Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's Christian nationalist blueprint for a future Republican presidential administration, is blatant about its intentions for the American education system: “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated.” From there, its recommendations continue along well-established lines, seeking to gut public education. I say “well-established” because this is not a new policy recommendation but a continuation of a decades-old project led by white evangelicals and their allies.
Conservative white evangelicals have long had an antagonistic relationship with federal authority over education. In fact, what spurred white evangelical leaders to become more politically active was not legalized abortion, as is commonly believed, but rather a battle over the legality of Christian schools that kept out Black students. These schools believed they should be able to stay segregated while maintaining their tax-exempt status; the IRS and civil rights laws disagreed. When they ultimately lost that fight, evangelicals began encouraging parents to withdraw their children from “government schools” and start homeschooling with specially made conservative Christian curricula. Homeschooling was (and is) one strategy employed to undercut public education, with the ultimate goal of eliminating it. In my book Exvangelical and Beyond, excerpted below, I examine how homeschooling and Christian education advance white evangelicalism’s social influence and power.
With Christian schools under “attack” by antisegregationists, some evangelical parents turned to a
different form of education entirely: homeschooling. Even more than Christian schools, homeschooling let parents control exactly what their children encountered and learned about. It also further reified the concept of the idealized family: mothers didn’t need to work, and children didn’t need to go to school. Labor and education could be performed in their rightful place: the family home. But homeschool moms—they were and still are virtually always moms—didn’t necessarily have a background in early education or pedagogy. They needed trustworthy sources to turn to for textbooks, curricula, and other educational materials, and several organizations founded in the early 1970s were ready to meet that need, including Accelerated Christian Education (ACE), Abeka Books, and Christian Liberty Academy School System (CLASS), plus, of course, Bob Jones University.
Two closely related schools of thought played an outsize role in the development of these homeschool curricula (which are also commonly used in private Christian schools): Christian reconstructionism and dominionism. Without getting too into the weeds on the terminology, these are movements whose goal is to establish a Christian government that would enforce biblical law—that is, they want to reconstruct society so it’s under the dominion of the Lord. If this sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because these movements originated many of what we now refer to as “Christian nationalist” talking points.
The godfather of reconstructionism was R. J. Rushdoony, an archconservative Calvinist who, according to religious historian Julie Ingersoll, “developed and then helped popularize what he called a ‘biblical worldview’” in which “the Bible speaks to every aspect of life and provides a blueprint for living according to the will of God.” While a statement like “the Bible speaks to every aspect of life” may seem abstract and innocuous, Rushdoony imagined a very particular kind of Christian nation, informed by Civil War–era “Southern Presbyterian theologian R.L. Dabney . . . an apologist for slavery; and a defender of the agrarian patriarchal ways of life that characterized the Old South.”14 Reconstructionists present their highly prescriptive, patriarchal expectations of how government, society, and church should be ordered as the biblical worldview— and they have a strategy to submit all of human life to “the Lordship of Christ.”
This strategy is “two-pronged. There is the short-term effort to engage in electoral politics and then bring pressure on elected officials. The more long-term strategy is to ‘raise up generations of leaders’ with the skills and the worldview to ‘usher in the Kingdom of God.’ ”16 Children need to be steeped in these ideas at a young age so that they grow up to put them into action. Reconstructionists and evangelicals in general have been working to “raise up generations of leaders” for decades, first with Christian schools and then with homeschooling. The Christian curriculum companies established in the ’70s gave parents a whole new alternative educational environment with which to resist modernism and propagate fundamentalist mores and beliefs.
These companies have persisted since the ’70s.
In the 2021 book Hijacking History, Kathleen Wellman writes: “With over a million students using its textbooks, Abeka Books is the largest US publisher of Christian textbooks and the largest provider for the homeschool market Its K–12 curriculum is now used in more than 10,000 Christian schools By 1998, over 225,000 families purchased their textbooks independently of schools.” And their reconstructionist influences have only become more entrenched. For example, an Abeka textbook on American history calls the United States “the greatest nation on the face of the earth” but says that “no nation can remain great without God’s blessing.” An ACE textbook on the same subject reads: “The south suffered greatly both from the war and the period of reconstruction that followed but ‘de land ob cotton’ rose from the ashes to become the bible belt, a part of the country that has continued to stand firm on the fundamentals of Christian faith.” The full academic, social, and psychological impact of Christian schooling and homeschooling—which often entail neglect or abuse—is beyond the purview of both this text and my own lived experience, but suffice it to say that homeschooling became an invaluable part of the evangelical media ecosystem and remains so to this day, turning generations of children into culture warriors ready to go to battle for the evangelical gospel of whiteness and power.
From EXVANGELICAL AND BEYOND: How American Christianity Went Radical and the Movement That's Fighting Back by Blake Chastain, to be published on 9/24/24 by Avery, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Blake Chastain.
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