In the towns and suburbs of America, a passionate and often clumsy rebellion is underway. Parents and citizens, like those described in a recent lecture from Texas, are rising up to fight what they perceive as a hostile takeover of their children's schools. They use words like "CRT," "Woke," and "left-wing propaganda" to describe what they are seeing. And in response, a chorus of sophisticated voices from the Left replies with a calm and dismissive retort: "What are you so afraid of? Critical Race Theory isn't even taught in K-12."

This retort is a masterpiece of intellectual dishonesty. It is a perfect and tragic example of a modern philosophical sickness that the tradition calls Nominalism. It is the art of using a debate over a name to obscure a battle over a reality. The parents in Texas may be imprecise in their use of academic labels. They may not be able to give a graduate-level lecture on the Frankfurt School. But they are not fools. They know, with the sure and certain instinct of a parent, that their children are being fed a poison.

The question is not whether the formal, academic discipline of Critical Race Theory is on the syllabus. The question is whether its core, revolutionary tenets are being woven into the very fabric of the curriculum, the culture, and the soul of the school. The evidence that they are is overwhelming. This new faith, which is the logical endpoint of a world that has rejected the Christian understanding of the human person, has a simple and powerful catechism: 1. It teaches that the universal, shared human nature of the Christian tradition is a lie. The only real identity is your group identity, based on race, sex, and class. You are not a person; you are a member of a tribe. 2. It teaches that the Christian concept of personal sin is a lie. The only real sin is the collective, inherited, and unforgivable sin of "privilege," or the sin of participating in an "oppressive" system. 3. It teaches that the Christian vision of history as a complex and redemptive story is a lie. History is nothing more than a brutal and unending power struggle between oppressor and oppressed groups. 4. It teaches that the Christian hope for salvation through grace and reconciliation is a lie. The only salvation is a worldly, political one, to be achieved through a permanent revolution to "dismantle" all existing structures.

This is the religion that is being taught in our schools. It is a complete, totalizing, and profoundly anti-Christian worldview. It is a direct assault on the belief in the Imago Dei, the dignity of the individual person, the possibility of forgiveness, and the existence of a common good.

What, then, is the purpose of education in such a system? In the classical and Christian vision, the goal of education is liberation. It is to use the great tools of faith and reason to free the student's mind so that they may pursue the Truth, the Good, and the Beautiful. It is a formation in a freedom that is disciplined and ordered toward a noble purpose.

The goal of this new system is the opposite. It is catechesis. It is the systematic indoctrination of the student into a specific political ideology. It does not seek to free the mind, but to bind it to a single, unquestionable narrative. It does not train a citizen; it enlists a soldier.

The parents and politicians in Texas, for all their lack of philosophical polish, see this with a clarity that seems to have escaped our intellectual elites. They are not fighting a phantom. They are fighting for the souls of their children. They are like a person whose house is on fire. And the sophisticated retort that "it is not technically a 'fire,' but is, rather, a 'rapid oxidation event'" is a form of cynical gaslighting that is as dangerous as it is absurd.