Quotes from Katherine Stewart

we no longer remember a time when neither party had a monopoly on God.

Liberal education is inevitably pluralistic," he lamented. "It would follow that Southerners are clearly wrong in resisting integration of white and Negro pupils.

History has never been dominated by majorities, but only by dedicated minorities who stand unconditionally on their faith," he says.

Christian nationalism looks backward on a fictionalized history of America's allegedly Christian founding. It looks forward to a future in which its versions of the Christian religion and its adherents, along with their political allies, enjoy positions of exceptional privilege and power in government and in law.

The roots of the present crisis in the American political party system lie at the juncture of money and religion

Perhaps the most obvious paradox of Christian nationalism is that it preaches love but everywhere practices intolerance, even hate.

If we want to defend against Christian nationalists' distorted notion of "religious liberty," we don't need to find a new principle. We just need to reclaim the genuine religious freedom that our founders established and that most of our citizens cherish.

business corporations may be said to possess religious belief systems and enjoy the right of freedom of conscience.

historian" of "America's Christian Founding.

What does it mean that the conservative church that's growing in America is an end-times church? What does it mean that we are raising a generation of children to believe that they are the last generation? What is going to happen if we keep on telling them, 'Don't care about the environment, and bring on the war, because we're going to be lifted out of here, and you can forget about loving your neighbors, because they're just going to get blown away'?

The Christian nationalist movement is not a grassroots movement. Understanding its appeal to a broad mass of American voters is necessary in explaining its strength but is not sufficient in explaining the movement's direction. It is a means through which a small number of people — quite a few of them residing in the Washington, DC, area — harness the passions, resentments, and insecurities of a large and diverse population in their own quest for power.

What David Barton and the leaders of the Hobby Lobby corporation don't want you to know is that America's founders explicitly and proudly created the world's first secular republic. It seemed the point of the Hobby Lobby ad was not to celebrate America's history but to counterfeit it.

This is a Christian country, and if you don't like it, get out," she remembers one teacher telling her.

We don't need lessons on patriotism from Christian nationalists. We need to challenge them in the name of the nation we actually have—a pluralistic, democratic nation—where no one is above the law and the laws are meant to be made by the people and their representatives in accordance with the Constitution.

In order to pin the blame for declining SAT scores on the Supreme Court's school prayer decisions, Barton also has to overlook the massive changes in American education at the time. Many of them involved the expansion of the school systems to include previously excluded and disadvantaged groups of people, which predictably resulted in a significant increase in the number of test-takers and a decrease in average scores.

This is why the Treaty of Tripoli of 1798, endorsed by John Adams and other members of America's founding generation, declared explicitly (and uncontroversially) that "the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.

Leave the matter of religion to the family circle, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions," said President Ulysses S. Grant in 1875. "Keep the church and state forever separate.

Forty years ago, when both sides of certain cultural issues could be found in either party, it made sense to speak of the religious right as a social movement that cut across the partisan divide. Today it makes more sense to regard the Republican Party as a host vehicle for a radical movement that denies that the other party has any legitimate claim to political power.

In August 2012, Barton's Christian publishing house, Thomas Nelson, halted production of the tome, announcing that they had lost confidence in it. "There were historical details—matters of fact, not matters of opinion, that were not supported at all

We are so used to the idea that the First Amendment is for liberals, and that it is our bulwark against fascist movements, that we fail to notice when it has been turned around and used as a wedge instead.

We don't notice when it shows up across the street or quietly takes up residence in our classrooms. And we just don't take its proponents at their word. Jerry Falwell, D. James Kennedy, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and any number of other leaders of the Christian Right have told us that they abhor our public schools, and that they pray for the day when such schools cease to exist.

you have to tell lots of little lies to promote one big lie.

replace our foundational democratic principles and institutions with a state grounded on a particular version of Christianity, answering to what some adherents call a "biblical worldview" that also happens to serve the interests of its plutocratic funders and allied political leaders.

This is not a "culture war." It is a political war over the future of democracy.