayed slavery, overhyped the impact that Judeo-Christian beliefs had on the nation’s founding documents, and implied that the conservative judicial philosophy that says the Founders’ desires are all that matter when deciding a case was baked into our legal system rather than being a deliberate choice Republicans made to get the results they wanted.

It was all bullshit, all the way down, and it was happening because conservatives in Florida at the highest levels of government were more interested in spreading lies than educating kids. That’s why the training sessions were being promoted by conservative propagandists like Christopher Rufo who have a long history of spreading lies to shape culture war battles in Republicans’ favor.

It was ultimately bad news for students, too. Not just because many of them wouldn’t receive the education they deserved through no fault of their own, but because better colleges might think twice before admitting a student who went to a Florida high school, knowing that they may lack basic knowledge about our country’s history. (Similar arguments were made years ago when some students were being taught “Intelligent Design” instead of actual science.)

Yesterday, Popular Information writer Judd Legum published an article that received a lot of attention… though some of it was essentially the exact same story. The indoctrination that occurred in the summer of 2022 was still happening in the summer of 2023.

What Legum reveals, however, is that the indoctrination got much, much worse a year after the program started.

Based on slides he obtained from the Florida Freedom to Read Project (which obtained them via a public records request), it’s clear that there’s a new presentation on “Influences of the Judeo-Christian Tradition.”

According to speaker notes accompanying one slide, teachers were told that "Christianity challenged the notion that religion should be subservient to the goals of the state," and the same hierarchy is reflected in America's founding documents. That slide quotes the Bible to assert that "[c]ivil government must be respected, but the state is not God." Teachers were told the same principle is embedded in the Declaration of Independence.

There’s also this slide that implies we need religion to have freedom:

Peter Lillback, by the way, is a theologian, not a historian.

Beyond that, the presenters at these events prioritized the views of religious thinkers over the Enlightenment thinkers (like John Locke) when it comes to who influenced our Founders. The slides also cherry pick connections between the Bible and the Federalist Papers—Creation, the Fall, the Ten Commandments—as if to say those were the basis for our founding documents.

As Amanda Tyler of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty notes, nothing in the presentation explains why, “if religion was so essential to the structure of the government, the Constitution does not mention God at all.”

According to a press release from the governor’s office, from July of 2023, the state has “awarded 11,000 teachers more than $33 million” for completing those training sessions. DeSantis’ proposed budget for 2024-2025, released in December, included $45 million for the continuation of this indoctrination program. (The bill that passed included at least $10 million for the program.)

All of that is to say: The training sessions aren’t going to change anytime soon. DeSantis and his allies have repeatedly argued that comprehensive, secular education is a form of liberal indoctrination while doing everything they can to shove historical and scientific lies into public schools, fueled by conservative dollars and Christian academics.

They can’t win on the facts, so they’ll attempt to win with lies, and Christian Nationalists are supporting them all the way. And this is all happening while DeSantis decimates public schools across the state by siphoning money meant for them into private or charter schools via vouchers.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)