“Segregation of white and Negro children in the public schools of a State solely on the basis of race, pursuant to state laws permitting or requiring such segregation, denies to Negro children the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. …
“Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. Compulsory school attendance laws and the great expenditures for education both demonstrate our recognition of the importance of education to our democratic society … the very foundation of good citizenship. Today it is a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.” – Brown v. Board of Education, May 17, 1954
“Christianity and democracy have been given a great place in America through the elimination of segregation in public school.” – J. M. Hinton, South Carolina conference president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), May 18, 1954 [AP]
“There never will be mixed schools while I am governor.” – Ga. Gov. Herman Talmadge, May 18, 1954 [AP]
“[T]he South will not abide by nor obey this legislative decision by a political body.” – James Eastland, U.S. Senator (Miss.)
[Brown v. Board threatens] “the fundamental … rights of the states” and “gave no consideration to the adverse effect of integration upon white children,” therefore “compulsory integration should be resisted by all proper means in our power” and “may result in the closing of public schools.” – “Gray Statement” of the Virginia Commission on Public Education, Nov. 11, 1955 [Virginia’s Prince Edward County, rather than integrate classrooms, closed all public schools for five years, beginning in 1959.]
[Brown v. Board] “is destroying the amicable relations between the white and Negro races that have been created through 90 years of patient effort by the good people of both races. It has planted hatred and suspicion where there has been heretofore friendship and understanding.”
[Racial integration] “is certain to destroy the system of public education in some of the States.” – “Southern Manifesto” opposing Brown v. Board, signed by “all but twenty-six of the 138 southern members of [the U.S.] Congress,” March 12, 1956
“Virginians are presently under the heel of the N.A.A.C.P. and the U.S. Supreme Court, and are in Mourning. BUT WILL RISE AGAIN!” – Warren Spitler to Va. Governor James Lindsay Almond, c. 1959. [Office of the Governor, J. Lindsay Almond Papers.]
The same year as Brown v. Board, the United Daughters of the Confederacy published a new edition of their Confederate Catechism for Children. Originally published in 1904 — and frequently republished and modified thereafter — the white supremacist, slavery-defending pamphlet teaches Southern white children the Lost Cause, a false, romanticized accounting of the Old South as righteous and just in enslaving Black people.
Typically religious in nature, catechisms indoctrinate, rather than educate. Like other catechisms, Confederate catechisms are in the form of questions and answers, which are to be precisely memorized.
One 1954 catechism question asks: “What was the feeling of the slaves towards their masters?” The answer defies actual history: “They were faithful and devoted and were always willing and ready to serve them.” Another asks: “How were the slaves treated?” Also dismissive of historical reality, the answer begins “With great kindness and care in nearly all cases.”
Confederate catechisms experienced a renaissance following Brown v. Board, as did white supremacy. Many Southern white families fled public schools and established private segregation academies. Confederate flags blanketed the South. Angry whites systematically assaulted and sometimes murdered peaceful Black people demanding equal rights. Congress and President Lyndon B. Johnson finally intervened by signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin) and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (prohibiting racial discrimination in voting).
Condemning Brown v. Board and the Civil Rights movement, some far-right Christian educators — in the South and otherwise — called for the dismantlement of the federal government. Praising the Confederate States of America, they republished antebellum and Civil War-era treatises composed by white theologians in defense of the enslavement of Black Americans. R. J. Rushdoony, far-right Calvinist educator from California, developed anti-Black educational curriculum that became popular in white segregation academies and Christian homeschooling.
Over the course of some five decades, Rushdoony’s anti-government teachings led to the rise of Dominionist theology, a crusade-like ideology and movement devoted to making America a theocratic nation. One of Rushdoony’s notable ideological successors is Doug Wilson, a white Christian Nationalist pastor and educator in Moscow, Idaho. Wilson routinely extols the “Christian” Confederate States of America, believes “Christian” slavery is scripturally valid and has criticized the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In a co-written pamphlet, “Southern Slavery As It Was,” Wilson — echoing Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Vice President Alexander Stephens — sanitizes slavery and portrays the Confederacy as the victim of an overreaching federal government.
In his book Black and Tan: Essays and Excursions on Slavery, Culture War, and Scripture in America, Wilson asserts that the Bible “permits Christians in slave-owning cultures to own slaves, provided they are treated well.” He teaches that “Nothing can be plainer than the fact that a Christian could simultaneously be a slave owner and a member in good standing in a Christian church.” Refusing to equate slavery with racism, he enthuses that the “Christian” slaveocratic Old South “surpassed” the culture of “most other nations in the world of that time.” God’s chosen Confederacy lost the Civil War only because they did not fully treat their slaves in accordance with biblical mandates.
Longing to implement a neo-Confederate theocracy in 21st century America, Wilson and his Christian Nationalist church are operating a local trial project in the small town of Moscow. Proclaiming as their “mission” a determination “to make Moscow a Christian town,” Wilson’s Christ Church seeks, according to the congregation’s website, to accomplish their goal by “teaching men and women how to live together in harmonious Christian marriage” and “through genuine cultural engagement that provides Christian leadership in the arts, in business, in education, in politics, and in literature.”
Wilson and his church’s agenda reflects the Dominionist playbook of eradicating secularism and subduing all aspects of human existence beneath the thumb of an angry, vengeful and authoritarian god. Beyond his own town, Wilson seeks to nationalize biblical law. In an article titled “The 5 Smooth Stones of Theocratic Libertarianism,” Wilson declares that “the first thing that would happen in a biblical law order is that the EPA, the IRS, the Department of Education, etc. would all be abolished. Legitimate functions of government (Defense, State, etc.) would be significantly downsized or redirected.”
By imposing biblical law upon the federal government, Christian Nationalists would take freedoms away from undeserving fellow Americans. Wilson longs to implement biblical punishment for homosexual acts, exclude liberals from political office, make all abortions illegal and deny voting rights to women.
In a 2023 interview on the “Christ Over All” podcast, Wilson complained that “secularism doesn’t work” because it seeks equal rights for all people, which makes “God angry with us [America].” As God’s self-proclaimed spokesperson, Wilson declares “I want the authority of the Lord Jesus to be confessed by the House and the Senate, and I want the president to sign it.” He also wants the federal government to formally adopt the Apostles’ Creed. In a 2022 essay he called for a theocracy established upon “the biblical doctrine of three distinct governments — family, church, and state, all of them under the authority and lordship of Jesus Christ.”
Far from being a quixotic quest, Wilson’s theocratic, hyper-masculine white Christian Nationalist ideology is now embedded within the nation’s capital. Within the past year, Wilson was featured on the Tucker Carlson Show and sat on a panel at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C. Pete Hegseth, appointed defense secretary by President Donald Trump, is a member of Wilson’s Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches denomination.
Wilson is well-positioned to help make America Christian through what he calls a “Public School Rehab.” In his telling, the nation’s public schools are “schizophrenic,” “socialism,” and have always been “a vehicle for the incarnation of radicalism.” By way of contrast, he insists “Education is fundamentally religious.” In his crusade to end secular education within the United States and make public education Christian, he turns to his favored nation — the Confederate States of America.
Wilson’s educator hero is Confederate Presbyterian pastor, theologian and educator Robert L. Dabney. An ardent pro-slavery white supremacist and one of the 19th-century South’s most influential scholars, Dabney was also chief of staff and biographer to Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.
Claiming that prior to the Civil War, “universal public schools” in the North fostered immoral behavior, Dabney praised the antebellum South for rejecting “state schools.” He was adamant. “It is the teaching of the Bible and of sound political ethics that the education of children belongs to the sphere of the family and is the duty of the parents.”
“The education of children for God is the most important business done on earth,” he also insisted. In praise of his hero, Wilson republished and wrote the foreword for a new edition of Dabney’s 1897 anti-public education essay, On Secular Education.
Influenced by Rushdoony, enamored with the Confederate States of America and holding aloft Confederate divine Dabney as his educational mentor, Wilson is founder of the Association of Classical Christian Schools, formed in 1993. “Classical Christian” refers to white Western, theocratic, Constantinian Christianity enforcing biblical (or creedal) belief and behavior and punishing non-conformists. Hegseth is on board. “I think we need to be thinking in terms of these classical Christian schools are boot camps for winning back America,” he said, according to a Salon report.
In 2022 and with co-author David Goodwin, president of Wilson’s Association of Classical Christian Schools, Hegseth wrote a book, Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation. Seemingly echoing the Confederacy’s Dabney, Hegseth condemned America’s public schools as a national enemy. “The battlefield for the hearts and minds of our kids is the 16,000 hours they spend inside American classrooms from kindergarten to twelfth grade. … It’s the 16,000 hour war, for our kids and our country.”
In November 2024, researcher and columnist Logan Davis, writing for the Colorado Times Recorder, recounted his experience growing up in Wilson and Hegseth’s world of Christian Nationalist Classical Christian schooling. “I was taught,” Davis wrote, “that Christians were the only hope for America.” But, he continued, “It was the hope for an America that has never existed and which, if we’re lucky, will never exist: an America where laws really are inspired by the Bible, leaving millions outlawed from loving who they love or making decisions about their own bodies.”
Interviewed by The Guardian in January, Davis warned that if Hegseth were to win confirmation as Trump’s Defense Secretary [he did], he would “be swearing to defend the constitution that he, to the extent he is aligned with Doug Wilson, does not believe includes the separation of church and state.” In fact, within America’s armed forces, white Christian Nationalist Hegseth is now actively discriminating against women, people of color and LGBTQ+ service people and their families.
Nor does Trump believe in constitutional church-state separation. In February, Trump announced the establishment of a task force to examine non-existent “anti-Christian bias.” In reality, during the second Trump administration, white Christian Nationalists are privileged, powerful and have been given free rein to discriminate against anyone with whom they disagree.
In February, and to Hegseth and Wilson’s delight, the Trump administration announced intentions to crack down on inclusive secular education, eradicate the federal Department of Education and effectively Christianize America’s public schools. Meanwhile, Wilson’s theocratic-grounded Classical Christian Schools, some 500 in number, are present in 49 states. Heavily concentrated in the former Confederate States, the schools are now influential within the Trump administration’s inner circle.
Rooted in anti-human rights ideology, a national theocracy is rising from the never-cold ashes of the Confederate States of America. Angry and vengeful over Brown v. Board, white Christian Nationalists seek retribution. Public education is in their crosshairs. Diversity, equity and inclusion are on the chopping block. “Biblical law” looms on the horizon.
Doug Wilson’s theocratic dream of white Christian domination is within reach.