"Give me my child back": Evangelical attitudes toward public education in twentieth century America

Abstract

The twentieth century saw the splintering of evangelical confidence in the project of public education. During the 1920s and 1930s, fundamentalists fought to keep evolution out of the classroom but largely accepted that public schools must be secular. The 1940s and 1950s saw a renaissance in evangelical scholarship that included an emerging critique of secular education influenced by Dutch Calvinist scholars who were increasingly leaving their ethnic enclaves and played a growing role in conservative seminaries. Evangelical theologians increasingly worried that secular education communicated to students that religion was unimportant, even when paired with religious devotionals reintroduced during the Cold War. After the Supreme Court struck down school prayer and Bible in Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington v. Schempp (1963), several prominent evangelical thinkers argued in Christianity Today that the public schools needed not devotional prayer but the inclusion of religious perspectives in the curriculum. Yet as the late 1960s and 1970s brought new sex education curriculum, increased teaching of evolution, and other changes in the public schools, a growing number of evangelicals worried that public education had taken a wrong turn. When evangelical philosopher Francis Schaeffer argued that all education was based in underlying presuppositions and that education by definition could not be neutral, he found a ready audience. During the 1980s, a collection of evangelical and fundamentalist writers influenced by Schaeffer’s ideas warned that the public schools had fallen under the influence of “secular humanism.” Nineteenth century evangelicals had supported the project of public education in part because the public schools served as a method for assimilating the children of immigrants into American society. Now, these evangelicals worried that their children were the ones being assimilated—into an America they no longer recognized. By the end of the century, leaders of the emerging Christian Right began to call for dismantling public education entirely. This is the story of how some evangelicals lost confidence in public education, gave up their longstanding opposition to public funding for private education, and became among of the nation’s staunchest supporters of school choice.