Friend:

Reporters covering the nationwide swell of Christian nationalism can save a lot of time by focusing on the state of Tennessee.

In Hamilton County, AU urged a public school district to end its Bible class. This class proselytized students, taught Biblical stories as fact, required students to transcribe Bible verses daily and showed a coercive video that includes antisemitic depictions of Jewish people and images of a forked road, with one path leading to God and Jesus in colorful and bright surroundings and the other headed straight into darkness. As our letter stated: “Simply put, this class is not academic study of the Bible; it is a Sunday-school class.”

AU also demanded a public apology for the students, including the 13-year-old Jewish girl who felt some of the class content was antisemitic and told her mother she didn’t “feel safe in Bible class anymore.” Yesterday, the district announced it was investigating our concerns, but it has not yet issued an apology.

Just a few miles away the McMinn County school board voted to ban “Maus,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel by Art Spiegelman, through which many children come to understand the horrors of the Holocaust in a powerful and accessible way.

“Maus,” acknowledged by scholars worldwide to be landmark literature, is now caught in a wave of hateful censorship sparked by conservative—and often religious extremist—objections to educating children about the history of racism, social justice, or anything that could be construed as sex education. But many of these same objectors are all for teaching the Bible, which can constitutionally be studied for its literary and historic qualities in public schools, but which is often taught and inserted into public school curricula with coercive goals.

The antisemitic undertones of the “Maus” ban and the Christian nationalist indoctrination of pseudo-“Bible as Literature” classes are especially unsettling for their impact on children. Sadly, that’s not the only way religious extremists are harming children and families in Tennessee.

In two lawsuits now, AU is representing parents denied the opportunity to give children a loving home because they didn't pass taxpayer-funded agencies’ religious tests. In Rutan-Ram v. Tennessee Department of Children’s Services, we represent a couple from Knoxville who lost the chance to adopt a boy with disabilities from Florida because they are Jewish; in Easter v. HHS, our client is an East Nashville woman denied the chance to foster an immigrant child because she is a lesbian.

Individually and collectively, these attacks on church-state separation ring alarm bells for all who believe in democracy and the American experiment. That so many can be found in a single state reminds us they are happening in thousands of other communities, most often under the radar, with incalculable harm. I outlined many of these threats earlier this week when I was interviewed for “The Why,” an online news program; you can watch it here. More than ever, AU must ring those bells and champion the true meaning of religious freedom that protects all of us from harm, backed by strict separation between government and religion.

With hope and gratitude,

Rachel K. Laser
President and CEO