One of the first usages of the phrase government schools occurs in the work of an avid admirer of Dabneys, the Presbyterian theologian A. A. Hodge. Less concerned with black paupers than with immigrant papist hordes, Hodge decided that the problem lay with public schools secular culture. In 1887, he published an influential essay painting government schools as the most appalling enginery for the propagation of anti-Christian and atheistic unbelief, and of antisocial nihilistic ethics, individual, social and political, which this sin-rent world has ever seen.

But it would be a mistake to see this strand of critique of government schools as a curiosity of Americas sectarian religious history. In fact, it was present at the creation of the modern conservative movement, when opponents of the New Deal welded free-market economics onto Bible-based hostility to the secular-democratic state. The key figure was an enterprising Congregationalist minister, James W. Fifield Jr., who resolved during the Depression to show that Christianity itself proved big government was the enemy of progress.

Drawing heavily on donations from oil, chemical and automotive tycoons, Fifield was a founder of a conservative free-market organization, Spiritual Mobilization, that brought together right-wing economists and conservative religious voices created a template for conservative think tanks. Fifield published the work of midcentury libertarian thinkers Ludwig von Mises and his disciple Murray Rothbard and set about convincing Americas Protestant clergy that America was a Christian nation in which government must be kept from interfering with the expression of Gods will in market economics.

Someone who found great inspiration in Fifields work, and who contributed to his flagship publication, Faith and Freedom, was the Calvinist theologian Rousas J. Rushdoony. An admirer, too, of both Hodge and Dabney, Rushdoony began to advocate a return to biblical law in America, or theonomy, in which power would rest only on a spiritual aristocracy with a direct line to God and a clear understanding of Gods libertarian economic vision.

Rushdoony took the attack on modern democratic government right to the schoolhouse door. His 1963 book, The Messianic Character of American Education, argued that the government school represented primitivism and chaos. Public education, he said, basically trains women to be men and has leveled its guns at God and family.

These were not merely abstract academic debates. The critique of government schools passed through a defining moment in the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, when orders to desegregate schools in the South encountered heavy resistance from white Americans. Some districts shut down public schools altogether; others promoted private segregation academies for whites, often with religious programming, to be subsidized with tuition grants and voucher schemes. Dabney would surely have approved.

Many of Friedmans successors in the libertarian tradition have forgotten or distanced themselves from the midcentury moment when they formed common cause with the Christian right. As for Friedman himself, the great theoretician of vouchers, he took pains to insist that he abhorred racism and opposed race-based segregation laws though he also opposed federal laws that prohibited discrimination.

Among the supporters of the Trump administration, the rhetoric of government schools has less to do with economic libertarianism than with religious fundamentalism. It is about the empowerment of a rearmed Christian right by the election of a man whom the Rev. Jerry Falwell Jr. calls evangelicals dream president. We owe the new currency of the phrase to the likes of Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council also bankrolled in its early years by the DeVos family who, in response to the Supreme Courts ruling allowing same-sex marriage, accused government schools of indoctrinating students in immoral sexuality. Or the president of the group Liberty Counsel, Anita Staver, who couldnt even bring herself to call them schools, preferring instead to bemoan government indoctrination camps that threaten our nations very survival.

When these people talk about government schools, they want you to think of an alien force, and not an expression of democratic purpose. And when they say freedom, they mean freedom from democracy itself.

Katherine Stewart is the author of The Good News Club: The Christian Rights Stealth Assault on Americas Children.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 31, 2017, on Page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: What Government School Means.

Link:

What the 'Government Schools' Critics Really Mean - New York Times