Common in the North, integrated public schools long remained absent in the old Confederate South, where white Christian parents cited God’s will in denying Black children the right to sit in the same classrooms as white children. Following the fall of southern apartheid during the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, enraged white Christians resisted federally mandated public school integration, often flying Confederate flags and resorting to violence. Failing in their new war against the federal government, many white southern parents — often citing religious and parental “freedom” — withdrew their children from public education and placed them in privately funded, whites-only Christian segregation academies typically housed in church buildings.
A second federal mandate – the early 1960s removal of government-sponsored prayer from public schools – also angered many white Christians. Collectively, racial integration and the absence of official school prayers in public school classrooms created lasting resentment and birthed political opportunities. In 1980 Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, seeking votes from an emerging white Christian Nationalist Religious Right, dog-whistled racism and made open verbal overtures to restoring government-sponsored public school prayer.
Although Reagan did set about undermining civil rights advances while in office, he failed to pursue the restoration of public school prayers. Sensing an opening nonetheless, Christian Nationalists began systematically building grassroots infrastructure to restore white Christian dominance in America. When inclusive-minded Democrat Bill Clinton won the White House in 1992, a new generation of anti-public education activists were ready. “The liberals just now beginning to feel snug again in Washington should beware,” conservative writers Bill Kristol and Jay Lefkowitz warned shortly after Clinton took office. “A new revolt by parents is brewing in the country against the cultural elite and the liberal bureaucratic state.” Demanding “parental rights,” the “parents revolt” represented a renewed movement for “parental choice and control over their children’s education.”
Although restoring segregation was not possible, the renewed parental rights movement channeled racial anxiety and anger into protesting emerging “gay rights” curriculum. A Louisiana court ruling that “teaching sexual abstinence in a public high school violates the U.S. Constitution’s separation of church and state” also riled many white conservatives, who criticized public education for “usurping the role of parents.” Kristol and Lefkowitz deemed the movement an expanding “populist rebellion” against a liberal federal government.