Exodus or Transformation

But none of that was made clear in the April episode of Stand in the Gap Today, which, despite its obscurity outside Christian circles, has a huge evangelical audience: broadcast live each weekday on over 400 radio stations; streamed on major podcasting platforms like iTunes; and boasting a TV edition with a wide reach.^[5] The show’s host, former Pennsylvania state Rep. Sam Rohrer, is president of both the American Pastors Network (APN) and the Pennsylvania Pastors Network,^[6] both closely connected to the Christian nationalist organization Let Freedom Ring,^[7] which aims “To strengthen the Biblical relationship between pastors and elected officials, through various private and public meetings for prayer, study, and policy discussion.”^[8] Stand in the Gap serves as APN’s main media project, with a mission to evaluate current events “from a biblical and Constitutional perspective.” In practice, these days, that means an unswervingly pro-Trump, conspiracy theorist,^[9] anti-vaccination, and Christian nationalist perspective. And, most lately, a far-right vision of Christian education too. 

In their April homeschooling episode, Rohrer, along with his co-host Dr. Gary Dull, a board member of the APN, and guest Jeff Keaton, founder and president of the Christian education resource and curriculum publisher “Renewanation,” argued for an exodus from public schools on a variety of grounds. Rohrer charged that public education, from elementary school to college, has been “hijacked with a rewriting of history, a redefining of truth and now a generation with less than two percent holding to a biblical worldview”^[10]; that the U.S. government has not just usurped God’s rightful place, but has used public schools to indoctrinate generations of impressionable schoolchildren into believing that government, not God, will save them^[11] ;that Christian children who attend public school will suffer an intellectual and spiritual bifurcation as parents and pastors lose the “battle for their minds”^[12]; and that homeschooling and Christian education are essential planks in the broader Christian mission to “take dominion” of the land.^[13]

To those familiar with the Christian homeschooling movement over the last several decades, these claims would likely be recognizable as the bedrock arguments of Rushdoony’s Christian Reconstructionism and Dominionism—the theocratic idea that God has called conservative Christians to exercise dominion over society by taking control of political and cultural institutions.^[14] But that deep influence went unnamed by the broadcast’s hosts or their guest. And as the COVID-19 pandemic has swelled the ranks of U.S. homeschooling families to an unprecedented degree, that pattern has played out repeatedly, with homeschooling increasingly promoted on large new platforms, to large new audiences, without any reference to the ideology at its core.

A New Opportunity

Before the COVID-19 global pandemic, homeschooling in America was already on the rise. While accurate numbers are difficult to come by, as of 2019, the federal government estimated that about 2.5 million U.S. children, representing about 3.3 percent of the student population, were being homeschooled.^[15] By March 2021, analysis from the National Home Education Research Institute estimated that 4.5 to 5 million children were being homeschooled, which represents roughly 8-9 percent of all U.S. schoolchildren.^[16] A U.S. Census Bureau survey found an even higher rate of increase, from roughly 5.4 percent of American households homeschooling in the spring of 2020 to 11.1 percent by the fall of 2020.^[17]

Parents turn to homeschooling for different reasons. Many have to do with perceptions, either real or imagined, of a negative school environment: 34 percent cited safety, drug use, or negative peer pressure. Others may be dissatisfied with their children’s academic performance. As of 2016, around 16 percent of parents expressly said their motivation was to provide their children with specific religious instruction, but a far larger proportion of homeschooling families—about two-thirds as of 2009—identify as Christian.^[18]

Over the last year-and-a-half, though, with the advent of COVID-19, the ranks of homeschoolers grew dramatically, as schools closed around the world and huge numbers of parents became desperate to keep their kids on track. By September 2020, a USA Today/Ipsos poll found that roughly 60 percent of American parents were contemplating some form of homeschooling. According to Susan Page of USA Today, “A separate poll of parents with at least one child in grades K-12 finds that 6 in 10 say they would be likely to pursue at-home learning options instead of sending back their children this fall. Nearly a third of parents, 30%, say they are ‘very likely’ to do that.”^[19] Furthermore, The Atlantic reported that, “Homeschooling organizations and consultants have faced a deluge of panicked parents frantic to find alternatives to regular school.”^[20]

For homeschooling advocates who’ve long sought to evangelize their methods, the pandemic was a golden opportunity. When harried parents went looking for teaching materials, they were glad to discover there were ready-made curricula available for purchase on homeschooling websites. But as reporter Elena Trueba of Religion & Politics points out, much of it had been created by conservative, and often fundamentalist Christian organizations, and the curricula constituted “their own form of indoctrination.”^[21]

As a result, unsuspecting parents could end up purchasing, and delivering, material to their children promoting very specific worldviews: conservative Christian, fundamentalist, Quiverfull, Christian Reconstructionist, and Dominionist. As journalist Katherine Stewart pointed out in 2013, parents looking for homeschooling curriculum options can easily “get sucked into the vortex of fundamentalist home schooling because extremists have cornered the market—running the conventions, publishing the curricula, setting up the blogs.”^[22]

In March 2020, the HSLDA launched a “Quick Start” guide to homeschooling,^[23] recommending that parents new to homeschooling should choose a curriculum and explore their child’s unique learning style, but also network with other nearby homeschoolers and research their state’s laws regarding homeschooling—both avenues that are likely to expose them to a conservative-dominated community.^[24] They also encouraged prospective homeschooling parents to become HSLDA members, which in addition to providing legal and academic support, brings with it a specifically fundamentalist Christian point of view, marked by hostility to non-conservative perspectives and state oversight or regulation. In other words, as Trueba points out, many existing Christian homeschooling materials come with a very specific agenda, of which unsuspecting parents may be unaware.^[25]

The Dominion Mandate

Almost all of that agenda can be traced back to R.J. Rushdoony, a leading proponent of both Christian day schools in the 1960s and the organized Christian homeschooling movement in the late 1970s and ‘80s. As religion scholar Julie Ingersoll, author of Building God’s Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction, notes, Rushdoony was among the first Christian Right leaders to mount a sustained attack on so-called “government schools,” laying “a philosophical and theological basis for dismantling public education in favor of Christian education” decades before the appearance of shows like Stand in the Gap Today.^[26]

One of the cornerstones of Rushdoony’s ideology was the conviction that education is above all a religious activity, whether it’s undertaken by Christian institutions and families or a secular government. Following this, he believed that all secular education is necessarily a secular humanistic education, inculcating in students a belief system he called “statism”: a system of governance whereby the state comes to be viewed as God, and thus ultimately supplants the God-ordained spheres of church and family.

In his 1961 book Intellectual Schizophrenia, Rushdoony argued that Christian children attending government schools suffer from a state of mental bifurcation, or “intellectual schizophrenia,” when their secular humanist teachers teach them the exact opposite of what they learn at home and in church, thus undermining those cultural agencies. He therefore argued that “Education in this sense is anti-human and schizophrenic.”^[27] In his 1963 book, The Messianic Character of American Education, Rushdoony maintained that “the public school is the established church of today and a substitute institution for the medieval church and dedicated to the same monolithic conception of society.”^[28]

Thus in his 900-page 1973 book The Institutes of Biblical Law, which laid out the principles of Reconstructionism, Rushdoony argued, “There can be no neutrality in education. Education by the state will have statist ends.”^[29] Abandoning a family-oriented education in favor of a statist one, he warned, would lead to the destruction of masculinity and teach children to be reliant on the state. By contrast, Rushdoony maintained that, according to Deuteronomy 6:6-7, God charged parents with the sole responsibility both for the discipline and education of their children. Since the family is the first and basic school of man, he argued, the truest and best educators of children are godly parents.^[30]

In the foreword of a 2002 rerelease of Intellectual Schizophrenia, the late Reconstructionist author Samuel Blumenfeld credited Rushdoony’s “incisive indictment of secular humanist education” with convincing “Christian parents of the urgent need for Christian education.”^[31] Blumenfeld, who also worked at Rushdoony’s think tank the Chalcedon Foundation, continued that this was the main reason for founding the first Christian day schools, closely followed by the homeschooling movement.

As a postmillennialist—believing Christians must establish Christ’s millennial kingdom on earth prior to his return—Rushdoony also saw homeschooling and Christian education more broadly as the first steps towards Christians achieving dominion at some point in the future. Rushdoony’s program of Christian Reconstructionism was founded on the notion that God mandated Christians in Genesis 1:26-28 to take dominion over the earth. The entire Christian education project he helped to found involved a slow but inevitable march to this end, given his postmillennial belief that Christianity would experience a progressive advance and ultimately, increasing influence and eventual victory. Given enough generations of godly children, raised in a Christian educational context, and furnished with a “biblical worldview,” he predicted that Christians would inevitably achieve victory in establishing a “theonomic” society—governed according to “divine law”—in place of a pluralistic democracy. While not calling for a theocracy technically, Rushdoony’s vision was that one day, biblical law would one day be the standard for all of humanity.^[32]

As Blumenfeld writes, “Christian Reconstruction preached an uncompromising belief in ultimate victory. The growth of the Christian homeschool movement was a clear indication that victory was not only possible but inevitable if Christian parents took up their responsibilities as educators of their own children, for it was the control of children that determined the shape of the future.”^[33]

Although Rushdoony died in 2001, others had already taken up his mission. In 1997, minister and former military chaplain E. Ray Moore founded Exodus Mandate as a Christian education and homeschooling resource organization. According to the organization’s vision, “the time has come for a coordinated commitment by the national Christian leadership, pastors, and the larger Christian community to support the effort to withdraw Christian children from the government school systems and place them in existing Christian schools and/or Christian home schools.”^[34] According to Rushdoony scholar Michael McVicar, author of Christian Reconstruction: R.J. Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism, groups like Exodus Mandate popularized Rushdoony’s broader ideology by “bringing Reconstructionist themes to America’s homeschooling culture.”^[35] 

That was true even when it wasn’t obvious. As Ingersoll writes, Rushdoony’s arguments about Dominionism have seeped into the everyday language of mainstream evangelicalism in “subtle, implicit, and hidden” ways. And yet, she continues, “the popular translation of Reconstructionist ideas to the broader conservative Protestant subculture is so consistent, often even including the obscure terminology and phrasing used by the Reconstructionists, and the evidence of ties between the Reconstructionists and the early leaders of the religious right are common enough, that the influence is undeniable.”^[36]

Generation Joshua

Reaching a post-Exodus “Promised Land,” however, brought with it a new set of problems. As Ryan Stollar of the now-archived Homeschoolers Anonymous blog points out, the early homeschooling pioneers—sometimes called the “Moses Generation”—“wanted to create an isolated bubble in which to raise kids untouched by the chaos and depravity of the American world.”^[37]

But living in a bubble is unsustainable if one takes seriously any aspect of the Dominion mandate. In other words, it’s not enough for Christians simply to vacate the government schools, since Christians isolated in homeschooling or Christian school bubbles have less chance to impact the world. So in 2005, HSLDA co-founder Michael Farris made the argument that homeschoolers would have to return to re-engage with the broader culture. That year, Farris published a book, The Joshua Generation: Restoring the Heritage of Christian Leadership, predicting that the relatively small numbers of homeschooled students in the U.S. “will grow into a large percentage of the highest leaders of the next generation who take seriously the Christian assignment of redeeming culture,” and will “turn America back to the spirit of the founding fathers .”^[38]

Homeschooling’s “Moses Generation,” argued Farris, should not rest on its laurels in celebrating its victories in the battle to establish homeschooling. The battle would not be finished, he maintained, until the next generation—the “Joshua Generation”—had taken back the land. “In short,” he writes, “the homeschooling movement will succeed when our children, the Joshua Generation, engage wholeheartedly in the battle to take the land.”^[39] To achieve that end, Farris founded a Christian youth organization he called “Generation Joshua,” with the express aim of training generations of homeschooled teens to get involved in the political process at a grassroots level,^[40] and founded Patrick Henry College to channel “the best and brightest” homeschool graduates into legal and political leadership positions. The college’s mission statement reflects both Christian nationalism and Rushdoony’s concept of Christians taking dominion: “to prepare Christian men and women who will lead our nation and shape our culture with timeless biblical values and fidelity to the spirit of the American founding.”^[41] 

The same spirit informs a different approach taken by some Christian education proponents. Back when the Southern Baptist Convention was debating the 2004 and ’05 resolutions for its members to leave “government schools” en masse, one member of the SBC Resolution Committee, Tony Beam—vice president for student life and Christian worldview at North Greenville University—maintained that “calling for an exodus from the public schools is not the answer. The solution is not retreat but a recommitment to retake public schools for Christ.”^[42] Or, as he wrote in an op-ed for the Christian publication Crosswalk at the time, “While I fully support and commend any believer who home schools or sends their children to a private Christian school, I also fully support and commend Christians who serve as salt and light in the public school system. We should always choose transformation over retreat.”^[43]

Such efforts to “transform” public schools, as journalist Katherine Stewart writes in The Good News Club: The Religious Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children, could take many forms: school-sponsored “Good News Clubs” or “See You at the Pole” events; efforts to change public school textbooks to reflect Christian nationalist and revisionist historical perspectives (a la David Barton); “Bible literacy” and “creation science” courses taught as part of public school curriculum; “peer-to-peer evangelism”; forced prayers by coaches or chaplains at school athletic competitions; and evangelicals running for seats on local school boards in an attempt to “Christianize” their local public school.

A similar tension—between exodus and transformation—was evident in Stand in the Gap Today’s March homeschooling episode, as the hosts and guest called for a public school exit and, implicitly, seemed to suggest that Christians should run for seats on their local school boards in an effort to “Christianize” those government schools. Jeff Keaton shared the story of how he’d moved to rural Virginia to pastor a new church, and asked his new church board to recommend the best local Christian school for his children. The answer he received, Keaton said, surprised him: “One of my board members was a County Board of Supervisors member, and he looked at me and said, ‘Why would you waste your money on a Christian school? … Jeff, our public schools here are Christian schools. They have Christian teachers and administrators.’”^[44]

It was a Generation Joshua update to the Dominionist mindset: that installing Christian teachers and administrators in a government school could transform it into a Christian school; that Christians could take dominion over education not only by bringing school into the home, but also by taking control of public school institutions that then allow them to shape policies, textbooks, staffing choices, and educational philosophy.^[45]

Recruiting through the Culture Wars

While one worrying aspect of the sudden rise of homeschooling is that unsuspecting parents seeking help amid the pandemic may end up teaching their children curricula that subtly introduces Christian nationalist concepts, the movement is also increasingly entwining itself with existing right-wing factions, from anti-vaccination activists to conservatives seeking to whitewash how public schools teach the racial history of the U.S.

Currently, it appears some parents may be turning to homeschooling, among other things, to avoid the possibility of mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations for staff or eligible students older than 12. As one New York parent told The Atlantic in 2020, she would rather homeschool her daughter than subject her to a vaccination that hasn’t been “rigorously tested.”^[46]

Anti-vaccination groups have long suggested that homeschooling can enable parents to avoid vaccinating their children. In 2019, after a measles outbreak led New York State lawmakers to eliminate all student vaccination exemptions on religious grounds, the anti-vax group New York Alliance for Vaccine Rights hosted a four-hour “Homeschooling 101” workshop in Long Island. Several hundred parents attended the conference, with a number telling reporters that homeschooling seemed the only viable option to avoid mandatory vaccinations.^[47] A similar dynamic unfolded in California in 2015, following a major measles outbreak at Disneyland that led the state to pass a strict vaccination law that eliminated most vaccine exemptions. Anti-vax parents without valid medical excuses were left with just one option: to homeschool their children.^[48] By 2019, The Los Angeles Times reported that parents were increasingly exploiting this loophole, and the number of unvaccinated, homeschooled kindergartners had quadrupled since the law went into effect.^[49]

Today, the California-based network “Mamalitia” (that is, “Mama Militia,” although the website attempts to clarify that they are not a militia) is capitalizing on the flood of misinformation and mistrust of government when it comes to the COVID-19 vaccine to promote a faith-based, pro-homeschooling, anti-vax, and survivalist agenda. An all-female prepper movement founded and led by pro-gun and anti-vax activist Denise Aguilar, the group started out protesting vaccine mandates in general, and now focuses more specifically on opposing COVID-19 vaccinations.^[50] The group, which has 30 chapters in California as of this writing^[51] and claims to have hundreds of members nationwide, describes its current mission as “pooling together to educate our children Little School house style given families still need to work and have various reasons for not keeping their kids in public schools.”^[52]

A second potential avenue for homeschooling recruitment plays on the anger of parents worried that “Critical Race Theory” (CRT)—however inaccurately defined—is being taught in public schools. While a number of Republican-controlled state legislatures have responded to this right-wing outrage du jour with bills promising to outlaw curricula that deals honestly with U.S. racial history,^[53] parents in other states have stormed their local school board meetings to demand that CRT not be taught.^[54] Some parents loudly declared that they’d turned to homeschooling to avoid Critical Race Theory, such as Gloria Vindas, who argued against CRT, mask- and vaccine mandates at a Utah school board meeting this May on behalf of the advocacy group Utah Parents United.^[55]

Homeschool graduate Sarah Weaver, writing at the National Review, similarly suggested that homeschooling gives parents a means of avoiding CRT, through absolute control over what their children learn. Her own parents, she noted, had taught her “history, and not collective guilt…I tried to imagine the tenets of CRT being taught in my own home classroom. It’s almost unthinkable.”^[56]

And in a June op-ed at Fox News, David McIntosh—president of the Club for Growth, a conservative free-enterprise advocacy group—declared that parents who are “sick of the indoctrination occurring in our public schools but don’t have the resources to send their children elsewhere” should be allowed to redirect their tax dollars away from public schools and into private schools or homeschooling environments. In what may or may not have been a conscious echo of homeschooling advocates before him, McIntosh threatened, “Schools that continue pushing critical race theory even though most families reject it can expect to see a mass exodus of children.”^[57]

The calls for Christian parents to either pull their children out of public schools, or to “transform” those schools, are two sides of a decades-long assault on public schools by the Christian Right. The legal and movement successes of the “Moses Generation” have helped create a world where homeschooling is both a lure—for parents to avoid lesson plans or health requirements they oppose—and a cudgel—through threats to redirect funds from public schools. But the Dominionist ideology at the heart of so much Christian educational philosophy led to a “Joshua Generation” that sees its mission as transforming America and the world. Whether these two tracks exist in tension with each other, or are running parallel to the same ends, remains to be seen. 

Either way, Ingersoll’s assessment seems correct: that “little slivers of Rushdoony’s work seem to be everywhere.”^[58]