This feudal revisionist would-be King could be your president

A new civics training program for public school teachers in Florida says it is a “[b]misconception[/b]” that “the founders desired strict separation of church and state,” the Washington Post reports.

The Constitution explicitly bars the government from “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Scholars interpret the passage to require a separation of church and state.

In another example, the training states that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were against slavery, while [i]omitting the fact that each owned enslaved people.[/i]

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has decried what he has branded "indoctrination” in public education.

DeSantis has instituted new civics curriculum since taking office, and this summer is offering optional “civics bootcamps” on how teachers can implement it. Teachers who participate get paid.

What he's saying: “[b]We’re unabashedly promoting civics and history that is accurate and that is not trying to push an ideological agenda,[/b]” DeSantis said at an event earlier this week.

Students in Florida are “learning the real history, you’re learning the real facts,” he added.

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ArishMell · 70-79, M

I am puzzled.

Looking at that quote from afar, so having no political or religious act to grind, it does seem oddly ambiguous.

[quote]bars the government from “ .... prohibiting the free exercise thereof."[/quote] of religion.

Fair and clear; and crucially the lack of an article preceding "religion" and no identifying any specific one, leaves open the freedom of [i]any[/i] religion, not only the founders' Christianity. The founders though, really had only two religions generically to think about. Their own in its various sects, and the indigenous ones. There may have been a sprinkling of Jews but very, very few Muslims, Sikhs, Hindhus, Buddhists etc. in the fledgling USA.

[quote]bars the government from “respecting an establishment of religion ..." [/quote]

What does that really mean? It's probably intended sincerely to prevent governmental control, founding, use or special favouring of any religious institutions; but looks as if religion as a whole is officially, only tolerated.

If so, then the whole sentence can be read as declaring a separation of Church and State gilded with treating all faiths equally and non-politically. That is what I'd always understood the nation's Constitutional position to be; as relevant now as then - if not more so in a world of so many mixed cultures.

It needs the whole text reading carefully while understanding the 18C English used by the founders; many of them descendents of colonists there partly to escape too great a link between Church and State, excessive church power and simple sectarian hatreds in the Old World.

'
Although the French Revolution was primarily political and social it held a very strong anti-Church (not anti-religion) thread. Once the country had stabilised, the French constitution eventually answered that by evolving a strongly secular but ecumenical government serving a society whose main faith is the Roman Catholic sect of Christianity; but which also includes many followers of other Christian sects, other faiths and none.

Somewhat similarly in the UK; whose Constitution is spread around any number of different Acts etc. going back for centuries. Christianity is still officially the State faith, royal religious events including coronations are Anglican ceremonies, and the Church of England is represented in the House of Lords. Otherwise the Government and Parliament are secular, reflecting the multi-ethnic, multi-faith, multi-sect nation at large. Indeed the MPs and Lords include a goodly number of people from non-Christian faiths and none, and fomenting religious hatred is an offence along with racism and similar unpleasantly anti-social "isms".

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As for what schools teach, History is only that if accurate, full and without fear or favour. Otherwise it can degenerate into mere propaganda furthering, not healing, divisions.

dancingtongue · 80-89, M

@ArishMell [quote]The founders though, really had only two religions generically to think about.[/quote]

In the context of their times, Christendom itself provided many "religions" and threats of state-supported religions. Some of the colonies (soon to be states) had been founded by more extremist forms of Protestantism -- or, in the case of Maryland, Roman Catholics -- fleeing from the official state Church of England, the Anglicans . You had Puritans, Quakers, Methodists, Primitive Baptists (not to be confused with Southern Baptists). More than a sprinkling of Jews, and even a few Moors. The founders real concern wasn't about Native American spiritualism, or even the "voodoo" African/Caribbean religions imported by the slaves. It was the devil they knew that they had imported from Europe, even though they all fought under the same big tent of Christianity. Some of the colonies had -- or had had -- official state religions, or were dominated by one sect or another, and they feared one becoming powerful enough to extend such over the rest of the new nation, or for it to devolve the Union into Civil War. So it is not that dissimilar to your French Revolution example.

ArishMell · 70-79, M

@dancingtongue I see. Thank you for explaining it.