From Conspiracy to Curriculum

Indoctrination and Trump's America

Conspiracy theory has become curriculum in America.

NPR announced this week that Oklahoma is rolling out educational standards for US History that require students to learn about election “discrepancies” in 2020.

Ryan Walters, Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction, advanced the standards through deception; he claimed a pressing legislative deadline took priority over debate. The standards passed. A GOP-led attempt to overturn the standards resulted in closed door meetings with Walters and a subsequent withdrawal of the resistance.

Here’s NPR summarizing and citing the new standards:

The social studies standard for high school U.S. history references baseless claims about the ballot counting process and the security of mail voting. It says students must “identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results by looking at graphs and other information, including the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities and in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters, and the unprecedented contradiction of 'bellwether county' trends."

These standards are not advancing critical thinking; they are blatant indoctrination.

Calling A Thing What It Is

Let’s call this what it is: indoctrination. Indoctrination teaches conclusions. Critical thinking forms questions. This is the former, not the latter.

Oklahoma’s educational system is legitimizing narratives which have no factual or legal basis. Over 60 court cases have ruled against concrete claims of election fraud.

But these narratives continue to carry moral and political potency precisely because they align with a certain form of totalizing Christianity which forms conservative evangelicals in what is both biblical and patriotic. And conspiracism is often the glue that holds these things together. It is an essential precursor in the act of myth making.

Conspiracism starts off as innocuous: “I’m just asking questions!” or “I’m just doing my own research!” Critical suspicion is endlessly malformed into something corrosive and paradoxically certain. Under the guise of critical thinking, the conspiratorial only ever practices a deceptive, corrosive suspicion.

Conspiracism, fully grown, inevitably has to authorize its claims by association, and this leads to the indoctrination that permeates fascist governance and totalizing authoritarians.

Whether US History curriculum, myths of American greatness, or even Christianity, conspiracy theory is endlessly couching its set of false facts and half-truths in stories which appear to give them credibility or plausibility or authority.

Inheriting Indoctrination

Truth telling in all its forms means refusing to go along with the encroaching shadow of indoctrination in America. But to tell the truth, we have to begin here: this isn’t a new phenomenon.

By turning conspiracy theory into curriculum, Oklahoma is engaged in the “necessary” act of myth-making that has always fueled white Christian America, from slave revolts to Jim Crow to the Red Scare to today. My upcoming book spells this out in detail.

We are living in a time where election fraud and January 6 are being mythologized, absorbed into the on-going, operative myth that organizes and directs American identity and sovereignty. Forms of Christianity—particularly evangelical— have always been bound up in this myth making.

I was raised in conservative evangelicalism. I resonated personally with the Christianity depicted in Dr. Kristin Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne (

Du Mez CONNECTIONS

) Why? My childhood church invited a John Wayne impersonator/evangelist to speak at our church, every year. It was a bit too on the nose, really.

Inside conservative evangelicalism, selected stories and myths of America are both reinforced and treated as a proxy for theological beliefs. A great deal of my own pilgrimage of faith has been marked by an unlearning of the story of America I had been taught.

To be a “good Christian” is bound up in the indoctrination of what it means to be a “good American.” Heresy and what is called “revisionist history” go hand in hand. To believe wrongly about America is a sign one might believe wrongly about Jesus.

Inside evangelicalism, it is not uncommon to encounter the Lost Cause/States Rights narrative on the Civil War—especially in 2020, where the removal of Confederate statues that organized post-Reconstruction white supremacist terror was treated merely as “destroying our heritage and history.” I heard it as a pastor.

To Tell The Truth

Truth telling is more than the facts, but never less. We desperately need the bold, courageous legal and political challenges against this policy-driven indoctrination.

For the rest of us, we may not possess credentials or proximity to power, but all of us have a responsibility to tell the truth. This is not just a responsibility to state the facts, alone. It is a truth telling that attends to the stories and myths which give credibility to falsehood.

Our truth telling—in word and way— needs to recognize the abiding power of the “Big Lie” or the mythologizing of January 6 are not grounded in facts because they themselves were created out of nothing. They are the stuff of story and myth. These lies draw justification, authority, plausibility and power from an entangled myth of American greatness and Christian faithfulness.

The question of what it means to be Christian right now perhaps has its answer in creative, local, and responsible refusal to go along with Christianities which lend authority to conspiracy theory as a tool of authoritarian sovereignty.