A Fight for the Foundation of our Democracy
From the beginning, the fight to protect secular public education has been at the very foundation of American Atheists. After all, it was the fight to end the practice of coercive, mandatory school prayer that gave rise to our founder’s activism. Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s lawsuit challenging the practice in Baltimore schools, Murray v. Curlett, was consolidated with a similar case, Abington v. Schempp, when the issue reached the Supreme Court in 1963.
Public education is often called the bedrock of American democracy — a melting pot, an equalizer, and the essential institution for forging a shared civic identity among the diverse populace of a nation with more than 340 million people. It is precisely for these reasons that public schools have become the primary battleground for a movement fundamentally opposed to pluralism and secular governance.
White Christian Nationalists’ decades-long campaign against public education has been persistent, sophisticated, and well-executed. They have targeted the core of its curriculum and the financial lifeblood of the institution itself.
They seek to remake America into a nation governed by a specific, narrow interpretation of Christian doctrine, often intertwined with nostalgia for what they imagine as the “good ol’ days” — a society dominated by white Christian men. For this vision to succeed, the shared, secular space of the public school must be dismantled or repurposed. The movement’s ideology views the current system — which teaches critical thinking, history inclusive of marginalized groups, and constitutional separation of church and state — as fundamentally corrupting. This belief is what has long fueled their most overt attacks on our nation’s schools: the direct, ideological takeover of public education.
We have seen this play out in the nationwide surge of policy proposals that would inject devotional Christianity into the classroom. The push to mandate the display of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms is a perfect illustration. This is not, as proponents would have you believe, a benign attempt to recognize so-called foundational texts. Instead, it is a calculated campaign to impose a monotheistic religious text as a de facto civil code, signaling a clear intent to marginalize atheist, nonreligious, and religious minority students. Their siege on schools is an act of ideological territorialism that weaponizes the classroom as a site for sectarian conversion rather than civic instruction.
Ken Paxton, Attorney General of Texas, made his views crystal clear in a statement announcing that his office would sue the Galveston school district for complying with a federal court order and refusing to display the Ten Commandments: “America is a Christian nation,” he said. “It is imperative that we display the very values and timeless truths that have historically guided the success of our country.”
While Christian Nationalist politicians are inserting religion into our classrooms, they are simultaneously engaged in a campaign of intellectual suppression. Driven by figures who proclaim the public school system is “godless” and fundamentally hostile to conservative values, the movement has mobilized at the grassroots level to target school board elections.
Their actions have included banning books that explore themes of race, gender, and sexuality; and demanding the removal of curricula that could be somehow “offensive” to white Christian parents. Critical thinking and inclusive, or simply accurate, history have been recast as “divisive concepts” or “indoctrination.” Their goal is not merely to “teach the controversy” (sound familiar?) but to ensure that the next generation remains intellectually ill-equipped to challenge their Christian Nationalist narrative.
Not content with their classroom coup, the white Christian Nationalist movement has also engaged in a systematic push toward privatization through vouchers and other “school choice” schemes that divert taxpayer dollars to subsidize tuition at private institutions. The rhetoric of “parents’ rights” is deployed to mask a massive transfer of public wealth to overwhelmingly religious entities.
These institutions, unlike public schools, are under no obligation to serve the entire community and are generally free to discriminate against whomever they would like. And it’s not just religious discrimination we’re talking about. It’s discrimination against LGBTQ+ students, parents, and teachers. It’s discrimination against English language learners, students of color, students from low-income families, and students with disabilities.
These voucher schemes pull funding from already underfunded public schools, dramatically limiting their ability to offer comprehensive courses, maintain their facilities, and provide essential services like special education or individualized instruction. This impact is felt most acutely in rural areas, where private school options are few or nonexistent, and public schools are asked to do more with less. Meanwhile, the recipient private schools are exempt from the accountability, transparency, and anti-discrimination standards that public schools must follow.
We’re left with a two-tiered system: a well-funded, ideologically and religiously aligned private system, and an increasingly starved public system.
Major figures within the Christian Nationalist ecosystem have been explicit about this goal. In his 1979 book America Can Be Saved, Jerry Falwell said he hoped “to see the day when […] we don’t have public schools. The churches will have taken them over, and Christians will be running them.”
Falwell and his ideological brethren spent decades implementing this vision, crafting model legislation for universal voucher programs and directing massive financial resources to advocacy groups focused solely on dismantling public education. Donald Trump’s first Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, worked for years to destroy the system she was tasked with leading.
It is a long-term strategy of deliberate financial asphyxiation, designed to force public schools to fail and thereby justify their replacement with a taxpayer-funded, faith-based alternative.
This is not a debate about pedagogical methods or budget allocations; it is a constitutional crisis unfolding in our local communities. The goal of the white Christian Nationalist movement is to fundamentally compromise the nonsectarian, democratic mission of public education, using state funds to subsidize ideological and religious purity. If the institution where Americans learn to reason and to respect one another is destroyed, the very foundation of our pluralistic republic will crumble.
To defend our democracy, we must defend our schools. This requires more than simply voting against voucher initiatives; it demands a full engagement with the school boards that are being systematically targeted, and a vocal rejection of any attempt to impose a narrow religious agenda onto government institutions. Public education is the most powerful tool we have against the forces of division and intolerance. It is time for each of us to recognize that protecting the classroom is an act of patriotism. We must resist the deliberate dismantling of our public schools before it is too late.
