Minnesota lawmaker's bill to "advance critical thinking" actually pushes Christian mythology
State Senator Glenn Gruenhagen wants schools to teach disease as divine punishment
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Once again, a Minnesota Republican proposed a bill meant to “advance critical thinking skills” in school… by which he meant trying to inject God into science classes.
SF 2402 was sponsored by Republican State Sen. Glenn H. Gruenhagen. At first, it didn’t look all that consequential. It sounded fairly sensible, actually, calling on school districts to make sure kids know the science behind sickness, disease, suffering, and death:
To advance critical thinking skills in history and science, a school district must provide instruction to students in grades 9 to 12 exploring the contrast between the scientific facts on how sickness, disease, pain, suffering, and death relate to the existence of complex living organisms…
So far so good! Kind of…
The wording was awkward. After all, “scientific facts” is what you say when you don’t get the scientific understanding of the word “theory.” And what exactly is the settled-science relationship between suffering and our existence? What repeated experimental results are we talking about? It sounds philosophical more than scientific.
It was only when you read the rest of the bill that you realized what this was actually about:
… and how sickness, disease, pain, suffering, and death are a consequence imposed by the Creator of complex living organisms.
Ah.
Gruenhagen just wanted his religious beliefs taught in science (and history) class. He thinks sickness and disease are the result of God punishing us, not germ theory or viruses. He doesn’t actually care about scientific “facts” or theories.
This was nothing more than a Trojan Horse to shove his Christian faith into schools.
Identical bills were proposed in previous years too, and they went nowhere.
The good news is that this bill met the same fate.
While the bill was referred to the subcommittee on Education Policy, it died on Friday after a crucial deadline passed—thank goodness—according to the National Center for Science Education. Even if it hadn’t, though, because Minnesota has a Democratic-led Senate and Tim Walz as governor, a bill like this never had any real chance of passing.
Still, it indicates Republican priorities.
Gruenhagen has been at this for a while, both as an elected state senator since 2023 and a state representative since 2010. He’s a climate denier and Christian Nationalist who falsely “believes that our rights come from God and not from man or government.”
There was no mention of the bill on Gruenhagen’s own social media pages. In the past, however, he has promoted the group run by Christian pseudo-historian David Barton:
The point is clear: Republicans like these don’t really want to help students learn, much less think critically. They just want to indoctrinate kids with Christian mythology under the guise of science.
(Portions of this article were published earlier because Gruenhagen keeps trying to get this same awful bill passed.)
Huh.
I mean... you REALLY want to explain to children that grandpa lingered in horrific pain and agony for years before mercifully dying because a woman ate an apple?
And you think that makes your god look good?
Fascinating how creationists dismiss evolution as 'Just a theory', while claiming everything is the work of a Creator whose existence cannot be demonstrated to exist. To make matters worse, these people speak with no consistent voice. Attempting to force religion into the public schools should be classified as a felony with heavy fines and serious jail time attached.