That being said, I'll take historical revisionism over the history of the empire over, uh, the evangelical option.

In religious schools, even the best of them, I learned nothing about any ideology but the “true” one, everything else was people being deluded by the devil.

This is why even as a hardline atheist I have sent at times my kid to private religious education, and I hope I can continue to afford it. Neither system is great but worshipping someone who exists only as an ideal entity in your mind seems marginally better than worshipping the world's largest incarceration machine and military aggressor.

I had the opposite experience, I never did the pledge in public school (or in the Adventist schools), at least not regularly enough for me to recall, but in the evangelical school it was the entire school doing it together in a big room every damn morning, first thing. I'd argue religious schools are more likely to drill it into you than public schools on account of the "under God" part that they've retconned in.

I also never saw military recruiters in public school, neither in military-dense Hawaii nor in deep red central Oregon.

There was never an assembly dedicated to them; it was always just a kiosk-type thing students could walk up to.

Did you hear a "devil's advocate" argument for the burning of Tulsa, Oklahoma by white supremacists?

Both-Sides-Ism isn't a real way to account for ideological coercion in education. It's just painting a picture that includes your enemies. What your enemies look like in the picture is LADEN with ideology.

People say this all the time and it's facile. Yes ideology is everywhere and you cannot be completely free from it. But the critical difference between secular ideology and religious ideology is that (in a properly functioning society) you can challenge/question/probe secular ideology.

This is some weird goalpost moving - I didn't say it's easy I said it's possible. Contrast with the fact that you fundamentally cannot question religious ideology - it's literally against the rules.

Martin Luther was pretty successful in his questioning.

But I guess he did get excommunicated for it, didn't he?

Well, I guess that could easily be described as "not easy".

But luckily, I'm not Catholic, so I have no idea.

Obviously 'Not all religions,' etc. However the Catholic church is notoriously dogmatic. Usually the more you press a dogmatic group to change, the more they dig their heels in about it. It's only when the organization is wounded by a schism or massive loss of membership do they suddenly start getting word from heaven that God has changed his mind.

Your lack of answer to that question speaks a lot.

This is wildly underselling the consequences of challenging the church: two centuries of unrest and war that would eventually result in millions dead, amounting to a significant fraction of Europe's population.

There are lots of different bible worshippers but there is only one academia. There might be small differences of opinion they all preach the same "proverbial" creation myth.

Most history taught in the states already waters down the historical facts to make us look better.

This feels like an odd statement, given how many of the most repressive regimes in human history were or are secular. Maybe the "properly functioning" part is doing the heavy lifting, but if so, it makes the statement almost meaningless.

All children are indoctrinated with something. There is a competition for who gets to do it.

This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.