One Race, One Religion

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | Sept. 13, 2025

White Christians. That is the future of America envisioned by some in the so-called MAGA movement. But you don’t have to take my word for it since they are happy to tell their own, sordid story.

First, let’s visit our old friend Ryan Walters, since 2023 the Superintendent of Public Instruction in Oklahoma. Walters ordered the Ten Commandments be posted prominently in every classroom, something that courts in seven other states have blocked. Walters also tried to force schools to buy a $60 Bible and, when he ordered instruction from the Bible in grades 5-12, the Iowa Supreme Court told him he doesn’t really have the authority and there is that pesky First Amendment problem, too.

Oklahoma courts have not blocked his insistence on posting the Ten Commandments, but his legislature balked at paying 60 bucks for a book that can easily be purchased online for less than a tenth of that. (It should be noted it is already perfectly acceptable in Oklahoma for students to bring their own religious texts to school and read them in their free time or when it does not interfere with classroom instruction.)

Meanwhile, in Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton, currently running for a U.S. Senate seat, has decided to expand his authority considerably beyond law enforcement. Here’s Paxton explaining his intentions, written on state government letterhead: “In Texas classrooms, we want the Word of God opened, the Ten Commandments displayed and the reading of Scripture... Our nation was founded on the Rock of Biblical Truth... begin the legal process of putting prayer back in schools...”

He would like the mandatory posting of the Ten Commandments in every classroom, currently paused by the Texas courts, and the reciting of the Lord’s Prayer in every classroom, though students could opt out.

Paxton, eager to prove he’s farther to the right than incumbent conservative John Cornyn, has left us with much to unpack. We have to start with the first line of the First Amendment of our constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...” Courts have traditionally interpreted “Congress” to be government at any level. Since the Ten Commandments are specific to two religions and the Lord’s Prayer specific to one, it sounds like Paxton is trying to establish Christianity as the state-sponsored religion in Texas with a side order of Judaism.

This is kind of a problem since our government recognizes hundreds of religions and less than two-thirds of Americans, just 62 percent, now identify as Christians according to a 2025 Pew Research Center study. The fastest growing religion is Islam, and more and more Americans now describe themselves as “spiritual” but without an organized religion to call home.

(As a sort of interesting and mostly irrelevant aside, Paxton is being sued for divorce for what his soon-to-be-ex-wife says are “Biblical reasons.” Others are a bit more blunt, calling it adultery.)

That brings us to Missouri U.S. Senator Eric Schmitt and his remarkably offensive speech to the National Conservatism Conference on Sept. 2.

Sen. Schmitt’s speech, “What Is an American,” made it crystal clear he is not a fan of immigration, legal or illegal. In fact, he isn’t much of a fan of any human not descended from white Europeans.

We’ll let the good senator explain it: “We Americans... the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores... forging a homeland for themselves and their descendants...”

Schmitt does not care that this was already the homeland for indigenous people, as many as 10 million north of the Rio Grande according to some (records are incomplete, so a precise number is difficult to determine). Nor does he bother to acknowledge it was slave labor on which large parts of the U.S. the economy was based for some 90 years, which led to a war killing 700,000 of our ancestors. It is not clear Schmitt is aware of those historic realities or even cares.

He believes immigrants, legal and otherwise, excepting those white European immigrants, “... take the jobs, salaries and futures that should belong to our children...” German immigrants like his family are just fine, though someone should remind Schmitt German immigrants were once considered an unwelcome minority.

Schmitt believes what he calls the “real American nation” is mostly just MAGA world and not much else. He’s not really a believer in that whole melting pot concept, but he describes it more overtly: “If America is everything and everyone then it is nothing and no one, at all... America is not a universal nation.”

That we now have elected officials openly advocating for a country of one religion or one race or both is destructive of our constitution and laws and lays waste to our humanity.