DeVos has spent the past three decades leading a campaign against public schools and personally subsidizing political candidates who favor private alternatives. Trump’s decision to appoint her as secretary of education was a reward to right-wing Christian groups that share her extremist views. In The Power Worshippers, Katherine Stewart documents these groups’ long-standing crusade against public schools. They are “the New Right,” the Moral Majority, Christian nationalists, and the Christian Coalition: angry crusaders against secularism, liberalism, abortion, feminism, gay rights, and public schools. They include groups like Capitol Ministries, Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America, the American Family Association, the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Council for National Policy, and the World Congress of Families. At least eleven members of the Trump cabinet met weekly for Bible study with Ralph Drollinger, the leader of Capitol Ministries, who argues that God favors private property owners and that social welfare programs “have no basis in Scripture.” The needs of the poor, he writes, should be addressed not by government but by “the husband in a marriage…the family (if the husband is absent) and…the church.”
Initially, the animating issue behind this amalgam of radically conservative groups was not abortion, Stewart’s reporting shows, but protection of the tax-exempt status of segregated schools and universities after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. Many of the “segregation academies” for whites that sprang up in response to Brown were affiliated with conservative religious groups that believed that racial segregation was ordained by God. But their leaders knew that they could not build a national movement around the issue of protecting the tax advantages of racist schools. Not until 1979, six years after Roev. Wade, did the religious right settle on abortion as its unifying cause.
Stewart traces the roots of the hatred of public schools to Robert Lewis Dabney, a Presbyterian pastor. Born in Virginia in 1820, Dabney was a defender of slavery and critic of the theory of evolution. He complained about “having to pay taxes to support a ‘pretended education to the brats of black paupers.’” After the Civil War—during which he served as a Confederate army chaplain—Dabney tried to undermine Reconstruction by attacking “the Yankee theory of popular state education.” He proclaimed that public education was “pagan” and “connected by regular, logical sequence with legalized prostitution and the dissolution of the conjugal tie.”