Stephen Monticelli
speaker
52 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Stephen Monticelli’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Texas standards also misled students into thinking there was controversy about whether human activity has led to climate change and to, quote, consider all sides of scientific evidence regarding evolution, even though the scientific consensus in favor of fossil fuels, drinking climate change, and also the scientific consensus regarding evolution is nearly unanimous.
Texas and California textbooks both introduced students to African American authors during the Harlem Renaissance, but only Texas students are told that, quote, some dismissed the quality of the literature produced by the Harlem Renaissance.
Barton, a 70-year-old lifelong resident of Aledo, Texas, which is a small town just southwest of Fort Worth, has become a major influence on the Republican Party and its attitudes towards education, not just in the Lone Star State, but across the nation. While reporting on the Conservative Political Action Conference for Rolling Stone, I recall being given a copy of one of Barton's books.
He calls himself a historian, although his only credential is a bachelor's degree in religious education from Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A one-time science and math teacher at a Christian academy in his hometown, Barton plunged into politics in 1988 as a Republican activist with a penchant for homophobia.
He declared that homosexuality is as evil as any deed Adolf Hitler committed and said that the lack of cure for AIDS was God's punishment for a wicked community. Quote, your sexual choice is not a God-given right, he said on one occasion.
The story is much more complicated than Barton says, and he gets the most important details wrong. Most of the generation that led the revolution and wrote the Constitution agreed with Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, that when church and state mix, both are harmed.
Jefferson successfully established separation of church and state in his home state of Virginia in 1786, when it adopted the Statute of Religious Freedom he authored. The First Amendment, adopted in 1789, also banned Congress from, quote, establishing a religion. And most states embraced, to varying degrees, the doctrine of church-state separation.
Barton has campaigned to overwrite that history with his own alternative narrative. Towards that end, he's collected approximately 100,000 primary documents written before 1812. Based on that selection of material, he argues that American leaders like Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and their peers wanted only Christians to lead the nation, and that American law should be based on the Bible.
In their letters, many of the founding fathers scoffed at the accuracy of the Bible and the reliability of its myriad translations.
Benjamin Franklin told his friend Ezra Stiles that Jesus was a wise philosopher, but that he had personal doubts that Christ was the Son of God. Franklin questioned whether the depiction of Christ's life or even his teachings as described in the Gospels could be trusted.
And Thomas Jefferson, who Barton insists believed that the American government should be based on Christian values, was even more blunt about his central Christian belief regarding Jesus and his virgin birth.
For instance, Barton depicted Jefferson as defining the United States as a Christian nation. Here's the real Jefferson in his 1785 book, Notes on the State of Virginia.
Barton's book on Jefferson went too far for even some of Barton's fellow Christian conservatives. The History News Network website derided the book as, quote, the least credible history book in print. Ten Christian conservative scholars so harshly criticized Barton's book that his publisher withdrew it from circulation because it had, quote, lost confidence in the book's details.
Yet in spite of the questions regarding its truthfulness, another evangelical publishing company eventually released a new version.
Because of Barton's influence, the state of Texas recently okayed public schools teaching Bible stories to kindergarten children. Former Arkansas governor and Republican presidential candidate and Trump's choice to be ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, owns the company that designed those lesson plans.
This video series may not be shown to kindergarteners in Texas, but the lessons in the Huckabee Design curriculum clearly favor a Christian worldview at the expense of other religions. The scripture-filled lessons are not required by state law, but the state will reward school districts with extra tax dollars per student for teaching Huckabee's product.
This is an attractive offer to the many school districts in Texas that are currently filing deficit budgets and struggling to raise revenue.
In 2010, the Texas State School Board, for the first time, required that textbook publishers portray a particular biblical figure as an honorary founding father. This supposed founder was famously portrayed in the 1956 box office smash by Charlton Heston, who later served as a five-term president of the National Rifle Association.
With Barton's encouragement, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick fought to get a similar bill passed in Texas that would have required every classroom to feature a display of the Ten Commandments at least 16 inches wide and 20 inches tall. And as the law put it, quote, in a size and typeface that is legible to a person with average vision from anywhere in the classroom.
The bill passed the state Senate with unanimous Republican support, but died when it didn't come before the Texas House in time for a legislative deadline. As KVUE in Austin reported, Patrick has vowed to continue his crusade in the coming months.
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