Ken Brown has a post pointing to Joe Carter’s essay on the subject of theocracy and the fear of it that is often expressed by those on the left. Carter argues that accusations that the religious right is pushing for theocracy are empty political rhetoric. While he admits that “some conservative Christians in our country do want to establish a theocracy” he also argues that their numbers “are rather negligible and their political influence almost non-existence (sic)”. I’m going to agree in part and disagree in part. Yes, I think the left often exaggerates the risk of theocracy and applies the term to people who aren’t really theocrats; on the other hand, I think Carter downplays the amount of influence that true theocrats do have within the various apparati of the religious right and even the Republican Party itself.

First, let’s define who we’re talking about. I don’t think that most religious right followers or leaders are actual theocrats. A theocrat is one who believes that religious law, as defined by sacred text, should be the civil and criminal law of the land. There are disagreements among theocrats as to which laws specifically should be enforced and how to do so, but this general definition works for our purposes. I think we should define this narrowly enough that it does not include, for example, someone who applies such laws only minimally.
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Whenever you see a religious right apologist claiming that America was founded as a “Christian nation”, you inevitably find them defining the nation not from the point it was founded – the time of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution – but from the time of the colonies that were still ruled by England. In particular, they like to point to documents like the Mayflower Compact and the charters of the various colonies, all of whom had official established churches, as proof that we were indeed founded as a Christian nation.

The National Reform Association, which has been around for nearly two centuries and has made repeated attempts to amend the Constitution to include language declaring America an officially Christian nation, cites those documents on their webpage. Innumerable Christian webpages refer to those earlier documents for evidence, including this one:
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As I noted the other day, and as many other blogs have discussed, there is a bill in front of the Missouri state legislature with enormous church/state implications. It is House Concurrent Resolution 13 and it reads pretty much like something out of a David Barton pamphlet. I’m going to examine it line by line and point out some of the absurdities and misrepresentations found within it:

Whereas, our forefathers of this great nation of the United States recognized a Christian God and used the principles afforded to us by Him as the founding principles of our nation…

Both claims found here are false. Most of our “forefathers” were of course Christian (no one in their right mind could doubt that), but some of them quite famously were not. Unless they wish to erase Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Ben Franklin and several other prominent “forefathers”, this statement does not match the historical reality. More importantly, the notion that the principles on which this nation was founded were products of the “Christian God” are utterly false.

Nowhere in the Bible or, for that matter, in Christian theology prior to the Enlightenment, will you find anything like the principles of political equality and unalienable rights found in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Nowhere will you find anything even close to the first amendment anywhere in the Bible, nor anything analogous to any of the other founding principles of our nation. You will find all of those ideas in the writings of Enlightenment philosophers like John Locke and Montesquieu, but not in the Bible.
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I’ve been trying to find out what was said at that press conference called by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools – you know, the one with Chuck Norris – earlier this month. As it turns out, after savaging Mark Chancey’s scathing report on the suitability of their curriculum as the efforts of “far left, anti-religion extremists”, the NCBCPS has actually incorporated those criticisms into new revisions to that curriculum and they announced those revisions at the press conference:

At the time, National Council officials lambasted Chancey’s report and the Texas Freedom Network. A statement still posted on the council’s website Sept. 16 labeled TFN “a radical humanist organization” and said the group was “desperate to ban one book — the Bible — from public schools.”

It also said Chancey’s report “cites several passages from the teacher’s guide to the curriculum out of context, and clearly misrepresents the curriculum’s contents and objectives.”

Nonetheless, many of Chancey’s recommended changes — including substantive ones — are reflected in the latest revision.

For example, Chancey faulted the curriculum for assuming a Protestant view of the Bible in the material’s very first section, titled “Introduction to the Bible.” It had asserted that “there are 66 books in the entire Bible” and that Scripture has “two major divisions” — the Old Testament and the New Testament.

However, Chancey noted, Jews do not accept the New Testament as part of the Bible. Therefore, it is accepted practice among biblical scholars to refer to the Old Testament as the “Hebrew Bible.”

In addition, Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians accept several books as part of the biblical canon in addition to those that Protestants accept.

The revised curriculum now begins the section by saying, “The term Bible means ‘books,’ but refers to different volumes for different religions. For example, ‘the Hebrew Bible’ of the Jewish faith contains 24 books…. While the Old Testament of the King James translation and other Protestant Bibles contains 39 books, it consists of 46 books in the Catholic Bible.”

In another example, the new version removes a citation, presented as fact, of an urban legend that attempted to prove the historical veracity of a famous passage from the book of Joshua. It had suggested that teachers tell their students to take note “in particular the interesting story of the sun standing still in chapter 10. There is documented research through NASA that two days were indeed unaccounted for in time (the other being in II Kings 20:8-11).”

A statement on NASA’s website says the agency never made any such claim.

I’m trying to get my hands on a full list of the revisions to see if they took out or revised the numerous other examples of shoddy scholarship, like the use of Carl Baugh’s creationist videos or David Barton’s pseudo-historical research. I’ve written to Mark Chancey to get more details. And while Chancey commends the NCBCPS for making the revisions, I can only laugh at the contradiction between the hysterical ad hominems they threw at him and the Texas Freedom Network when the report was released and their now admission that many of those criticisms were accurate. And note that they had just revised the curriculum in March of this year and it was that revision that was used in Chancey’s report in the first place. The only thing that changed in the last 6 months is the existence of his report, the same report that they disingenuously claimed was a vicious attack on the Bible and totally without foundation only a few weeks ago. Always good to see people who claim that teaching the Bible is the key to building moral behavior among our children engaging in highly dishonest rhetoric.

The full report on the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools’ Bible course curriculum is now available from the Texas Freedom Network. The report was written by Mark Chancey, a professor of Biblical studies at Southern Methodist University. As Chancey notes, the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools has quite a select group of supporters and they’ve managed to compile an entire curriculum on how to teach about the Bible without a single Biblical scholar on either their 8 member Board of Directors or their 50+ member Advisory Committee. They do, however, have Mr. and Mrs. Chuck Norris on that committee, so no doubt they’ll have great material on spinning back kicks and bad movies. The list of folks who endorse this curriculum is staggering and they include everyone from the American Center for Law and Justice to Kent Hovind’s Creation Science Evangelism, which hardly boosts their credibility.

One of the interesting things that Chancey notes is that the entire curriculum is written from a peculiarly Protestant viewpoint. One would think that a non-sectarian and informational rather than devotional class about the Bible would include, for instance, an examination of the history of the development of the Bible, the different versions of the Bible in use by Christian churches around the world, the Jewish perspective on the Biblical texts that were written in Hebrew and how they developed, and so forth. But this curriculum contains virtually none of that information:
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One of the growing trends around the country is school boards allowing schools to teach an elective course on the bible. The National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools (NCBCPS) has been very active in lobbyign school boards to do so and selling them their textbooks for such a class in the process. Such courses are legal as long as they are, in the words of first amendment scholar Charles Haynes, “taught academically, not devotionally.” Schools can teach about the bible, about what people believe about it, but they may not endorse biblical teachings or any particular religious belief. But in practice, of course, this distinction rapidly breaks down. Such classes are being approved by school boards precisely because they want to endorse Christianity and that is exactly what the curricula are generally designed to do. And this morning’s New York Times points out just how far such courses go in achieving that goal.

The National Council says that their curriculum is used by 312 school districts in 37 states, reaching more than 175,000 students. And as the times notes, “The national council’s efforts are endorsed by the Center for Reclaiming America, Phyllis Schlafly’s group the Eagle Forum, Concerned Women for America and the Family Research Council, among others.” But in truth, this may well be little more than a way of smuggling in creationism:

Some of the claims made in the national council’s curriculum are laughable, said Mark A. Chancey, professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, who spent seven weeks studying the syllabus for the freedom network. Mr. Chancey said he found it “riddled with errors” of facts, dates, definitions and incorrect spellings. It cites supposed NASA findings to suggest that the earth stopped twice in its orbit, in support of the literal truth of the biblical text that the sun stood still in Joshua and II Kings.

“When the type of urban legend that normally circulates by e-mail ends up in a textbook, that’s a problem,” Mr. Chancey said.

Tracey Kiesling, the national council’s national teacher trainer, said the course offered “scientific documentation” on the flood and cites as a scientific authority Carl Baugh, described by Mrs. Kiesling as “an internationally known creation scientist who founded the Creation Evidence Museum in Glen Rose, Tex.”

This is all quite laughable except that 175,000 students around the country are being taught this nonsense. Carl Baugh is an utter fraud, acknowledged so even by his fellow creationists. He and Kent Hovind are the only major creationists still using the Paluxy footprints as “proof” that humans and dinosaurs lived together at the same time, decades after this claim was debunked by their fellow creationists. And this ridiculous story about NASA’s computers proving that the sun stood still is the sort of thing believed in only by the truly stupid or delusional. The folks who put together this curriculum are scraping the bottom of the barrell for claims that even their fellow creationists realized were false a very long time ago.

In addition, the curriculum also quotes approvingly from Christian Nation apologist David Barton and claims that the bible was “the blueprint for the Constitution.” As Haynes says, they must not have read the Constitution. If the Constitution is based upon the bible, then one should be able to point to provisions in the Constitution and to their analogs in the bible, but there are none. On the other hand, one can trace provisions of the Constitution directly to the work of Enlightenment thinkers like John Locks and Montesquieu, the men who actually did lay down the blueprint for our Constitution.