Sometimes it is impossible to take the political correctness movement seriously. That moment came last week when, according to Reuters, “a California teacher was barred by his school from giving his students documents from American history that refer to God — including the Declaration of Independence.”

What’s next — banning the reading of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech because it calls Americans “all God’s children?”

This story sounds like science fiction, but it’s simply one of the more bizarre ways that liberals who hide behind the banner of separation of church and state are trying to remove mention of God in the public square. This movement has been around for decades, but it has gained momentum ever since the 2004 election showed the power of the evangelical Christian vote. Fear has arisen that religious zealots will lobotomize America and turn it into a theocracy.

Garry Wills, writing in The New York Times, sums up this viewpoint handsomely: “Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an enlightened nation?”

With this kind of rhetoric, you would think that America is becoming a Christian version of Iran. But the truth is that more use of “the G word” won’t send our nation into uncharted waters.

America was never afraid to wear its religious heritage on its sleeve until 50 years ago, when the phrase “separation of church and state” entered the American legal lexicon. In 1947, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black said any federal aid that benefited religion was unconstitutional. Since then, the Political Correctness Thought Police have tried to whitewash America’s religious legacy, but it’s pretty hard to ignore it if you take a look at our past.

For starters, our Founding Fathers were overwhelmingly Christian. Of the 55 men who attended the Constitutional Convention, more than 90 percent were self-avowed Christians (70 percent were Calvinists, the most doctrinally strict Christians around). Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were arguably deists, but they were in the tiny minority.

The Founding Fathers never advocated separation of church and state. If you read the Constitution, you won’t find this phrase anywhere in the document. It’s a modern idea that is quite different from the government not endorsing a state religion.

Flash forward to the abolition movement in the 1840s. Christianity inspired women and men who got a whole series of constitutional amendments ending slavery, granting blacks equal rights and granting blacks and women the right to vote. Modern feminism sprang out of The Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which still exists today. Should these stories be sterilized of references to God?

Jump to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Martin Luther King Jr. believed that religion and activism would be the only thing that could defeat racism, since man was inherently bad. He ignored northern white liberals who thought racism would be defeated by increasing education. Instead, he galvanized the church into action. The civil rights movement wasn’t a public movement with shades of religion; it was a public religious movement. Should we rewrite the civil rights movement?

Granted, this doesn’t mean that just because America has a religious history we should force kids to pray in public schools and rename ourselves “The Holy American Empire.” But it does mean that we should at least cut off the more ridiculous extremities of “separation of church and state” and acknowledge the importance that Christianity played in America’s past. Erasing religion from the public’s memory doesn’t make us look more enlightened; it’s a distortion of the truth. Otherwise, our country will be put on a collision course with gross intolerance.

We can use Europe as an example of a place where the separation of church and state is robbing people of their liberty. France is creeping closer to that point — last year it forbade Muslim women from wearing head scarves in public schools. Or take Holland, where the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Muslim extremist prompted a politician to recommend blocking immigration to non-Westerners. These are the “enlightened” nations many liberals want to become.

If this is the type of “enlightened” nation we want America to become, then I’ll decline and stick with the Declaration of Independence. Oh wait, I would, but it was taken away from me because it contains that darn “G word.”