On his radio program earlier this week, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins declared that the separation of church and state is to blame for the Americans who have left to fight alongside ISIS because “[r]adical secularism that has driven the defining characteristics of our Western culture, our Judeo-Christian heritage, from our schools, our entertainment and even our government has left in its place a void, a vacuum.”

In a column for the Christian Post yesterday, Perkins expanded on the claim, adding that the same “atheizers” who are responsible for Americans joining ISIS are also the cause of “hip-hop gang banger music” and the “the appalling phenomenon of teens ‘sexting.’”

He also links ISIS recruitment, hip-hop and sexting to a new AP U.S. History exam, which he says teaches “anti-Americanism” and to “a jihad in the classroom” consisting of what Religious Right groups claim is an insufficiently hostile portrayal of Islam in textbooks.

“Our young people need to know the truth about America’s storied past,” he writes. “And those who deny it to them are actually feeding the flames of jihad.”