Proselytizers and Privateers

Before I get to the recap of our book study (which, as always, was a delight) I want to thank all my readers and subscribers for being here, especially this month. Two weeks ago, I started work in a new school district and a new grade level, where I knew no one. This week, I began working with 24 amazing students. On top of that, my husband just started a new job (same vocation, different location), my older son went back to college, and my youngest started middle school. I had to give myself a little time to absorb the change and lighten my cognitive load a bit. It takes a lot of mental energy to think about states of matter, long division, and how to teach personification and dialogue.

Now that I have my feet under me, I’ll get back to my regular rhythm: a Sunday night book study recap, and a history piece each week digging into whatever thread from that reading deserves more room than a group chat allows. Paid subscribers get to join us live for the Sunday night book study itself, plus a Historian’s Notebook piece — a closer look at primary sources, the research trail, and the stuff that doesn’t fit into the regular posts. If you’re a paid subscriber already, thank you, from the bottom of my heart. This newsletter takes real research hours, and your support is what makes it possible for me to keep doing this well, especially in a season like this one. And if you’ve been getting value out of this and have been thinking about upgrading, there’s no better time than now. We’re nearing the end of The Power Worshippers, which you can still join. I’d also love to have you in the room live when we pick our next book.

The Book Study

Another Sunday, another book study session that started on the book and wandered gloriously off the rails before finding its way back. If you were with us live, thank you. If not, here’s the recap.

This week we dug into the “Proselytizers and Privateers” chapter of Katherine Stewart’s The Power Worshippers, which is all about the alliance between religious nationalists and free-market fundamentalists in the fight over public education. One of the things I appreciated about this chapter is that Stewart doesn’t flatten these groups into one monolithic “anti-public-school” bloc, which is easy to do. Some people are motivated by faith, and others by money. This chapter is about where those two motivations tangle together, and sometimes it happens in the same family.

We spent a good chunk of time on the Betsy DeVos material, which apparently hit different for one of our members, who worked in nonprofit education advocacy back when DeVos was first appointed Secretary of Education. She remembered colleagues half-joking about inviting DeVos to a fundraising luncheon because “she’s rich, it could mean money for us,” a reminder that even people who see through someone’s politics can still feel the pull of proximity to wealth. It’s a small, honest detail that says a lot about how influence actually spreads.

From my copy of the book (page 193, paperback), there’s a 2003 report from the Christian Reformed Church in North America that I read aloud, because I think it captures the why behind a lot of this better than any summary could:

“Government schools have become aggressively and increasingly secular in the last 40 years... [public schools] engage in a deliberate program of de-Christianization that is at odds with Christian morality. Not only does there exist a climate of hostility toward the Christian faith, but the legitimate and laudable educational goal of multiculturalism is often used as a cover to introduce pagan and New Age spiritualities, such as the deification of Mother Earth, and to promote social causes such as environmentalism.”

I’ll be honest; I went to public school for thirteen years and the closest I got to “New Age spiritualism” was planting a tree for Earth Day. I’ve always thought of public school as the one place that’s supposed to be open to everybody, regardless of religion. Reading that quote reframed the whole voucher and charter conversation for me: for a real segment of the people pushing school choice, “failing schools” isn’t really the complaint. Secularism is.

One of our book study members has watched this from the inside as a former Bible college student and church board member. He made the point that this isn’t really a single-issue fight; it’s a coordinated, multi-pronged one. State legislatures, federal policy, curriculum, courts. And because the same networks show up in all of those places, nobody’s incentivized to investigate anybody else. He brought up the Cornerstone Schools Association as an example: schools that started explicitly religious, converted to charter status, and kept doing more or less the same thing. And the people who’d be responsible for oversight are drawn from the same donors and political networks that fund the schools in the first place.

That tracks with something I’ve seen locally. Every dollar that goes to a public school here comes with real strings attached. Public schools in Indiana face state board of accounts audits, state testing requirements, obligations to serve certain student populations. Charter schools don’t answer to that same standard, and it shows: Indiana just had two men indicted for allegedly siphoning $68 million from a charter network around Indianapolis. Sixty-eight million dollars. It takes years for something like that to even surface, because the accountability infrastructure simply isn’t built the same way.

I also mentioned a private Christian school about two miles from my house. It’s not a charter school, but it receives voucher dollars, and over the last eight to ten years that money has visibly transformed the place. At least, that’s how it seems to me. The school boasts a new amphitheater, an early learning center, and now a full sports complex under construction. Meanwhile the local public schools are fundraising for classroom supplies. That’s not a metaphor. That’s the actual state of things.

We also discussed that vouchers didn’t start as a school-choice innovation. They started in the 1950s and ‘60s as a way to funnel public money to white families so schools could stay segregated after Brown v. Board. One woman from Texas believed it’s really the whole reason the private school wave exists in the first place. It’s not the only reason charter and voucher programs exist today, but it’s the root, and roots matter.

We did pause to acknowledge nuance here, because the group is good about that. Some people in our group attended or sent their kids to Catholic and Jesuit schools, and neither of them experienced those as religious indoctrination so much as genuinely strong academics. One member noted that money, not religion, is often the bigger predictor of educational outcomes. Well-funded schools, whether public, charter, or private, tend to produce better results, and the parents with the most money and time available tend to cluster wherever the resources are. The problem isn’t that some private and religious schools are good. It’s that public dollars are being redirected away from public accountability toward institutions that don’t have to answer to the public at all.

We also touched briefly on homeschooling, which came up as another branch of the same tree. One member made a good-faith case that homeschooling isn’t monolithic either; she homeschooled her own kids for a sabbatical year and called it one of the most positive experiences of her life. But there was real agreement in the group that homeschooling quality varies enormously, and that some families use it less as an educational philosophy and more as an exit from any form of accountability.

Where I wanted to push the conversation a little was here: it can feel dangerous to shorthand “Christian nationalism” as “just like 1930s Germany.” That comparison escalates fast and can shut a conversation down rather than open it up. So instead I asked the group: what does democratic erosion actually look like, in real time, in front of us?

I’d pulled up some numbers from V-Dem (the Varieties of Democracy research group) right before we talked. The U.S. dropped in their rankings this year — from roughly 20th most democratic out of 179 countries to 51st. That’s not abstract. And the strategies behind that kind of decline tend to rhyme across countries and eras: contesting election rules, working to install friendly judges, questioning election integrity, and, yes, going after school curriculum. None of these tactics are new. What’s new is watching them converge in real time, in your own county.

One of the best moments of the night wasn’t really about the book at all. One member shared something that’s stuck with her since a conversation with her brother years ago: “We don’t need to be tolerant. We need to be inclusive.” Tolerance, she said, is I still don’t love what you do, but I’ll let you come to dinner. Inclusion is hey, want to come over for dinner? It’s a small distinction with a lot of weight behind it, and it gave us language for something we’d been circling around all night: the difference between grudging accommodation and actually building a shared table.

Another member connected that same thread to a story about a “God’s Not Dead”-style registry: a woman in Washington charged with child abuse after unknowingly ingesting THC, whose name stayed on a state abuse registry for ten years even after the charge was found to be a mistake, ending her plans to become a nurse. He tied it to a pattern he sees in a lot of unforgiving, purity-driven systems, religious and secular alike: once you’re marked, you stay marked. There’s no path back in.

We also talked about why people assume anyone flying an American flag is a Republican. My take, which I’ve made a video about before: patriotism doesn’t belong to one party, and the moment a party starts acting like it does, that’s nationalism, not patriotism. Our local Democratic party has actually leaned into this by handing out flags at events, encouraging people to fly them on Flag Day and Memorial Day, partly because ceding the symbol felt like ceding something bigger.

We’re moving into “Theocracy from the Bench,” followed by the chapter on religious liberty and bodily autonomy, and then “The Ongoing Holy War.” Each one probably deserves its own full session, because if this week proved anything, it’s that we’re incapable of staying on topic for more than 45 minutes at a time, and honestly, I think that’s part of what makes this group work. The tangents are where the trust shows up.

Join us next time! We’re meeting tonight at 7 p.m. Usually my recap comes sooner, but remember to give me grace. I just started back to school. Link to join and the questions are below.