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New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees has drawn harsh criticism for releasing a video supporting Bring Your Bible to School Day, an annual event put on by Focus on the Family.
Focus on the Family, whose mission is “nurturing and defending the God-ordained institution of the family and promoting biblical truths worldwide,” is a notoriously anti-LGBTQ hate group. After receiving well-deserved pushback for his video, Brees claimed that he did not know of the group’s anti-LGBTQ reputation when he recorded the video. But his non-apology stopped short of condemning the Christian Nationalist group or its activities.
Even more fundamentally, Brees still hasn’t learned his lesson about how divisive his video is. Bring Your Bible to School Day is itself a theocratic event meant to encourage public school students who are part of the Christian majority to target minority religious and nonreligious students for conversion.
In fact, of course, students may bring their bibles to school any day they want. This organized event, however, is an insidious campaign to use the machinery of our public schools to proselytize.
If Brees believes in loving his neighbor as himself, he should reflect on how events such as Bring Your Bible to School Day encourage bullying of non-Christian students in the name of “peer-to-peer evangelism.” Its effect is to turn non-Christian students into outsiders in their own school community for not believing in the “right book” or the “right god.”
The Freedom From Religion Foundation receives complaints about this event every year from parents and students, and knows from such complaints that the event leads to ostracizing of non-Christians and non-religious students (who today comprise up to a third of the student population). The event also regularly encourages public school teachers to break the law by proselytizing non-Christian students. This is all that Bring Your Bible to School Day achieves: marking Christian students as “us” and all others as “them.” It should be no surprise that it’s sponsored by a divisive, hateful group like Focus on the Family.
Just because Brees is Christian is no excuse for promoting a hate group’s Christian supremacy event. Brees should apologize for his video and encourage students to celebrate all of their classmates, whether they believe in Christianity, a minority religion or no religion at all.
Photo via Shutterstock By Joe Seer
