This is the second in a series about attacks on public education, setting the historical context for the current assaults from the right on our public schools. As promised, we’re keeping each of these entries short, so this subject will be one we cover in multiple parts. And we’ll save the “what you can do” list for the last entry.
—Karen Johnson-McKewan
Activate’s Advisors are Nikola Bozinovic, Ellen Ehrenpreis, Catherine Foster, Jon Foster, Don Keller, and Glen Van Ligten
While southern states fought with the federal government over racial desegregation of public schools, another culture war—also involving the public schools—was intensifying in the 1960s, this time (ostensibly) over religion. As the public square in mid-20th century America became increasingly occupied with the fight for civil rights, and increasingly secular, educators likewise focused the curriculum on secular matters, including anti-racism, sex education, and evolution. By the 1970s, religious conservatives had had enough. They advocated for a School Prayer Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, clamored for the teaching of creationism (later rebranded as “intelligent design”) alongside evolution in the science classrooms, protested any discussion of human reproductive biology, and accelerated a trend that had started in earnest after Brown v. Board of Education: fleeing the public schools for private Christian academies or home schooling.
Many of those private Christian schools, however, claimed a “religious liberty” to maintain all-white student bodies, having been founded in the wake of—and because of—Brown. Under the Civil Rights Act, however, racial discrimination disqualified such schools from claiming the tax exemption otherwise afforded educational institutions. Facing the loss of that tax exemption, most such schools integrated, but the evangelical community was aroused, and goaded by Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich, the founders of the Moral Majority, it began flexing its electoral political muscle. (The Moral Majority was an early supporter of Ronald Reagan’s first presidential campaign and was so influential with Reagan that he appointed its first executive director to a position in the U.S. Department of Education.)
Falwell and Weyrich saw political opportunity in agitating among conservative Christians: they quickly learned that issues such as abortion, divorce, feminism, gay and lesbian rights, and the Equal Rights Amendment—packaged as threats to “traditional family values”—triggered powerful reactions (and substantial financial contributions). Hostility to gay rights—particularly as they related to education—was a particularly potent tool for fundraising, and in the late 1970s, legislated bans on gay and lesbian teachers went into effect in Dade County, Florida, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, while individual school districts around the country quietly investigated and dismissed gay and lesbian teachers.
Though the Moral Majority is no longer with us, what it learned about fundraising by pitting religion against secularism has been quite enduring. Right-wing leaders from Newt Gingrich to George W. Bush and even to Donald Trump—a thrice-divorced admitted adulterer—pandered to religious voters, all quite successfully.
Next in Education: How Religion in Public Schools Expanded into a Broader Culture War