An analysis of PDK poll data shows that evangelicals and non-evangelicals are not so far apart in their opinions about religion in their local schools — except when race and ideology get involved.
For the last 60 years, evangelical Christians have had a turbulent relationship with public education. Beginning in the late 20th century, they began seeing their influence on public schools diminish on multiple fronts. For example, after fighting long and hard to keep prayer and Bible readings in American classrooms, they saw the U.S. Supreme Court ban such practices in the early 1960s. This decision remained potent for decades, so much so that when Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1984, he “played to the sensibilities of Evangelical voters when he condemned ‘God’s expulsion’ from public schools” (Laats, 2012). In the late 1960s, much to evangelicals’ chagrin, the U.S. Supreme Court also struck down prohibitions on teaching evolution in science class. And by the 1970s, school districts across the country had adopted comprehensive sex education curricula that promoted condom use as an alternative to abstinence.
More recently, the inclusion of LGBTQ+ content in the standard curriculum has become a growing source of discontent in evangelical circles. In 2002, influential evangelical family psychologist James Dobson called on Christian parents to pull their children out of public schools in districts that embraced homosexual themes in instruction. “This godless and immoral curriculum and influence in the public schools is gaining momentum across the nation in ways that were unheard of just one year ago,” Dobson said in a radio interview. “It is aimed at the very core of the Judeo-Christian system of values, the very core of scriptural values. I’m telling you that is not an overstatement” (Olson, 2002).
Evangelicals’ desire for school choice
Conventional wisdom suggests that evangelical parents are frustrated with the secular uniformity of today’s public schools and wish to escape religious biases and the pressure to conform to beliefs with which they disagree. Having lost the legal battles to preserve their moral values in public education, the idea is that evangelicals may be pivoting their strategy to endorsing private school choice instead. With private school choice, public tax dollars earmarked for K-12 education follow the student, allowing families to enroll children in private schools at no or low cost. And in a decision celebrated by evangelical and Catholic groups nationwide, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (June 2020) that the state of Montana could not exclude religious schools from its program that uses tax credits to help families pay tuition for private schools. Evangelicals (who supported Donald Trump’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns by a wide margin; Lipka & Smith, 2020) saw an additional triumph in Trump’s appointment of staunch school choice advocate and devout evangelical Betsy DeVos to be U.S. Secretary of Education. In her four years in office, DeVos led an unapologetic, highly controversial effort to expand private school choice nationwide, an effort that critics say embodies “the story of those evangelicals who lost confidence in the project of public education” (Coleman, 2018).
Conservative evangelical leaders like Dobson and DeVos have expressed a desire to make private school more accessible to families disenchanted with the limitations of public schools. However, that raises an important question: Are evangelical Christians significantly more frustrated with public schooling than other Americans? To explore this question, I ran statistical regressions using survey data from the 2019 PDK poll that directly addressed issues concerning religion in public schools. Surprisingly, my results showed that evangelicals’ support for the public schools is remarkably consistent with that of non-evangelicals. Evangelicals gave more negative ratings of the public schools in only one area: the teaching of comparative religion. At the same time, the more politically conservative the respondents said they were, the higher their level of frustration with public schools. In short, disenchantment with public education appears to have much more to do with political ideology than religion.
An empirical approach to capturing evangelicals’ opinions
In April 2019, PDK recruited a stratified random sample of 2,389 adults, 1,191 of whom were parents of K-12 students, to participate in the organization’s annual national survey of the public’s attitudes toward the public schools. Of these parents, 805 answered a survey question about their faith. These 805 respondents — including 310 (38.5%) who identified themselves as “born again or Evangelical Christians” — became the subsample for my own study of the relationship between religious faith and level of frustration with the public schools.
The survey questions recorded participants’ level of concern about a series of topics, using a four-point Likert scale that ranged from “Very Concerned” or “Major Problem” to “Not Concerned at All” or “Not a Problem.” I collapsed the four outcome choices into a binary variable of either being frustrated or not frustrated. To measure evangelical Christian parents’ faith-based frustration with public schools, I looked at the connection between respondents’ religious self-identification and their responses to questions about pressure to “fit in” or conform; religious bias; bias against gay, lesbian, and/or transgender students, and the perceived risks of improper civics, Bible, and comparative religion instruction.
Pressure to fit in
Overall, 31% of all K-12 parents were frustrated by the pressure to fit in or conform in the public school where their oldest child attends. However, evangelical Christian parents were no more frustrated than their non-evangelical counterparts. Frustration over having to conform to the secularism of public schools was also not statistically different for white evangelical Christians compared to evangelicals of color (which includes Black, Latinx, Asian, and biracial groups). Race did, however, have some association with frustration about pressure to fit in, with Black parents, overall, 12 percentage points less likely to be frustrated about such pressure than white parents.
Religious bias
Only 8% of all K-12 parents thought religious bias was a problem in the public school that their oldest child attends. Considering the headline-making culture wars and litigation that have taken place between evangelical Christians and public school administrators involving such issues as school prayer and religious clubs, one might assume that evangelicals made up the majority of that 8%. Surprisingly, however, evangelical parents were no more frustrated by religious bias in public schools than were non-evangelical parents. This was true for parents on all points of the ideological spectrum; that is, extremely conservative, moderate, and extremely liberal parents were all statistically identical to each other as it pertained to their perceptions of religious bias in public schools.
Parents with a high school education or less, however, were 5.4 percentage points more likely than more educated parents to be frustrated by religious bias in public schools. The cause of this is unknown; perhaps less educated parents feel misunderstood more often in academic settings and see their religious beliefs as a factor in that disconnection.
A division also appeared along racial lines, with Black parents 4.5 percentage points less likely to see religious bias as a problem than white parents, even though research consistently finds that Black Americans have the highest levels of religiosity among all racial groups (Mohamed et al., 2021). At the same time, only 6% of evangelicals are Black, while 76% are white (Pew Research Center, 2014). My research offered no clear explanation for this disconnect between religiosity and perceptions of religious bias, but one plausible reason for the remarkable lack of concern among Black Americans is that their struggles for racial equality in the face of slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, and other forms of systemic injustice have left relatively little room for concern about religious bias.
Some geographical connections also appeared in the data. Parents in the Northeast, which includes what are considered the top five most un-churched states in the nation — New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, and Connecticut (Lipka & Wormald, 2016) — were 4 percentage points less likely to say religious bias is a problem in public schools than parents living in the Midwest, West, and South.
Bias against LGBTQ+ students
Just 9% of all K-12 parents said that bias against gay, lesbian, and/or transgender students was a significant problem. Conventional wisdom suggests that evangelical Christians are major influencers of that outcome in that they tend to be more concerned about these students receiving too much support and would therefore drive the overall percentage down. Surprisingly, however, the poll revealed no statistically significant difference in the frustration levels of evangelicals and non-evangelicals on the issue of bias against LGBTQ+ students. Regarding ideology, conservative parents were neither more nor less bothered by discrimination based on sexual orientation than liberal parents.
These findings were consistent across racial groups, with both white and non-white evangelicals showing no significant difference in concern about these biases. Curiously, however, Latinx parents were 8.9 percentage points more likely to be frustrated by bias against LGBTQ+ students than any other ethnicity. A 2012 study found that Latinx people, overall, were slightly more likely to support homosexuality than the general public. However, the study found that the opposite was true among those who were more religious: 73% who were “Born Again Protestants” and 49% who were “Born Again Catholic” were opposed to gay marriage compared to 43% who were “Non-Born Again” (Social Science Research Solutions, 2012).
Civics instruction
Some 27% of all K-12 parents were concerned that their child’s civics classes might include political content that they disagree with. When evangelicalism was treated as a singular variable, evangelical Christian parents appeared to be 11.7 percentage points more likely to be frustrated than non-evangelical parents by civics instruction, at a 99% level of confidence. However, when I controlled for political ideology and other demographic characteristics, such as race, gender, income, and education, evangelical frustration with civics classes dropped to just 6.7 percentage points more than that of non-evangelicals, with a 90% confidence level, a measure of marginal statistical reliability.
Political ideology, however, appeared to play a larger role in parents’ level of frustration. Each step up on a conservative scale, where 1 is extremely liberal and 7 is extremely conservative, was correlated with a parent becoming 6 percentage points more likely to be concerned that civics instruction might contain political content that they disagreed with. When I compared parents who self-identified as “Conservative” or “Extremely Conservative” to moderate and liberal parents, I found an even starker contrast between staunch conservatives and everyone else: On average, these conservative parents were 20.1 percentage points more likely to be frustrated with civics classes than moderate and liberal parents.
Furthermore, when I took religion out of the equation and focused on ideology as the variable of interest, I found that Black, Latinx, and Asian parents were 10-11% more likely than white parents to be frustrated by the political content of civics instruction. The relationships among race, religion, and ideology make it difficult to know to what extent each variable is driving the results. Because religion is rarely included in such educational analyses, researchers can easily over- or underestimate the effects of ideology and race when religion is also playing an important role in the results.
For example, 64% of Black Protestants and 66% of Black Catholics say it is “important” or “essential” for preachers to deliver sermons on political topics like immigration and race relations (Mohamed et al., 2021), and it seems logical to imagine that they would like more content on these topics to appear in their children’s history lessons. To untangle which portion of this view of civics instruction is driven by race, faith, or political ideology, analysts would need to include all three variables in their polling — which is almost never done in education research. With more than a dozen Republican-led state legislatures having either banned or considering banning the teaching of critical race theory and/or using the New York Times’ 1619 Project in K-12 public schools, we need to take a moment to ask what facet of our humanity is most motivating such drastic education policy making: race, religion, or ideology — and why?
Bible study classes
Of all K-12 parents surveyed, 34% worried that “Bible studies classes might improperly promote Judeo-Christian religious beliefs” in public schools. The wording of this question is ambiguous, however, because the term “Bible study” is usually associated with a devotional approach to religious scripture, but the question could also refer to an otherwise academic Bible class in which a teacher begins to proselytize students. Although we cannot be sure what kinds of classes respondents had in mind, evangelical Christian parents responded to the issue in a statistically identical way to non-evangelical parents, meaning that evangelical Christians were not more comfortable than nonbelievers with teachers promoting Christian religious beliefs in public schools.
Concerns of ideological subgroups of parents regarding teacher influence were topic-specific: Conservatives were more worried about civic instruction and liberals were more worried about Bible study.
Interestingly, when looking at differences among evangelicals, white parents were 13.8 percentage points less likely to be concerned about proselytizing in Bible study classes in public schools than evangelicals of color. This divergence is partially explained by the influence of the bloc of staunch conservatives within white evangelicalism, which was virtually absent among the Christians in racial minority groups in the sample.
As was the case with civics instruction, parents’ views tended to align with their political ideology. With each shift to the more conservative side of the ideology scale, parents became 6.7 percentage points less likely to worry that these Bible classes might illegally proselytize public school students. In fact, when the ideology scale was collapsed into clusters of conservatives, moderates, and liberals, those who identified as “Conservative” or “Extremely Conservative” were 10.8 percentage points less likely to be concerned about improper Bible instruction than clusters of moderates and liberals. Comparisons that controlled for religion without ideology and vice versa paint a startling picture of how conservatism directly correlates to elevated tolerance for teacher-led Judeo-Christian proselytization in public schools — even though there was no statistical difference between evangelicals and non-evangelicals. In essence, concerns of ideological subgroups of parents regarding teacher influence were topic-specific: Conservatives were more worried about civic instruction and liberals were more worried about Bible study.
Comparative religion classes
About 27% of all K-12 parents were concerned that “comparative religion classes might improperly encourage students to change their religious beliefs.” This is where evangelical Christian parents showed the greatest level of concern: They were 7.9 percentage points more likely than non-evangelical parents to be worried about comparative religion classes’ ability to influence children against their faith. In essence, evangelical parents were more threatened by the potential for their children to be subversively converted to a non-Christian religion at school than they were about the potential for someone else’s non-Christian child to be subversively converted to Christianity at school.
And again, levels of conservatism appeared to be associated with higher levels of concern. With each step to the ideological right, parents were 3.4 percentage points more likely to be worried about comparative religion classes. To put that in perspective, an extremely conservative parent would be 23.8 percentage points more likely to worry about the influence of comparative religion classes than an extremely liberal parent. When measured as ideological categories, instead of on a scale, those who identified as “Conservative” and “Extremely Conservative” were, on average, 12.5 percentage points more likely to express concern about comparative religion classes than moderate or liberal parents.
Evangelical frustration: An illusion?
Comparative religion was the only area among the six selected survey questions in which evangelical Christian parents showed more concern than non-evangelical parents about the religious, social, and ideological direction of public schools. While evangelicals have often spoken out against what they perceived as brazen atheistic attacks and an invasion of humanistic thought in public education since the mid-20th century, these respondents showed beliefs that were remarkably in step with the mainstream on most religion-related education issues in this poll. From an empirical standpoint, evangelical Christian parents had no problem with conforming to public school culture, and their perceptions regarding religious bias and bias against LGBTQ+ students were closely aligned with their non-evangelical counterparts.
In this study, it appears that political ideology and minority race identity are as big, if not bigger, drivers of frustration with public education than evangelicalism, particularly on the issues of how civics and the Bible are taught. Could it be that conservatism and racial politics have usurped religion as drivers of public opinion? Or could it be that evangelicals have lost some of their spiritual fervor and replaced it with ideological passion? Or perhaps, as Coleman (2018) asserts, evangelicals are still on fire for God, but instead of fighting to make a place for their religion in public schools, they’ve chosen to quietly conform to social norms of public education as they lobby for the tipping point in which private school choice becomes widely available.
Because the intersection of K-12 education and religion is so rarely studied, there is little empirical evidence to gauge how many evangelicals are lobbying for school choice or how much the school choice movement is driven by evangelicals. But there are clues. For example, a 2013 EdChoice survey of adults in Rhode Island found that 52% of Catholics, 59% of Protestants, and 50% of the nonreligious gave their area’s schools a grade of C, D, or F. Of these residents, 63% of Catholics, 46% of Protestants, and 46% of the nonreligious said that if they could choose, they’d put their children in private schools to obtain the best education; that’s compared to 24%, 34%, and 33%, respectively, who believed that traditional public schools would be the best choice. Note that while these statistics don’t separate out evangelicals, they do show that Protestants (a group that includes but is not limited to evangelicals) and the nonreligious express similar levels of discontentment with their local schools, interest in private schooling, and preference for traditional public schools.
This study of PDK poll data does not support the notion that a new wave of religious bias or frustration is driving evangelicals out of public education and fueling their fight for more school choice. Instead, it suggests that there’s a tug-of-war within evangelicalism among religion, ideology, and race. For example, conservatives are far more comfortable with proselytizing Bible courses in public schools than are evangelical Christians, but white evangelicals are much less worried about those classes than Black, Latinx, and Asian evangelicals. As such, it seems that religion does not play as strong a role in parents’ attitudes about the schools as some might assume. Race and ideology influence parents’ education discontentment — even for matters that are rooted in religious belief.
References
Coleman, R. (2018). Give me my child back: Evangelical attitudes toward public education in twentieth century America (Publication No. 10811912) [Doctoral dissertation, Indiana University]. Proquest.
Laats, A. (2012). Our schools, our country: American evangelicals, public schools, and the Supreme Court decisions of 1962 and 1963. Journal of Religious History, 36 (3), 319-334.
Lipka, M. & Smith, G.A. (2020, July 1). White evangelical approval of Trump slips, but eight-in-ten say they would vote for him. Pew Research Center.
Lipka, M. & Wormald, B. (2016, February 29). How religious is your state? Pew Research Center.
Mohamed, B., Cox, K., Diamant, J., & Gecewicz, C. (2021, February 16).Faith among Black Americans. Pew Research Center.
Olson, T. (2002, July 1). Dobson again calls for parents to pull kids out of public schools. Christianity Today.
PDK International. (2019). Frustration in the schools: Teachers speak out on pay funding, and feeling valued: PDK poll of the public’s attitudes toward the public schools. Author.
Pew Research Center. (2014). Religious landscape study. www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/
Social Science Research Solutions. (2012). LGBT acceptance and support: The Hispanic perspective. The Arcus Foundation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marilyn Anderson Rhames
Marilyn Anderson Rhames is a Ph.D. student in education policy at the University of Arkansas, the executive director of the nonprofit KuriosEd, and the founder of the nonprofit Teachers Who Pray. She is the author of The Master Teacher: 12 Spiritual Lessons That Can Transform Schools and Revolutionize Public Education.