Throughout our nation’s history, public education has been respected as the bedrock of our democracy. Maintaining a strong democratic system is only possible if citizens have the knowledge and ability to engage with the political process, whether through voting, running for office, or contacting their representatives about important issues.
This requires each and every person to receive a solid educational foundation. Courts around the country have routinely acknowledged that providing a free, quality education to America’s students—regardless of those students’ backgrounds—is one of the most important roles the government plays as it gives young people the tools they will need in order to have their voices heard for the rest of their lives.
Public education’s role in maintaining our democracy is one of the reasons white Christian nationalists have targeted it so heavily over the past several decades, beginning after the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Prior to this monumental decision, public schools were segregated by race. White schools were given the most resources and provided the best opportunities, leaving everyone else with scraps.
Mass resistance to the Brown v. Board ruling started immediately after the Court held that segregating schools based on race was unconstitutional and ordered all school districts to begin integrating. Private religious schools opened at an unprecedented rate, the vast majority of which only accepted white students. Legal scholars took note of novel tactics school districts started using to avoid integration, including what they dubbed “state-sponsored free private schools,” the predecessors to today’s charter schools, and subsidizing the cost of private education for white families, which would evolve into voucher programs, tax credits, and education savings accounts. In short, affluent white families fled the public education system in favor of private religious schools rather than have their children attend integrated schools.
Alternatives to public education exploded throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. Conservative religious groups released homeschooling curricula centered around teaching that America was founded as a Christian nation for white Christians and needed to be restored to its former glory after drifting away from the righteous path established by the Founding Fathers. Millions of families took advantage of the vast network of private schools and segregation academies established after Brown v. Board, often subsidizing some or all the tuition with taxpayer dollars. Christian nationalists quickly realized that controlling the next generation’s education allowed them to influence future elections. Expanding their control by taking over public education would mean exponentially increasing their political power; in classrooms, they could directly influence the views of future voters.
This desire for power is the driving force behind the egregious new attempts to insert religion into public schools and the revival of once-dead legislation. This legislative session, over a dozen states have introduced bills to allow public schools to hire religious chaplains or accept volunteer religious chaplains to replace school counselors, citing a nationwide shortage of qualified school counselors as justifications. By replacing counselors with chaplains, Christian nationalists seek to gain access to public school students and use positions of authority to proselytize to a captive audience. It is no longer enough that parents have the option to send their children to private schools for a religious education. Chaplain bills are a clear attempt to insert Christianity into public schools and onto every student regardless of their own family’s wishes—the polar opposite of how public education is intended to function.
Evangelizing to students is also not enough. For Christian nationalists to succeed, public school curricula must also reflect the so-called “Judeo-Christian values” previously only found in far-right Evangelical homeschool programs. They began experimenting in Woodland Park, Colorado, to discover the best methods to turn public schools into indoctrination centers, including passing some of the first policies in the country that banned books in public school libraries and all but eliminated funding for student mental health support. The most alarming development was the Woodland Park school district’s implementation of the American Birthright social studies standards in 2023.
American Birthright was created by the Civics Alliance, a far-right group dedicated to opposing critical race theory, multiculturalism and antiracism. Their “model K-12 social studies standards” are advertised to school boards as a way to teach students about the importance of individualism, religious freedom, and American “heroes of liberty,” such as Ronald Reagan. According to the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS), the largest nonpartisan professional organization devoted exclusively to promoting quality social studies education, American Birthright has “damaging and lasting effects on the civic knowledge of students and their capacity to engage in civic reasoning and deliberation.” The curriculum was prepared with “a clear political motive,” according to experts at NCSS, and presents students with an oversimplified and whitewashed version of American history that minimizes the contributions and experiences of everyone else.
Imposing the American Birthright model on Woodland Park students, and later on students across the country, helped set the stage for the sweeping bans we are witnessing today on anything related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). As of writing, there are over 30 bills across the country that would limit or eliminate DEI initiatives in public schools and universities, including the removal of large portions of science, health, history, and language arts curricula. In Kentucky, some legislators are seeking to abolish general education requirements in state universities and colleges to suppress underrepresented perspectives and ensure students are only exposed to a narrow, white, and Christian understanding of the world.
We must work together to stop the Christianization of public schools and ensure all students receive an accurate and well-rounded education. Church-state separation, LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive health, and antiracism are not separate silos—they are one and the same. Effective advocacy for the separation of church and state recognizes the fight also includes protecting the LGBTQ+ community, promoting antiracism efforts, and opposing all efforts to restrict civil rights in order to privilege and promote religion and religiously motivated political agendas. To protect public education is to defend democracy, and to be successful, we must advocate for all who are harmed by white Christian nationalism.