Former Attorney General William Barr is back, and this time he has a serious warning for the woke acolytes that have hijacked America's schools:

Barr made the comments while accepting an award at an Alliance Defending Freedom conference last week.

He opened with this statement:

"I want to take a few moments and talk about what I think is the greatest threat to religious liberty in America today, and that's the increasingly increasingly militant and extreme secular-progressive climate in our state-run educational system."

Here is Barr's full speech if you want to watch it. I guarantee you'll grow brain cells by tuning in:

Here's a brief summary:

1. Barr said America has discussed the "radical ideology being promoted in our schools," but that the nation hasn't talked much about the long-term effects on religious liberty.
2. He made the argument that education and religion are intertwined, and that America is seeking a rise in secular "religion" in schools because moral education has been divorced from religious thought.
3. Barr reminded his audience that public education started in the early 1800s as a way to create a common civic identity ("forming the 'unim' out of 'pluribus'") and the moral formation of citizens.
4. He referenced the rise of secularism in the 20th century and the push to drive "every vestige of religion from the private square", with education at the forefront. What replaced religion was an education in values without a "metaphysical foundation" that were "nothing more than mere sentimentality still drawing on the vapor trails of Christianity."
5. In the vacuum that resulted, Barr argues that the "kind" secularism that removed religion while keeping values is now becoming militantly evangelistic in its own religious beliefs – something he believes violates the core definition of how the Supreme Court defines freedom of religion.

He also talked about how this secular orthodoxy is aiming to fundamentally divide us, and gave two recent examples he has seen in schools. First, one in Iowa:

"The school district distributed children's coloring book that teaches on a page, I saw it, it says, everyone gets to choose if they are a girl, or a boy, or both, or neither, or someone else, and no one else gets to choose for them. Now, one thing we know, this is not established science, it is a moral, psychological, and metaphysical dogma of the new progressive orthodoxy. In fact, until recently, virtually no one in America had heard of these radical notions. Yet now they are thoroughly institutionalized in many public schools, and in some states, students are permitted to select new genders without the consent of their parents."

Second, in California:

"These new laws often prohibit opt outs for parents. In Orange County, California, for example, the Board of Education issued an opinion that, quote, 'parents who disagree with the instructional materials related to gender, gender identity, gender expression and sexual orientation, may not excuse their children from this instruction.' But this only really scratches the surface. This gender and sexuality agenda only scratches the surface of the kinds of things being taught in public school these days."

I wish I could simply transcribe the entire speech and have you read it, since Barr so eloquently nails our educational problem on the head as a theological problem.

Oh look, the Alliance Defending Freedom already did that job for me!

I'll leave you with a few very good quotes for further thought:

• "We're rapidly approaching the point, if we're already haven't reached the point, in which the heavy-handed enforcement of secular-progressive orthodoxy through government-run schools is totally incompatible with traditional Christianity and other major religious traditions in our country. And in light of the development, I think we have to confront the reality that it may no longer be fair, practical, or even constitutional to provide publicly-funded education solely through the vehicle of state-operated schools."
• "Education and religion were combined [in Western history]. Education started off as a religious project. They're inherently bound together and I think the whole idea of being able to separate them is actually a fallacy, because education is more than just balancing your checkbook or vocational training. At the end of the day, it's really about the big questions."
• "The idea that you can hermetically seal off education from religion is a relatively novel idea, and I think the experience of the past half century has refuted it quite spectacularly."
• "Values in this second phase [of secularization in the 20th century] were nothing more than mere sentimentality still drawing on the vapor trails of Christianity, and it was a vain attempt to have familiar-sounding ethics and morals but without God. But when you take away religion, when you strip away religion, you're left with a moral vacuum."
• "In recent years, across the country, we've seen this rush to embrace critical race theory. Now critical race theory is nothing more than the materialist philosophy of Marxism, substituting racial antagonism for class antagonism, that's all it is. It posits all the same things as traditional Marxism, that there are meta-historical forces at work, that social pathologies are the result of societal conventions and power structures that have to be torn down. That conflict between the oppressed and the oppressors provides the dynamic and progressive movement in history, and that the individual morality to the extent there is such a thing in a materialist philosophy, is determined by where one fits in with the impersonal movement of these historical forces."
• "While an astonishing number of public schools fail to produce students proficient in basic reading and math, they spare no effort or expense in their drive to instill a radical secular belief system that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago."
• "I'm not the first to observe that the tenants of progressive orthodoxy have become a form of religion, with all the trappings and hallmarks of a religion. It has its notion of original sin, of salvation, it has its clergy, it has its penance, it has its dogmas, its sensitivity to any whiff of heresy – and even the burning at the stake."
• "In the absence of a statewide mandate, curriculum are frequently adopted in particular school districts. These new laws often prohibit opt outs for parents. In Orange County, California, for example, the Board of Education issued an opinion that, quote, ‘parents who disagree with the instructional materials related to gender, gender identity, gender expression and sexual orientation, may not excuse their children from this instruction.' But this only really scratches the surface. This gender and sexuality agenda only scratches the surface of the kinds of things being taught in public school these days."
• "As the Supreme Court has recognized, there's nothing more fundamental as a part of religious liberty and a part of our basic liberties, than the right of parents to pass along religion to their children, and it's monstrous, for the state to interfere with that by indoctrinating students into altered alternative belief systems. So it seems to me that if a school is going to propose to teach a child that they get the pick their gender, and no one else has anything to say about it, that's infringing on the free exercise of religion."