The current controversy surrounding the Texas board of education and their attempts to rewrite history with an extreme right wing evangelical spin brings to mind the words of writer Robert A. Heinlein, who said “It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.” At the center of this controversy is Cynthia Dunbar, an evangelical Christian, lawyer, and author, and a member of the Texas Board of Education. She has proven willing to use her power to force her extreme religious views into the Texas educational curriculum, even when her beliefs do not match with historical accuracy, or to put it bluntly the truth.
Dunbar firmly believes the United States was founded on Christian principles – a belief likely reinforced by her education at Regent University School of Law, Pat Robertson’s university. Her invocation for Friday’s Board of Education meeting began with, ““I believe no one can read the history of our country without realizing that the Good Book and the spirit of the savior have from the beginning been our guiding geniuses.” She also stated the founding fathers had the intent of creating “a Christian land governed by Christian principles.” In her book, One Nation Under God (Onward, 2008), she states the founding fathers created “an emphatically Christian government.”
If the founding fathers were driven to create a Christian government, as Dunbar believes, then why would they have lead a revolution against the prior government? Revolution against the government is against biblical teachings. In Romans 13:1 the apostle Paul wrote “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resist authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.” Until the American revolution, authority to govern came from God, but the founding fathers saw the authority coming from reason instead.
The founding fathers were men of the Enlightenment – the era of philosophical awakening – a term Dunbar tried to remove whenever possible. They were men of reason not superstition. Quite a few were Deists, not Christian. Deists believe that a supreme being created the universe, that religious truth can be found through reason and observation, and denies the need for faith or organized religion. Reason was the litmus test for government, not that government be held to a “biblical litmus test” as Dunbar holds.
To put the thought of a Christian nation to rest once and for all one need look no further than the Treaty of Tripoli from 1796. Article XI of the treaty states “The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.” There it is plain and simple. Should be enough to convince anyone, but not Dunbar. Even though Thomas Jefferson helped draft it during George Washington’s presidency, and John Adams signed it, that is still not enough for her.
Thomas Jefferson seems to be a problem to Dunbar for several reasons. She would see him marginalized if not outright vilified for coining the term “separation of church and state.” She has claimed the separation of church and state is a myth. To her this is not the intent of the first amendment. Her belief system, outlined in her book, would go to the extreme as to “require that any person desiring to govern have a sincere knowledge and appreciation for the Word of God in order to rightly govern.” This requirement for Christian knowledge would be in direct contradiction to the Constitution which says in Article VI, section 3 that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”
Dunbar also finds fault with the public school system, a system Jefferson helped found, and a system she was elected to serve. She goes so far as to refer to public education system as a “subtly deceptive tool of perversion.” She goes on to call the creation of public schools unconstitutional, even “tyrannical”. She say this is because they threaten the rights of the family, as granted by God in the scriptures, to control the education of their children. Her own children were home schooled and sent to private schools, rather than sending them to public schools which to her would be “throwing them into the enemy’s flames.”
One need only read the first 2 pages of her book to see her inability to separate her beliefs from the reality of a situation. She compares modern America to Nazi Germany before the Holocaust. She then says targeted group, the unfortunate “chosen people”, this time would be “devout, Bible-believing Christians.” She then say they are the only group in the United States it is acceptable to malign. This shows how far her beliefs are out of touch with reality, so far that they border on the paranoid.
Do not write her off as extremist, a radical, or paranoid. She may be all three of these things, but to write her off would ignore the most dangerous thing about her. She has power. Power over the education and futures of 4.8 million Texas schoolchildren. Power over possibly millions more in other states forced to follow the lead of Texas. Power to strike a blow for the extreme evangelical right, far beyond the beliefs of most conservatives. Make no mistake, she is dangerous. Her beliefs make it clear that she supports the idea of an evangelical Christian theocracy. Pretty sure that is not what the founding fathers had in mind.
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