Secular Apologetics: Mindfulness in K-12 Public Schools and Appeasing White Christian Nationalism

• In Event: Education amid an Era of Rising White Christian Nationalism and Political Extremism

Abstract

This article explores the popular phenomenon of school-based mindfulness and situates both the recent interest in, and pushback to, school mindfulness program within a larger historical-religious context of anti-Asian sentiment and white Christian nationalism. I argue that while the anti-Asian religious pushback to mindfulness from Christian nationalist groups may be par for the historical course, the defense of secular school-based mindfulness programs also rely on a paradigm of White Christian nationalism as norm. I demonstrate how school mindfulness programs have attended to accusations of religious indoctrination by cleansing their curriculum of references to Asian religions and languages. In doing so, they accommodate White Christian nationalist hegemony and reinforce a perceived need to discipline and exclude the supposed Asiatic other.

Author

• Funie Hsu/Chhî, San Jose State University