Barr: Judeo-Christian tradition under attack in US public school system, 'crisis' of western culture

Former Attorney General Bill Barr says Christianity is under attack in U.S. public schools, calling it a "crisis" situation in western culture.

"We are going through a fateful crisis in western civilization, Barr said at a Christianity conference this past weekend in Chicago. "This is the deepest crisis we’ve faced in my mind since Christ. That’s because our whole civilization is based on the Judeo-Christian tradition, and that tradition is under sustained attack by increasingly militant secular forces."

Barr also said, according to a report in the Federalist that "the threat today is not that religious people are about to establish a theocracy in the United States, it is that militant secularists are trying to establish an atheocracy,"

He argued that U.S. public schools have become so hostile toward the Judeo-Christian tradition that they effectively wrestle parents for control over their children's upbringing.

This is a view Barr has held for years and has frequently discussed.

He has said, and said agains at the conference, that the anti-religious actions of American pubic schools are becoming so outrageous as to likely be unconstitutional.

He told the audience that the behavior within that system, as an entity, likely violates the Constitution's explicit ban on the government establishing one religion over others, as well as the Free Exercise Clause, which forbids the governments from interfering with the religious obligations of citizens.

"What we’re living through is not a situation where religion is intruding into the government’s rightful arena, it’s exactly the opposite: It’s that government and politics is usurping the role of religion," said Barr, the county's top attorney in the Bush and Trump administrations. 

Barr called the U.S. progressive movement an "ersatz religion that gives them a sort of truncated version of the place filled by religion in people’s lives."

"It also explains the bitterness in our politics today" he continued, because once you adopt this view, then your political opponents aren’t just disagreeing with you, they’re evil. They are standing in the way of the salvation of mankind.

"I cannot see a way out for us and the way for Christian citizens to live in peace in this republic until we address the educational system," he said, as he made the point that it is, for religious parents, now impossible to "pretend what’s being taught in schools is compatible with traditional religion."