Road sign via Shutterstock

In Tennessee yesterday, the Republican-dominated state Senate passed a bill that would make the Bible the state’s “official book.”

Republicans in Tennessee have been trying to do this for more than a year, and their efforts have finally been successful — despite the fact that Tennessee’s own state constitution prohibits it:

Section 3. That all men have a natural and indefeasible right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own conscience; that no man can of right be compelled to attend, erect, or support any place of worship, or to maintain any minister against his consent; that no human authority can, in any case whatever, control or interfere with the rights of conscience; and that no preference shall ever be given, by law, to any religious establishment or mode of worship.

Republican Gov. Bill Haslam is on record opposing this bill but hasn’t said whether he’ll veto it. The sponsor of the bill, Republican Sen. Steve Southerland, said “an outside legal organization” (presumably the Liberty Counsel or the Thomas More Society) has offered to defend the measure against any challenges to its constitutionality, for free.

“So I ask you, what do we have to lose?” he said.

Republicans throughout the United States seem utterly determined to rewrite the laws of the country to eliminate the First Amendment’s wall of separation between church and state, and turn America into an explicitly Christian nation — and a far right, fundamentalist version of Christianity at that. And these are the people who often loudly boast of being “strict Constitutionalists.”