Texas has required a specific Protestant wording of the Ten Commandments in public-school classrooms.
Texas is pushing state-backed Christian norms into public institutions, especially schools. Examples include laws and policies involving Bible-based curriculum, Ten Commandments displays, school prayer or chaplain programs, and public funding or support for religious education initiatives. These are modern ways government institutions privilege one religious tradition.
Republicans may finally have found the group responsible for Christianity’s problems in America.
It is not Muslims.
It is not immigrants.
It is not drag queens, transgender children, Hollywood, college professors, Starbucks cups, or whatever Target has on display this week.
It is the people who checked “no religion.”
Pew estimates that more than 57 million American adults were raised Christian but no longer identify as Christian. By comparison, roughly 410,000 adults who were raised Christian now identify as Muslim.
Apparently Islam did not steal the flock.
The flock wandered off.
That creates a serious political problem. “No religion” is a difficult enemy to attack. There is no foreign country to blame, no mosque to point at, no distinctive clothing to ban, and no holy book to wave around at a campaign rally.
Most of them are just Americans who stopped going to church.
Houston may already have discovered the future of religion on television. At Lakewood Church, Joel Osteen often opens with a joke. Some viewers may tune in for the joke, laugh, and then change the channel before the sermon begins.
Not Christian to Muslim. Christian to “thanks for the joke, Joel.”
And yes, Joel still gets the rating.
Republican strategists could call the unaffiliated “radical secular extremists,” but that might create an awkward problem when voters realize they are talking about their children, grandchildren, neighbors, and coworkers.
They could accuse them of conducting a coordinated assault on Christianity. Unfortunately, investigators might discover that the conspiracy consists mostly of people drinking coffee, watching football, mowing the lawn, and saying, “I just don’t believe that anymore.”
Deportation would not work either.
Most of them were born here.
The uncomfortable possibility is that millions of Americans did not abandon Christianity because somebody stole them.
They left on their own.
That would mean asking why.
And asking why is much harder than finding another group to blame.
