When I taught high school English, I spent a lot of time helping students learn how to write research papers and deconstruct poems and essays. I taught them how to look for deeper meaning beneath the surface, consider historical context, spot contradictions and ask whether a claim was supported by evidence. If a student had turned in a research paper filled with chronological errors, cherry-picked “historical accounts” and one-sided conclusions, I would have handed it back covered in red ink.
Yet that is essentially what the Tennessee General Assembly has done with the Charlie Kirk American Heritage Act, named after the slain conservative activist. Instead of rejecting a poorly vetted, error-ridden piece of Christian nationalist revisionist history, the legislature passed it, and it was signed into state law on July 1.
The law encourages schools and universities to promote a one-sided, fictionalized narrative of religion’s “positive” influence on American history. I’d be okay with this if it required an objective treatment of religion’s role in American history, including both the good and the bad. But the Charlie Kirk American Heritage Act advocates for teaching only the “positive” aspects of religion. Instead of encouraging students to study religion’s role in American history honestly and critically, it distorts the past and advances a government-sponsored religious narrative inside public school classrooms.
It is part of a broader, cookie-cutter “bill mill” strategy. Tennessee’s law carries over nearly the same 19 supposed examples of religion’s “positive” role in U.S. history. The FFRF Action Fund played an active role in educating Ohio lawmakers by publishing a detailed line-by-line rebuttal of the Ohio bill, walking lawmakers through the historical errors, intentional omissions and Christian nationalist talking points. That rebuttal document was shared widely with Ohio lawmakers and helped expose the bill for what is (or was). While the Ohio bill passed the House, it has stalled in the Senate.
According to an Associated Press analysis, lawmakers in more than 20 states have introduced more than 60 Charlie Kirk-themed bills seeking to promote his ideology, establish official days of remembrance or attach his name to roads and public places.
Much of this revisionist history echoes the long-debunked “Christian nation” pseudo-history promoted by David Barton and his organization, WallBuilders. WallBuilders openly describes its mission as helping Americans understand the nation’s “Christian foundation” and “Christian history.” But Barton’s version of American history has been repeatedly challenged by historians, scholars and even fellow evangelicals. His claims became so notoriously unreliable that the Christian publisher Thomas Nelson stopped distributing his book, “The Jefferson Lies,” after concluding that key claims were not adequately supported. Barton, apparently immune to humiliation, continues to sell the discredited book on the WallBuilders website.
One of the most absurd falsehoods in Tennessee’s law is its claim that Benjamin Franklin advised Thomas Paine to burn The Age of Reason, published in 1794. Franklin died in 1790, long before Paine had even started the book. The American Historical Association called this out directly, noting that the bill’s supposed “historical accounts” are riddled with errors, mischaracterizations and anachronisms taken from a discredited Christian nationalist website whose stated mission is to “restore America’s biblical foundation.”
The law tries to make it seem as though Americans rejected Thomas Paine’s “The Age of Reason”. But that is not what happened. Paine’s book was widely read, went through multiple printings and helped spread freethought among everyday people.
Those everyday people were reading Paine’s arguments against church authority, and that scared many political and religious leaders at the time. That same fear is still alive today. Modern Christian nationalists are using the same playbook: attack Paine, downplay the religious fights of early America and pretend everyone agreed this country was founded as a Christian nation.
The law also misrepresents Benjamin Franklin’s appeal for prayer at the Constitutional Convention, claiming it led to “the hiring of chaplains that followed.” But it leaves out the most important part: Franklin’s motion failed. As Franklin later noted, “The Convention, except three or four persons, thought prayers unnecessary.” No chaplains were hired, and no official prayers were held during the entire four-month convention.
The Framers went on to produce a godless Constitution. It rejected the prominent divine right of kings doctrine, instead basing governmental authority on the consent of the governed, on “We the People.” The presidential oath includes no reference to God or the bible, and Article VI expressly bans religious tests for public office. A few years later, the First Amendment made the point even clearer by prohibiting any law respecting a government establishment of religion.
The law also cites the supposed Ten Commandments in Supreme Court artwork as proof that it shaped American law. But that argument does not hold up.
Yes, some commandments overlap with secular law, like rules against murder, theft and lying under oath. But those prohibitions existed long before the bible. The rest of the commandments are religious rules about worshiping one god, avoiding idols, not taking God’s name in vain and keeping the Sabbath. If the government tried to enforce those, it would violate the First Amendment.
The Charlie Kirk American Heritage Act leaves out the bigger picture. Moses is not shown alone in the Supreme Court as the source of American law. He appears alongside many other lawgivers from world history, including Hammurabi, Confucius, Muhammad, Blackstone, John Marshall and Napoleon. And the tablets are blank.
That artwork is not an endorsement of one religion. It is a tribute to the long, global history of law. The current Supreme Court building was also made less than 100 years ago, with subjects chosen by a private artist rather than by lawmakers, much less the Framers of the U.S. Constitution themselves.
The law treats the addition of “In God We Trust” and “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance during the Cold War as evidence that America is founded on religion. Instead, those belated manipulations of the motto, money and the Pledge were the result of theopolitical messaging driven by the “Red Scare” against the Soviet Union nearly 180 years after the Declaration of Independence.
As a teacher, I would encourage students to study religion’s positive and negative impacts side by side. I would teach about Roger Williams, who advocated for separation of church and state precisely because he experienced fierce Christian persecution under a Christian government. (He also invented the metaphor of a wall separating church and state well over 100 years before Thomas Jefferson). I would teach about John Leland, the Baptist preacher who explicitly wrote that “the notion of a Christian commonwealth should be exploded forever.” Instead, the Charlie Kirk American Heritage Act imposes a curated, state-approved marketing narrative that reads more like a Turning Point USA pamphlet than a serious civics curriculum.
That is why this law matters beyond Tennessee. Unfortunately, bills like this are likely to keep showing up in state after state, disguised as history but used to promote a Christian nationalist agenda.
As a former high school teacher, I know how vital critical thinking skills are in the classroom. But as a parent, I also know that mindset has to be nurtured at home. In our house, my kids and I play a game we came up with called Fact, Fiction or Faith. I give them a statement or a claim, and their job is to sort it into the right category. We also like to play 20 Questions because it helps them build the lifelong habit of asking sharp, foundational questions rather than accepting things at face value.
I want my kids, just like I wanted my students, to be encouraged to study religious traditions, compare their common themes and contradictions, and ask thoughtful questions about how different faiths have shaped human history. That kind of honest education helps young people develop the critical thinking skills they need to evaluate claims, recognize propaganda and resist manipulation.
At a time when pseudohistory, pseudoscience and ideological misinformation are being pushed into public school classrooms, parents have to take extra steps to teach their kids how to think, not what other adults tell them to believe.
Disclaimer: The views in this column are of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the FFRF Action Fund.
