Christian Nationalism and Educational Policy in the United States with Dr. Kevin Burke

In this episode of Faithful Politics, Josh and I sit down with Dr. Kevin Burke from the University of Georgia, co-author of the National Education Policy Center report Christian Nationalism and Educational Policy in the United States. We explore how Christian nationalism is reshaping public education—from classroom prayer and Ten Commandments laws to school choice and state-funded religious schools.

Dr. Burke explains how recent Supreme Court decisions like Kennedy v. Bremerton and Carson v. Makin opened the door for religion to play a larger role in public life and what that means for the future of church-state separation. We also talk about whether this movement reflects a moral revival or a coordinated political project.

It’s a candid, challenging look at how faith, politics, and education collide in today’s culture wars—and what’s really at stake for America’s classrooms.

Watch or listen on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

Read the report: https://nepc.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/publications/PB%20Burke-Hadley_0.pdf

Guest Bio: 

Dr. Kevin J. Burke is an Associate Professor at the University of Georgia, specializing in curriculum theory, educational policy, and the cultural intersections of faith, politics, and schooling. His research examines how belief systems—particularly Christian nationalism—inform classroom practices, legislative agendas, and the broader purpose of public education in a democracy.

He is the co-author of Christian Nationalism and Educational Policy in the United States, a policy brief published by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC), and has written extensively on religion’s influence in American schooling. Dr. Burke’s work challenges educators and policymakers to engage ethical dialogue across ideological divides and to safeguard pluralism in public education.

Transcript

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Hey, welcome back, Faithful Politics listeners and watchers. If you're watching on our YouTube channel, we are so glad to have you. And if you're watching us on a Roku TV, send us a note because I'm curious on how many people are actually watching us on a Roku TV. uh But I'm your political host, Will Wright, joined by your faithful host Pastor Josh Bertram. How's it going, Josh? Doing fine, thanks Will. Hey, and today we have a special treat for you. We are talking with Dr. Kevin Burke. He's from the University of Georgia and one of the authors of a new policy brief uh from the National Education Policy Center titled, Christian Nationalism and Educational Policy in the United States. Dr. Burke is an educational scholar. He does research on the intersection of culture, faith and public schooling. and how belief systems and political movements shape what happens in classrooms and legislatures. And today we are going to be talking to him about that NEPC document, Christian Nationalism, Educational Policy, and the United States. So we are just so glad to have you on the show. Welcome to the show, Kevin. Thank so much for having me, gentlemen. I really appreciate it. Well, I guess just to start off first, what is the NEPC? Put that into context for anybody that's never heard of the organization and what they do. Let's start there. What is the NEPC? Yeah, so it's housed at the University of Colorado. It's important to say that I'm not um an employee, a direct employee of the National Education Policy Center, but the focus of the center is to provide educational policy analysis at the intersection of sound evidence uh in the direction of deliberative democracy um and rooted in, and these are the ideas that I really like, and this is from their site, of justice, inclusion, and kindness. um At the level of education and religion, which can often feel relatively difficult, there's a guy named Bob Kunsman who's at the University of Indiana who talks about the need in public education for ethical dialogue. And the idea would be that with your interlocutors, and I think this is what you all engage in really nicely in this space, you do not have to... convert to whatever the position is of your interlocutor, but you do have to engage with them in such a way that you understand that their beliefs are sincerely held. And so it strikes me that that is the project of the NEPC, is to provide sound analysis and the belief that if we might disagree at the level of policy, we probably are engaging with people who believe deeply in whatever they're writing about or arguing. So this new policy that is out, the uh Christian nationalism and educational policy, ah walk me through kind of the evolution of this document. Because I mean, most people when they think of educational policy, probably don't associate it with Christian nationalism, but your document specifically kind of ties the two together. how did this document come into existence? Yeah, I think it's twofold. So I had the good fortune of writing an article in an educational journal called Educational Researcher in, I want to say, 2023 with Esther Prinz, who's at Penn State and Mary Jeswick, who's at Michigan State. And Esther and Mary grew up in the evangelical movement. And we wrote a piece making an argument that educational research needed to more closely to white Christian nationalism and its influence on educational policy, both contemporaneously and historically. This is in the moment after January 6th and also the confusion for a lot of people as to why there was such a white evangelical support for Donald Trump in the 2016 election and then subsequently, of course, in this most recent election. And there were explainers in a lot of different fields, but not in education. And one of the problems there is educational research has a paucity of research on religion. for lots of reasons that maybe we'll talk about here, but maybe we won't. uh And the second point is that there's been a pretty significant shift in Supreme Court jurisprudence in relation to the establishment of religion, particularly Christianity in public education. And there's a long history there, but at the juncture of what we're observing, it seems like that the driving force of that shift at the Supreme Court is rooted in a sense of Christian nationalism and often white Christian nationalism. So just to make sure that I'm like stating the claim. that you're making. like sometimes when we have people on like again, if like I've had uh people in the talk about like books, I won't show the book, but like uh it's uh like poetry and prayers and stuff like that. So my questions are different, you know, when it comes to them. I'm not going be like, well, can you give me your claim and evidence and premises for the that prayer? You know, I'm but like thinking about this, this is a this is a pretty particular claim. And I just want to make sure it's clear. And I just want to do you mind if I just kind of try to So basically you're saying there's a coordinated policy driven Christian nationalist project shaping the United States education system all the way from K through 12. Yes sir, and into college as of the last couple of years as well. So what, what's, how do we know that essentially help us help our audience who take on like, I'm trying to take on the skeptic, you know, um how do you, how do you actually know that's not true? Isn't it just like a restoration of something that's like been lost at the liberals and the Marxist kind of like influence came in and clearly took over. And how about all these people like, haven't you seen this free speech report where it's like, I don't actually, don't know if you have seen that the 2026 fire free college free speech report. Yeah. So, you know, like how even the highest grade is like a B minus. There's not even an A in terms of like freedom of speech on college. So I'm just kind of trying to set the like tone for people that might be skeptics. How do we know that this is? it's also fair to say like there's methodological issues with that fire survey that we don't have to get into. And there are certain colleges that they leave out for instance, but that, you know, that's okay. Like that's not the engagement here. think, I think there's a long history of Christianity's overlap with the American educational public educational system. And, and that's a winding road to the point where we might make a claim that Christian nationalism has undergirded the American public educational system for its entire establishment. What is new, I think, is the most recent manifestation, which you're characterizing, I think, as backlash, but Chelsea Eben, who has written about this uh pretty convincingly would suggest that this is actually a prefigured policy. So we should give our colleagues on the right, and I know that you're on the right to some respect, we should give them, uh yeah, we should give them credit for the agency that they've taken, which is the sense that it's really useful to suggest that there's a backlash to cultural Marxism or whatever in the schools, uh which then. ah obscures the fact that this was actually a coordinated political project over time, which said essentially like the central socializing institution of uh American social life is American public education. And so the reason why we have debates over what should be included in curriculum is because that is essentially the only shared for the most of the population, not all the population, but the only shared experience that we have across the population that then determines how we think about history, how we think about language, often how we think about identity. And certainly students come into those spaces with religious identities and that colors how they experience that space. But for the last 50 or 60 years or so up into this current Supreme Court, the understanding has been that the public educational system should avoid the establishment of a particular religion through religious practices by representatives of the public educational system. And that has changed in the last, I'd say, 10 to 15 years from a deference to the Establishment Clause, which says we should not establish a religion, and a shift towards the Freedom of Religion Clause, but with a very particular take on whose religion should be free in that space. And our argument is it's a very particular kind of Christian nationalist religion that should be free in that space. Yeah, you know, after Kennedy v. Bremerton, um the Supreme Court, I think essentially did away with the Lemon Test, which is sort of like this test to determine if something violates uh the Establishment Clause. um How do you think... the you know the I don't know the what's the word I'm looking for like when something goes away I'm having a brain flatulence but anyways if when the when the lemon test went away um what role do you think maybe I don't know I need to get it that doesn't work doctrine that's taking it over essentially. Yeah. but the limit test had a three-part test, and it said, hey, if it meets these things, it either meets or doesn't meet the establishment clause. What effect do you think that had in the larger picture of Christian nationalism making its way into schools? think it was the case that it was largely settled that uh because of stare decisis and because of case law, like we weren't gonna do Christian prayer by teachers in schools, or we weren't gonna post the 10 commandments in schools because of prior decisions. And of course, states have always pushed a little bit on that, ah but you see a cascading line of states, Louisiana. uh prime among them, not only Louisiana and not only in the South, essentially seeking to establish uh Christian religion in public educational spaces. Now, one version of that would be to say, well, the Ten Commandments are just posted there. You don't have to engage with them. But of course, we understand how that works in that space. The other version is like you have, for instance, the Blue Bonna curriculum in Texas, which is explicitly teaching biblical values and you might imagine, you know, this is probably not, excuse me, um this is a very particular interpretation of what biblical values might be in that space. And it's a very specific kind of evangelical Christian establishment in that space. But I should, you know, I should probably lay out, like, as you asked, Josh, like, what is the, how do we define Christian nationalism? How are we thinking about it in terms of education? I'll just lay out the four tenets for the audience and then, and that might be helpful as a baseline. So. Just generally speaking, I work in curriculum theorizing. And the main question there is like, what knowledge is of most worth and what most thought we teach? And like, that's always intention. It always has been. Like, this is the great debate of what we should teach in schools and what schools should do. um And that's an understanding of a lot of people who think about education, but particularly I think Christian nationalism in this space say like public education should actively promote Christianity or Christian values. um Wokeness in the classroom. introduced by teachers or through curriculum is a danger to those Christian values. This is, think, why you see a lot of the pieces coming out now about how empathy is against Christian belief or whatever. um Christians are victims of a secularizing society. You alluded to this a little bit, Josh, earlier, subject to godless brainwashing in public schools. um And in order to make schools prioritize Christian values, the end sanctifies the means. So essentially, any action is permissible, indeed demanded. You have to do it because... If you really believe this is true, then the schools themselves are actively undermining Christian values in a Christian nation. I really appreciate em how you are articulating this. I find myself like really almost like an innocence mesmerized because I hear what you're saying and I'm trying to hear every word of it and understand like there is this the question that we have to wrestle with right now is what gets to be part of an influence the education of a massive amount of people, right? It's universalized, it's generalized, right? So once it's enshrined or codified in a law or declared unconstitutional or constitutional, change, mean, those ramifications, right, that ripple effect is intentionally created within the system to be vast. And so everyone is going to somehow be affected by this one way the other, because they're going to have to choose homeschool, public school. You know, it's almost going to be a reversal of the homeschool movement is now going to people exiting the public school system if they can to try to teach their own values. Right. If it becomes this kind of like vision of the Christian nationalism that you em are resisting. And, you know, I think one thing that I would love to get your thoughts on is this idea that every state catechizes in some way. Like every state is going. And I mean, I know that's an intentional word. Yeah, I love it. word, but they do. It seems like every state is going to come to a place where, what do we do with these little people that we need to figure out some way to help them? I mean, my wife, anyway, I'm not going to throw her. I'm going to put her on blast. But I know many teachers that have said, like, dude, this is so in, you can tell it is institutionalized to the T when you walk into a public school system. It is designed, like you can just see the ramifications of all these things that she's going to now. face as a result of this. And I just feel like how do we get because I'm trying to get to the place where, yeah, there's I agree with you that we shouldn't have this particular version of Christian nationalism. What I think I note that you're saying I've heard enough about it that I intuitively I don't want that being taught as something that's required by any means. And I am concerned about what it seems like an infringement and a continued. um redefinition of these like establishment clause doctrine now to like history and heritage kind of like language, which is a bit concerning like anytime we start tying ethnic heritage like things like that. It's it's it gets concerning because it's not necessarily an ideal or principle we're appealing to at that point, but something different. And so I guess what is like what is the If we're digging deep, what's the issue with catechizing? Isn't everyone going to try to do that? So how do we decide who gets to do it? And why is Christian nationalism in particular egregious in this and this? the, I mean, that like, to the extent that I love my job, that has been my job for the course of the last like 15 or 20 years, which is, please, no, yeah. that develops curriculum, but I'm going to thank them. Thank you. But the question really is what values do we put forth in the public education system, in any kind of education system? So the relatively settled doctrine had been, although certainly since the Supreme Court decisions in the 60s that got rid of public prayer and... than 10th Commandments stuff, there has been a sense, and you see it in language that, for instance, like Mike Huckabee used after, I think it was 9-11, he said, this is what happens when, or I'm sorry, it Sandy Hook, he said, this is what happens when you push God out of school, public school. And like my response would be like, how weak is your God? Like God's still there. I mean, everybody walks in with whatever religious instantiation that they have. It's in the discourse that they speak. It's in the way that they read. It's how they interact. the... Ascension was essentially, and this isn't the official standards from the main social studies body in the US, which is like, absolutely, we should teach about religion. The understanding though is you teach a cosmopolitan version of religion, which is essentially comparative religion. People will be more tolerant, the assumption is, if they know about everybody's religious backgrounds. It will make us better readers, it will make us better citizens. That's unsatisfying. to people who see their job, indeed their faith, as imbued with the idea that you have to evangelize. So one of the stories I always tell, my colleague who wrote this with me, who's not here, did a study of three teachers who came through our program who were religious in certain instantiations, one of whom taught in public education and was a great teacher, but... did not evangelize in her public school classroom and felt like she was gonna go to hell as a result of that. And dealt with that all the time and still didn't do it. Which is really, the sense was like, A, she didn't know what the line was in terms of what was allowed in that space, but she also understood, public education as a pluralistic project where you don't do that sort of evangelizing. I think that's probably what goes away well with the sort of Kennedy v. Bremerton stuff and whatever else comes down the line. But the big distinction I think Josh is like, there had been a sense that public schools were a place where you taught about religion as opposed to teaching your religion as the way forward. There were always instances where that was not true. But the broader consensus was, that's what we did. And I think that that is what Christian nationalism explicitly pushes against. Like you do not need to know about other religions except in the context of their being dead or probably fallen. And the religion that you need to know because we're trying to save you is this particular instantiation of Christianity. You know, I'm curious, the policy seems to um recent fights over books, prayer, school choice, not necessarily as small community sort of incidents, but more systemic, more national, or at least that's the impression that I got. And I'm curious on, at what point in time did you... and your team sort of look at kind of the educational landscape ah and then saw Christian nationalism? um Or ah was it kind of just the accumulation of all these different things like the books, the prayer, the school choice? was like all these dots help create the picture as you're connecting them. Yeah, I really think, as I said earlier, the big question was for a lot of people who are in the educational research community who don't think a lot about religion, which as I say is a lot of my colleagues, they're great, God love them, but it's just not their interest and or they don't see it as particularly important in the classroom. I would say that it's very important, but in any event. this was an entire field that was stunned by what happened with the election in 2016. And so you look for explanatory variables. And then you do a little bit of digging into, for instance, like how do you end up with somebody like Betsy DeVos, who's in charge of the Department of Education in that first instantiation of the Trump administration. If you don't track anything in the state of Michigan, or you're not all that interested in school choice, or you're only interested in school choice from a policy standpoint and you don't pay attention to the kind of religious undergirding that has come from being Dutch reformed from Western Michigan and how that drives a particular kind of ideology. Like you miss all of these things. fortunately because of Mary and Esther's work and my own particular kind of em strange upbringing in the Catholic church and as an old boys Catholic school alum and then writing my dissertation there, I a real interest in the ways in which religion inflects on public education. So that's been there forever. But I'll give you one other story and then try to finish answering the question. My advisor who's at Michigan State um was Jewish from Israel. And so he always talked about how he had the ability to ask lots of questions about American public education, about things that were strange to him that were normalized to us. actually opened a lot of doors for me in relation to like, is it that Judith Butler talks about learning to see the edges of the frames that blind us? Like what are the edges of the frames of things that I can't see in relation to this religious project? So that brings us then to this, like what are the explanatory variables that might actually tie together the school choice movement, all the book banning stuff, and then this push to bring religion and prayer, specifically Christianity and prayer, into schools again. And people might argue it's not white Christian nationalism, it's lots of other things. We think that white Christian nationalism is a pretty useful heuristic for understanding why this is on. You know, because when you say stuff like school choice, ah you know, even when folks talk about like homeschooling, for instance, I always get a little like like a little cringy uh because I think I agree with most of the research about uh at least sort of like the Christian Nationalists leveraging school choice as a sort of like tool to ah I don't want to say indoctrinate, basically have a religious focus curriculum um at home. I think that that's fine. If people want to do that, knock yourself out because we homeschool too. when my oldest son had a lot of medical problems. We home-schooled for the longest time. I was really upset because I was paying taxes still. But it was a period I wish we could do it more because I think there is a lot of benefit to it. But I'm curious for you just to draw the distinction between home-schooling, school choice, vouchers, because some of these programs are actually uh good, in my opinion, think. Yeah, think um so. Cheryl Field Smith, who's a colleague of mine, has written pretty extensively about black homeschooling. So she might be somebody that would be interesting for you to think with. Well, like that there are lots of different decisions that parents are making in relation to what their kids ought best do in relation to schooling. I think the the particular instantiation that I'm thinking about in relation to school choice has to do with two things, one of which is the central ideology of starving the beast, which is the move to get public funding out of public schools through the school choice movement in order to particular kinds of religious schools or homeschool movement. Now, not every parent who's doing that work is thinking in that way, but that is an underlying ideology that runs through, you know, the kind of thing that Betsy DeVos is pushing for, which is basically like public education is corrupt in large part because it's a collective project and education itself is an individual good. So this marketizing of education as an individual good is one of the ways in which you smuggle in that idea of, parents should have an individual choice. And that individual choice could include public education, but what it really should include is sort of the public paying for wherever I want to send my child. We might have concerns about where that public money goes in relation to what it supports ideologically or religiously. It is the case that Supreme Court jurisprudence right now seems like it will essentially say there was uh the case in Oklahoma about the Catholic charter school that was essentially struck down because Amy Conna Barrett like recused herself, but the idea is like, it's probably going to end up being the case that public money will end up in religious schools or religious contexts without any kind of repercussions or recourse to standards or ah what would you say? Like that money will be gone and the public will not have a whole heck of a lot of accountability for what will have been taught in that space. um This is rooted in thinking about homeschooling and vouchers, the idea that the parents are the first educator of the child. And it's a response to a kind of um assumed expertise, like a rejection of expertise of educational actors. And that has long been embedded in American education. it's originally was rooted in the progressive movement in the 1910s and 1920s and 1930s that said, like, we can't trust these poor immigrant parents to educate their kids well, to be good Americans. So we got to get them into the public educational system. like resistance to that kind of paternalism has always been a part of that homeschool and school choice movement as well. So it's a confluence of a lot of things, but I think we ought to be really concerned with the idea that there is a significant movement that wants public money without any kind of accountability and also really does not believe in public education as a project in the United States. Man, so I really appreciate it. I keep thinking about this, like, and wanting to think through and kind of get your, I'd love to get your thoughts on, like, again, the purpose of public school, right? So when we originally did it, like, why, maybe even digging a little deeper, why do we even want an educated populace to begin with? Yeah. what was the purpose of it? How did it kind of like, like how did this move through time? Because you've alluded to like maybe a sense of like it was Christian nationalist before, right? There was a time of course where 10 Commandments were in the classroom. That's why they're where Supreme Court and prayer was done, right? And that's why Supreme Court uh decisions changed that. So what is kind of the history of this? to give us some context to understand like, why did it change as much as you can, but why did it change? What was the kind of logic of those changes? Like again, yeah, go ahead. No, I mean I wrote a piece that got me in trouble with some people because I always say blame it on the Catholics Which I feel like I can own because we were there but I mean, you know the initial law and that's in the brief is like the old deluder Satan law which is one of the best names of a law that you'll ever run into which is in Massachusetts in the the 18th century, which essentially said like listen if you've got a big enough community we have to We have to come together as a community to pay for that so that our kids will not essentially be uh deceived by the devil. So this first collective educational movement in the US, the first public law was like, we need to have a religious education for people, but we're gonna all pay for it. So it was a public project of religious education. yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. religious. Now, the problem is, what happens is you have uh immigration, significant immigration in the middle 19th century from Europe, Eastern Europe, very specifically, where you have these populations who do not understand themselves in the way that Horace Mann, who's creating the common school movement throughout the colonies in the US, right? So we're post colony there, but through the early States. And essentially the idea was like, we need to have an educated populace. because it will improve any number of outcomes, particularly tied to morals and ethics. But the understanding of these schools, well, like they're going to be just generally kind of Protestant-y. And so Horace Mann got in trouble with a lot of denominationalists who were like, he's not Christian enough. Like we need to very, we need to very particularly be Methodist or whatever in that space. So like you run into the problem of denominationalism pretty quickly in that space. And then you get this influx of Jewish immigrants and Catholic immigrants and German Lutheran immigrants. who run into that space. And first of all, they're not considered white yet. Like you can look at depictions of Irish in particular and Italians at that time in any kind of political cartoon. And they look like the ways in which African-Americans are depicted often as simian. Yeah, that sort of thing. There's a great one of like em these alligators that are coming on shore and they're wearing like the papal. had the closure, like they're gonna come take over. So, but the idea was, okay, so what we can do with the public educational system is we can socialize these new immigrants into Americans. And the understanding of what an American was from that standpoint was like, well, they're gonna be Protestant and they're gonna be white and they're gonna be like pretty waspy. And the Catholics, know, Dagger John Hughes in New York, and then the Bible riots in Baltimore were like, listen, we don't read the same Bible as you. We don't believe in the same kind of ah Christian faith as you do. And so they're like, we're just going to have our own system if you're going to make us read your Bible. So this is where the conflict comes in, essentially. Like once you get pluralism in the space, it's no longer about, well, we got to have Christianity. It's like, what kind of Christianity are we going to have there? Then the system starts to get to get changed into a kind of uh socialization of this American exceptionalism. So you get a shift from American religion in those schools where you're moving away from like McGuffey Readers and the New England Primmer. And now we're gonna start teaching about American secularism and exceptionalism. So it's American civil religion. And that's where you start, the progressives come in. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, like you have all these laws that essentially are like, listen, you Catholics and you Lutherans can't have your own schools. These are the Blaine Amendments. Because we're really worried that what you'll end up doing is you'll have loyalty to the Pope and you'll use your own language and you won't become proper Americans. And this is where the original like religious freedom laws uh run into real problems. And that's what you see in the states still. They still have these Blaine Amendments, which is essentially like you can't fund religious education. You can only fund public education with public funds. And that's all the stuff that's getting overturned by the Supreme Court right now. We might be kind of OK with that because the laws were originally rooted in a kind of racism and anti-Catholicism, anti-Lutheranism. But we might also be concerned with the way in which that money gets used now in the way that people were concerned about it then. I think it's fair to say in some ways. So what happens is you get this replacement of uh denominational Christianity with some sort of American patriotism, and then you get the Supreme Court decisions in the mid-1950s or so. And that's when there's a real movement on the political and religious right to say, well, the schools aren't doing what we want them to do, and either they need to start doing what we want them to do, which is what we thought they were doing in the past, or we're gonna try to get the money out of them to support our schools, or we're just gonna pull out of the American educational project altogether. So this, you know, the white Christian nationalism stuff is not brand new. The ways in which it's become manifest, I think in the most recent like 15 or 20 years, particularly under the Trump administration is what's troubling. You you map Christian nationalism as a movement onto federal policy, state legislatures, local activism, what have you. And a lot of what you wrote in your policy statement sounds a lot like what Project Blitz tried to do. I can't remember 2017 or 2018, which is basically this. It was a congressional prayer. caucus, I can't remember the exact group, to essentially use states as like little uh testing centers to roll out a lot of these initiatives. I'm curious, I'm like, how did you guys trace the movement of Christian nationalism uh across the educational sectors that you looked at? Yeah, the laboratories of democracy, yes. um I think the thing that we haven't laid out that's probably worth laying out before I answer that is that, and I'm sure that you've had colleagues on here who, because we cited them all and thank God for them, because it made our job a lot easier, uh just the central tenets of white Christian nationalism very particular, and then we can think about that. It's like... uh There's a rigid and clearly defined social hierarchy that should be maintained under the dominion of Christian God, males over females, adults over children, whites over other ethnic social groups. Preserving God-given freedom is of paramount importance, but only for white Christian men who are atop the hierarchy. And for all others, it's authoritarian and at times violent forms of control and governance that are needed to maintain proper God-given order in families, communities, the nation of the world. The way to think about it, think Will, is like, there is no federal right to education. You guys know this, I would imagine, from your work here, but it gets played out in state constitutions. So you get these interesting flavors of policy, as you said, Josh, like all sorts of different curriculum in different spaces, although Texas used to drive it all because of the way that the textbook ah publishing worked, like essentially whatever they established, a lot of states were going to do. But what's important, I think, is you see these test flares that were flying up from the states. What we didn't have in the past until Betsy DeVos was in charge was essentially the federal government saying like, yeah, we should have national school choice. We should have national vouchers. We should really uh start to support religious education with public funding in ways that the states were doing it before. And then there became like a kind of confluence at the level of the federal policy making as well. So this seems like a shrinking or a narrowing of the Establishment Clause and an expanding of the Free Exercise Clause. Yet in a particular, for some people, but I guess the question I have is, and I appreciate that, and I understand that's very concerning, and I agree that that is indeed concerning. uh Does this not though expand these kinds of rights for say Muslims or Mormons or Catholics in legally, right? mean, does it set a precedent like that? Is it like, and I guess what I'm saying is like, is it, if this begins to happen, is the advice, well, everyone then should be pushing for their curriculum to be included, you know, whatever it may be, because then it's going to like kind of force the issue. Like, guess, like, what is this going to create? What is it creating? What is it going to create in terms of that kind of legal doctrine that's going to affect the school's ultimate? I think it's a great question, Josh. It's one of the ways in which, you know, one of the things that NEPC wanted us to do was like put in recommendations, policy recommendations. Like we don't have many because we don't, this manifestation of Christian nationalism is so recent that we're not entirely sure what pushback to the degree that there should be pushback might work because no one's really done it at the level of policy yet. I mean, one example which we wrote in there, which you guys know is that there were, There was a collection of Jewish mothers in the state of Tennessee who tried to push back under this particular kind of expanded religious freedom grounds against um new abortion laws in that state. And they were said to not have standing, but it was an engagement of, well, let's see if this kind of expanded understanding of the free exercise clause applies more broadly than for Christians. We might be worried about, you know, I can't remember the name of the case law, but there was the law that Justice Scalia wrote the opinion for where it was Native Americans who were using peyote as a part of one of their uh religious ceremonies. And they were not allowed to do that. This was prior to the current administration's, the current court's jurisprudence, so maybe that would come out differently. But I think the larger concern, Josh, that we might have too is, I had a student who did a dissertation in... public schools in the state of Georgia, this is prior to Kennedy v. Bremerton very particularly, about all the ways in which non-Christian teachers experienced Christian practice in Georgia public schools. A lot of that stuff is fairly innocuous, but it might not be if you are an irreligious person in a public school space. who assumed that, well, because this is a public school, there won't be an establishment of, like, we won't have our faculty meeting at the Baptist church with an invocation from the minister. Like, that won't happen. But then it does. And you're like, well, wait a minute, you know, nothing against Baptists, Catholics might do it too, but this was just one of the examples. So the idea was like, what you would have to have then is you would have to have somebody in a small community in Georgia, who would have to stand up and say, listen, that's actually violating my rights. And that's a pretty risky thing to do if you are minoritized in any kind of way in relation to your religion, but if you have any other kind of marker that's different from the community, because you might alienate yourself from the community. And certainly maybe the community doesn't intend to do harm to you. ah But the larger point you asked is like, when you have a movement that is really concerned with domination and seems to have pretty strong political power at the moment, we might be really concerned about the ways in which those people who are affected, who might wanna take advantage of that religious freedom stuff might actually be silenced in communities because of the implications of their standing up for whatever religious rights might be expanded to them. Got it. Gosh, so many questions. um I guess I probably should ask um one of the more fundamental questions. I know you already kind of. talked and defined what Christian nationalism is earlier. how do you judge? Is there a scale? Is there a mood ring or something? How do you know that somebody is a Christian nationalist or they are teaching Christian nationalist centered curriculum? Yeah, I mean, one of the things that we wrote in that earlier article is like, have a very vivid memory of being at Arlington National and my mom being handed my dad's flag ah in front of his grave with a cross on it. So this is like, Christian nationalism comes in all sorts of different forms. decide whether that's problematic or not problematic, but it's important to me, right? So, uh you know the scale from Whitehead and Perry, I think there's the idea of rejectors and resistors and accommodators and ambassadors. uh The ambassadors and the rejectors are on either side. So rejectors would suggest that like, listen, we shouldn't have any instantiation of Christianity. or any religion in the public sphere that's imposed on other people. And ambassadors would say, yeah, like this absolutely needs to happen. Resisters and accommodators are kind of in the middle. Like maybe we're a little bit uncomfortable with it in certain cases and maybe it's okay in others. How you recognize it, I think for our purposes, like it's about Christian supremacy. So. don't wanna use the pornography definition like you know it if you see it. But if you're in a situation where the idea is like we need to do this because Christianity is more important than that, like we need to teach Christian fundamentals. Ryan Walter is in Oklahoma, is a great example of this, that gentleman. He's gonna buy all these Bibles for. the schools in Oklahoma that are a very particular kind of Bible that is missing very specific parts uh that are important and also will pay money to people who are politically connected. This is an instantiation of Christian supremacy in that space. And there are lots of different examples of that. Jeffrey Landry in Louisiana said, we're gonna put the 10 Commandments in there. And then he said, I look forward to being sued. And idea, it's like a mark of, it's a mark of pride in the sense that like, I'm gonna push this as far as I can go. Maybe because I believe it, maybe because it's like politically expedient. But this idea of establishing a kind of supremacy, I think is probably the mark that we, that's maybe easiest for people to see. Yeah, it's, it's, I, I went ahead and took the liberty of looking up like, all the, or trying to get a list of like current state laws that are in, you know, some kind of uh state of litigation. um And there's quite a few, we can put that out and show notes or we don't have to do that, but we can do something where like we can show some of these things and maybe I'll write a sub stack about it. But there is quite a few laws, right, that are happening, challenging this. And of course, I'm thinking about how people I know and even my own way that I used to view, I've shifted for sure, but I still have a lot of empathy for conservative views. I consider myself a conservative. um And I guess one thing is thinking about at what point does accommodation become... endorsement like essentially like you have different places like Louisiana say Louisiana. I highly doubt that there's going to be like a 10, you know, commandment, you know, rule in New York City, for instance. I doubt that that's going to pass or Los Angeles or California or, know, the Northwest Northeast, right? Take your these geographical locations. You know, it'll be challenged in Virginia. I'm sure that I haven't looked, but there may be something already being proposed, at least. I know in Ohio, there's been a law that's passed that's allowing, um you know, more leeway in terms of religious education, specifically Christian, specifically Christian in this case. So I definitely see that. But it's like, is this just like, hey, this is our culture. This is who we are. This is the, you know, this is what people want and we want states to be able to have the freedom to do that. I'm not going to New York and making them do like, you know, um do things. And I felt like New York was coming to Ohio and making Ohio change, um you know, with all sorts of inclusion because of federal and it didn't represent me or my community. I'm trying to take on the form of people I've talked to. I'm sure you've talked to and the way that they're thinking, because if I don't enter into the way they're thinking, then I don't really have empathy and I can get mad at them about hating empathy but I'm not really doing it myself. I think it's really important not to dismiss the concerns of people who are seriously engaged. Yeah, I mean, there were substantial accommodations in place. there's religious release time, which has been legal for very long time, which is essentially in the public school. You can go for religious instruction during public educational hours just outside of the public education building. It's kind of a clutch. Like it's still public education being like, okay, you can do religious stuff, but it's not in the building itself. um Kids could always pray in schools. Teachers could always pray in schools. Teachers couldn't make kids pray in schools. Kids could organize groups that were prayer groups that had like faculty sponsors in those spaces. so the simple, yeah, yeah. at the pole when I was in high school. Yeah. Everything was religious. yeah, yeah. But the idea is like, the simplistic understanding that somehow God or religion was pushed out of school, like, does not do justice to the faith that people have. And so I think, as you say, the tension is, what should our schools do? Our understanding is our schools should not establish Christian supremacy with public money. And one of the issues that emerges from there is like, okay, well, so then if public money is going to religious schools, which it is, that might be a little stickier. because we don't want to impose on religious beliefs in religious spaces, but we might have concerns about what public money is doing in those religious spaces. ah And I think that's a debate point that we might have. Your larger question also is an important one, like what do we do with regional difference? One of the things that educational scholars often talk about is like, Big educational reform always falls apart in the United States because the public education is so diffuse. It always kind of runs against the shoals of the fact that we have so many schools and so many different contexts and so many different places doing so many different things. So what should we allow in one space and not in another? I think what we had in the past was this idea that you could teach about religion, but you couldn't proselytize. And we may have lost that. line. I don't know where that gets us. I have serious concerns about it. Have you, mean, I just, Will, can I just mention this real quick? Have you seen this new Texas? Essentially, what was it? Was it the law or an executive order? Well, I'm trying to remember, but essentially the judges was trying to say the judges could not sign like marriage certificates because of religious. Yeah, because of religious religious conviction. don't know if like like I see similarities because of, you know, public institutions, things that are supposed to be kind of general. Right. If you're if you're a teacher, you're supposed to serve the general. public, right? Anyone comes in, right? It doesn't matter if they're Muslim, Black, White, you know, on any of the spectrum of the LGBTQ, um anywhere there, right? It doesn't, you're supposed to treat them, give them the same education you would, right? Anyone. That's kind of the American ideal, it would seem to me at this point. At least that's how I grew up, and yet that's been challenged. Anyway, sorry. Well, go ahead. absolutely. And I don't want to underplay the way in which for particularly for like LGBTQ rights, this is devastating. you know, there was a teacher in Georgia who was fired last year for reading, what was the book? My Shadow is Purple. I just talked about like gender identity and difference. And because of divisive concept laws, in the state of Georgia, this teacher was fired by the school district. you and I, we talked before this, my colleague is not here because she's concerned about the implications that this brief will have on her job as a university professor in a different state. um The, that strikes me as, you know, obviously as censorship, self-censorship, people who are concerned about their jobs. But the idea with the first example is like this, This is a sense that these kinds of people shouldn't exist because of my religious convictions. um There are lots of different versions of uh God and faith and religion out there. I want to assert that in the public sphere, using religion to say that a certain kind of person shouldn't exist might be a line we don't want to cross at the level of education, particularly with children. Yeah. I think one of the things that I'd expect people are going to say and or react to is the fact that, obviously, you're using Christian nationalism to define the group and the politics somewhat. Christianity is the largest religion in America. a lot of people identify very closely to that identity, like I am a Christian. uh If your title, instead of it saying Christian nationalism and educational policy in the United States, if it said, I don't know, black theology, I'm throwing something out there, and educational policy, you would probably get quite a bit of sternly worded emails uh about that. You're like, hey, you're talking about black and then theology. Yeah. Like you're talking about Christian and nationalism and with Christians being such a large group in the country, how do you expect to kind of like wrestle, discuss, um convince Christians that you're not like personally attacking them and or attacking their faith? Yeah. Well, I think people should read James Cohn and Joan Copeland anyways, like black theology is great. em I think that it's a great question because I do think that there is a sense for conservative Christians particularly that the liberal establishment, but also that public education has been attacking religion for any number of years. That's not entirely untrue in certain ways. Fair enough. The concern that I have, I was thinking earlier today about this idea from John Dominic Cross and the notion that like the kingdom of humanity is concerned with, ah is concerned with peace through victory. And the kingdom of God is concerned with peace through justice. And my sense is, from the kind of Catholicism that I grew up with, there's this idea of uh faith-seeking understanding. I don't know that there's a whole lot of understanding that goes on in an ideology, Christian nationalism, that is focused primarily on domination. So that's one answer and probably an unsatisfying one for people who really believe deeply in this. So there's a guy named Paul Miller who is an evangelical and who had worked in the Bush administration. You've had him on the show. Yeah. So his, you know, the religion of American greatness, like he's trying to make a distinction between like the political project and the faith project. I don't know that I can make that distinction, but he's trying to salvage this. project that he's worked his life towards. Peter Wehner writes all this stuff all the time. And I think that the real struggle there, David French is another one who's in the middle of this right now, is this community that it was a part of is not the community I thought it was a part of. And one of the things that I would say to Christians who are concerned about this is like, if you are, if, if, If you are coming to conclusions that run counter to the way in which you view the kind of manifestation of Jesus you have in your life, then that might concern us about the political movement with which you might be tethered. And for the people who are ambassadors who are Christian nationalists, I don't know that I have an answer other than like there's this podcast called Faithful Politics that tries to engage in these kinds of conversations. Well, I appreciate the endorsement. So this is the last question. um What is your call for people? What do you want them to hear? And I guess maybe address two people. What do you want the MAGA listener? Welcome MAGA listener, by the way. We love you. And I pray for Donald Trump. He's my president. I pray for him. I pray for the people that are in. uh In office, I truly do. uh when I think about them, I have ADHD, so I don't do it all the time. So don't hold me to that, but I definitely do want to think about it. But what's your call to the MAGA person who's listening and they're like, dude, mean, finally have someone taking action. um We've been oppressed for years by this kind of Marxist, you know, that kind of idea. And again, you don't have to address that argument, just like... What's the call to them and what's the call to the person is like, can't even, I can't believe my neighbor voted for Donald Trump. got nothing. I want nothing to do with them. I haven't talked to my cousin in three years because um of that fight at Thanksgiving. um You know, what's the call? Yeah, it's hard. I'll say, you know, debate isn't, we know that's not effective. We know that presenting people with facts is not effective, but that's to a certain degree, that's the benefit of faith is it's rooted in mystery. Ultimately, we don't know. So to someone who is embedded in the MAGA movement, what I would say is that I am not your enemy. The people who are engaged in the educational project. are there by and large because they love kids. This is a language I play around with, generally speaking. Their particular manifestation of love might not look like what your love looks like, but it is certainly not rooted in hate, particularly if you were a Christian in that space. Fundamental principle of teaching. Do less harm next time. That's from a former professor of mine. And then for... my friends, many of whom I have, who are really concerned with the idea of like a neighbor who might feel irredeemable. There's, I had a professor named Mike Himes. He was a priest in the Brooklyn diocese, but he taught at Boston College where I went. So he had a Brooklyn British accent, because his aunts were British. So like imagine that accent as he's talking. But he talked about the sacraments in the Catholic church. There's seven of them. So like reconciliation and baptism and. Glasswrights, and he said that the sacraments are our experience of God's grace extended beyond the Trinity. The particular seven sacraments that are in the church themselves are just the ways in which we attend to that grace. That grace is everywhere. We just need to attend to it. So the sacramental principle is that we can attend to the grace in other people all the time if we choose to. even if it's hard, that might be your call, regardless of whether you have religion or not. What is it, I was just talking the other day, this idea of hexiety, the irreducible thisness of a thing, for Christians that'd be the soul. But like, what is the hexiety of the person before you that most matters, stripped away of all of the political trappings? It's hard, but there's grace there. I really, really, really love that. How can people get involved? Where would you send them to to learn more? And then where can people find the policy to look at it? Yeah, the policy brief is at the National Educational Policy Center. I believe that's nepc.org, if I had to guess. ah I'm at the University of Georgia. I teach about religion and education. If anybody wants to come and do a PhD, we'd love to have you. If anybody wants to come and be an English teacher in the state of Georgia, we'd love to have you as well, because that's the organization in which I teach. And, you know, I've written a lot of books. and a lot of articles that essentially because they're academic nobody reads. So pick those up and let me know that they're unreadable. I'd love to hear from you. you say academic, are you talking about like, are they like a hundred dollars or something like that? Like that's why nobody's re- can't, no, I mean, who would find an academic journal anyways? Yeah, email me, I'll send it to you. But also, my first book, I spent a year as a fake high school senior at an all boys Catholic school. I think that was kind of fun, yeah. That's amazing. Ah, you said amazing. I said crazy at the same time. That's so funny. Well, man, thank you so much for being on the show, Kevin. It's been a real pleasure to have this conversation. man, I just got to say, I really appreciate the way you articulated your position, truly. I think people should listen and at least contend with the ideas. We need to get back to continuing with ideas and not people like we have been. So thanks again. you. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you. Absolutely. And to our viewers, guys, thanks for joining and our listeners. Thanks for listening to another episode of the Faithful Politics podcast. Make sure you like, subscribe, do all that stuff that helps us get this great content out there. We need sanity at a time when there's so much partisan hostility right now. And as always, keep your conversations not right or left, but up. God bless.