Trump Is Not Taking the State Out of Public Schools, He Is Putting Christianity In
MAGA doesn’t need the Department of Education to advance its religious makeover of K-12
Given the sweeping—and illegal—exercises of executive power emanating from the Trump White House, the future of K-12 education has understandably taken a back seat. Indeed, compared to the sideshow of Trump’s Cabinet picks—including his elevation of a vaccine skeptic as health secretary and a Crusades enthusiast as defense secretary—his education secretary, Linda McMahon, is relatively unremarkable: McMahon has, after all, run a federal agency before—the U.S. Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term—though she has no experience in education save for a one-year stint on the Connecticut Board of Education in 2009.
News of Trump’s plans to gut the Department of Education has certainly made waves. But given that the federal government has a limited role in K-12 education and limited control over education spending, too few are focused on considering what public education under Trump’s second term might look like. If Uncle Sam is out of the K-12 business, at least President Trump won’t be using his power to interfere with local schools, right?
If only! Trump, working with a GOP-controlled Congress, can inflict damage not just to American education but through it. The track record of MAGA-run states, the policy designs of Project 2025, and Trump’s own statements reveal a clear interest in using schools to sunder the separation of church and state.
Finding Religion
Across eight decades, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed and reaffirmed the unconstitutionality of religious indoctrination in public schools. In McCollum v. Board of Education (1948), it ruled that religious instruction in public education buildings during the school day violated the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. In Engel v. Vitale (1962), the court concluded that public prayer in schools did the same. Later rulings—in Lee v. Weisman (1992) and Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe (2000)—extended the ban on public prayer beyond the school day to graduations and athletics, respectively.
Following Trump’s first-term conservative makeover of the Supreme Court, however, the nation’s highest court has signaled an interest in revisiting these issues. This has emboldened MAGA leaders in various states to start breaching the wall of separation between church and state, particularly at the K-12 level.
In the past few years alone:
Florida, notoriously, passed the Don’t Say Gay law in 2022 barring the discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in primary school.
Texas passed a law allowing public schools to hire chaplains in lieu of school counselors and mental health professionals; similar proposals followed in other states, with bills passing in Florida and Louisiana.
Oklahoma’s top education official has ordered that the Bible be taught in grades 5-12, a mandate that includes the state spending $3 million on Bibles whose specifications match Trump’s preferred “God Bless the U.S.A.” version or Donald Trump Jr.’s preferred “We The People” version. Oklahoma State Sen. Dusty Deevers praised the move and added: “It seems difficult, if not impossible, to adequately teach on matters such as U.S. or world history without a significant emphasis on the Bible.”
Louisiana passed legislation last year requiring that public schools put up a poster-sized display of the Ten Commandments in every classroom. In Stone v. Graham (1980), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled a Kentucky statute requiring each classroom to display the Ten Commandments unconstitutional. While that did not seem to deter Louisiana’s new Republican governor from passing last year’s law—since then, a federal judge has blocked it, deeming it “unconstitutional on its face.”
Nine states, including South Carolina, Idaho, and Montana, have approved the use of “curricula” produced by Prager U, an explicitly right-wing advocacy organization that enlists figures like Candace Owens, Charlie Kirk, and Heather Mac Donald to feature in its content. Some video themes include: warning about the consequences of society dismissing Judeo-Christian values and being skeptical of the idea that Islam is peaceful.
Texas approved the use of a “Bible-infused” curriculum for elementary schools that privileges Christianity. Though Texas made the curriculum “optional,” schools that adopt it will receive additional funding.
Ohio passed a law requiring release time for off-site religious instruction during the school day, which is not only logistically tantamount to approving a field trip on an unusually regular basis, but inserts religious instruction into a student’s school schedule.
West Virginia is allowing Intelligent Design to be taught in science classes in public schools.
To be sure, these state efforts have met resistance—from students, educators, parents, and some Christian clergy, such as Rev. Jeff Sims, who describes Louisiana’s law requiring every classroom to display the Ten Commandments as “gross intrusion of civil authority into matters of faith.” But these state initiatives are coming at a time when the current president, and the current Supreme Court, which he has shaped more than any other president—and may have the chance of shaping further—appear interested in challenging long-held principles about keeping religion out of public schooling.
Putting the Ball in the Justices’ Court
To those ends, these cases don’t merely challenge the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause directly. They also initiate a public struggle over their implementation that is intended to give the Supreme Court an opportunity to review and ultimately allow religion—specifically, Christianity—a greater place within public education. Indeed, the broader wave of state action appears intended to invite litigation, in hopes that fights elevated to this Supreme Court will result in the overturning of precedents prohibiting religious instruction and observance in public schools.
Indeed, the court has already delivered. In 2022’s Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, it decided in a 6-3 ruling that a public school football coach can pray publicly at a game’s end. Justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote the majority opinion, stretched, to put it mildly, in representing Kennedy’s prayers as private and quiet. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted in her dissenting opinion (which was joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan): “Kennedy had a longstanding practice of conducting demonstrative prayers on the 50-yard line of the football field. Kennedy consistently invited others to join his prayers and for years led student athletes in prayer at the same time and location.” A rival coach had even revealed that Kennedy “asked him and his team to join [him] in prayer.”
K-12: A Vehicle for MAGA Culture Wars
Despite seeking to dismantle the Department of Education, Trump wants to leverage education funding against schools that offend MAGA: if they require vaccines, for example, or are “pushing Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children,” they’ll get cut off. His language on this score should be familiar—it’s the boilerplate used by MAGA figures who use claims of liberal indoctrination in public schools as a pretext for injecting their own agenda.
The GOP-led House passed a bill last year modeled on parents’ rights bills that MAGA has pushed in states. There is nothing wrong with empowering parents, but this is a genre of the laws that has restricted curriculum and banned books in numerous red states. The federal bill stalled in the previous Congress and it’s part of the Project 2025 agenda to prioritize its passage now.
But that’s not all. Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership” document goes to extreme lengths to characterize any discussion of transgender identity as pornography that needs to be censored and its purveyors, including educators and librarians, criminally punished. Here is what it says:
Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.
This kind of extreme and vicious rhetoric and threats are calculated to browbeat educators into self-censoring and complying with MAGA’s particular religious vision.
MAGA Micromanagement
Indeed, in addition to undercutting the separation of church and state, these laws and initiatives pushed by MAGA-aligned figures—whether politicians, organizations, or individual parents—end up superimposing religious regulations onto local schools and districts. As educator Peter Greene explains:
The state management of religion has already led to micromanagement of religious observances. When Louisiana passed a law placing the Ten Commandments in each classroom, the state also mandated which version of the three in the Old Testament would be allowed (and edited that one as well). When Oklahoma declared that every classroom would have a Bible in it, the state decided which version of the Bible would be acceptable.
Since 2021, 23 states have passed what PEN America calls “education gag orders” on what MAGA has variously referred to as “divisive concepts,” “anti-woke,” “CRT,” or “parents’ rights” laws. These state laws restrict and dictate curriculum—especially in history, English, science, and health classes—often along ideological lines, wresting control from local districts.
These laws are often highly punitive and intentionally vague in order to spur overcompliance. Each school district eyes the other to avoid standing out. The result: similar lists of books banned across districts. In Tennessee, after Wilson County Schools pulled 400 books from shelves for review, other districts in the state used their list “as a template.” Some of the legislation facilitates the removal of books based on the complaint of a single person.
Under the guise of local control, MAGA is using the levers of the state to censor schools and remake education to promote a religious, Christian vision of society in direct violation of the First Amendment.
One last thing…
The UnPopulist will be having its first Happy Hour on Saturday, Feb. 22, at 6:30 p.m. at The Henri in Washigton D.C., aka, The Swamp. We hope to see you there. But RSVP on Facebook!
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Should I, a kippah-wearing progressive, be concerned about state-supported policies—implied or legislated—essentially forcing conversion to Christianity to participate in public schools in the U.S.?
He’s gone. Don is gone. Long gone. Neuralink leash animates him as necessary.