Chapter 2 - The Modern Threats
When schools teach contested beliefs as fact, they cross the line from education into indoctrination—whether the belief is dominion theology, socialism, or gender ideology.
Public education is meant to teach empirical knowledge—what can be demonstrated, tested, and questioned through the scientific method and the Socratic tradition. But when the state inserts non-scientific belief systems into the classroom and demands conformity, it ceases to educate and begins to indoctrinate.
This danger is not new. Some seek to use schools to impose dominionist theology—teaching that government must promote one religion as supreme. Others seek to infuse socialist ideology, elevating equality of outcome as dogma over liberty and free enterprise. Now, in many classrooms, we see the same pattern with gender ideology: contested theories presented as fact, and students pressured to affirm them as truth.
The Constitution forbids this. In West Virginia v. Barnette (1943), the Supreme Court held that no student can be forced to salute the flag or recite the pledge of allegiance. Justice Jackson wrote:
⭐ “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official… can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.”
That principle applies with equal force today. Schools may teach facts—biology, civics, history—but they may not compel students to profess belief in disputed ideas. When classrooms require affirmation of gender ideology, they are no different than if they required a catechism lesson or a socialist loyalty oath.
Justice Neil Gorsuch has reminded us that “the law does perhaps its most important work in protecting unpopular beliefs.” Justice Clarence Thomas has warned against reducing constitutional rights to “second-class” status. The thread uniting their jurisprudence with Madison and Washington is this: liberty collapses when government prescribes orthodoxy.
The response is not hostility, but neutrality. Schools must return to evidence-based instruction and respect the liberty rights of parents and children to hold differing opinions. A government that forces orthodoxy in religion, economics, or identity, violates the same constitutional barrier: the prohibition on compelled belief.
From modern identity orthodoxy in schools, we turn to Islamism—another system where creed and state are fused, and where the dangers of compelled belief are unmistakable.
