State religion: Why it pays to be Christian in Kentucky

Just how much religion can the government promote? My home state aims to find out.

This June, a group of twenty students in Northern Kentucky took a field trip that included entry to two sprawling religious facilities. Inside both, students learned a number of surprising facts: that dinosaurs, trilobites, and humans coexisted, that climate change is a myth, that the planets in our solar system are only a few dozen centuries old, and that geology and paleontology are properly understood through the lens of a recent global flood caused by a disappointed God. They learned that racial prejudice persists only because schools teach evolutionary biology. On at least two occasions, they were instructed that belief in Jesus, through Protestant evangelical Christianity, is their only chance at escaping an eternity in hell.

It might seem reasonable to assume such a clearly religious excursion originated from one of Kentucky’s many private religious schools. But the students came from public schools in three counties, and the trip was organized as a “college preparation” event by a public community college using taxpayer funds.

Kentucky is not known for strict adherence to separation of church and state. In early 2004, I watched from the state senate floor as the Kentucky became one of the first states to pass a constitutional amendment preemptively blocking marriage equality. I was there with the conservative lobbyists who…