If you have read anything I have written over the last few years, you know that I believe that Christian nationalism is the most pressing threat to American democracy. I have been harping on this for years, since well before the Heritage Foundation crafted Project 2025, and well before Christian nationalism became the animating force behind Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Unfortunately, during the time I have been writing about the risks Christian nationalism poses to both democracy and Christianity, history has repeatedly proven my concerns to be justified. Now that Trump has returned to office and Project 2025 is well on its way to completion, there is not much utility in shouting from the rooftops that Christian nationalism is coming for us all. It has already arrived.
What requires our attention now is what the Christian nationalist movement will do with the power it has found – and I think I know where we should be looking.
In my years of writing about Christian nationalism, I have documented the movement’s intersections with politics, art, media, entertainment, and other areas of society which it seeks to influence and ultimately co-opt for its own purposes. No matter how much I write about the movement, though, one intersection crops up more frequently than the rest combined: education. Disdain for the public education system is central to the Christian nationalist movement in the United States, as is the desire to seize, reprogram, and co-opt that system for the movement’s own ends.
In the last few years, school districts across the country have watched as the “parents’ rights” movement has rained harassment and hysteria down on teachers, administrators, and board members in a crusade animated almost entirely by the core Christian nationalist conviction that America should be a country primarily, if not exclusively, for straight, white, protestants. Think “CRT,” or “DEI,” or the ongoing panic over trans kids. All of these synthetic moral panics have ties to the Christian nationalist movement.
This, however, is where things get more complicated. Because, though right-wing efforts to fundamentally change public schools have been animated by large numbers of Christian nationalist footsoldiers in recent years, the right-wing education ecosystem extends far beyond that particular movement. Rather than understanding right-wing education reform as a Christian nationalist project, we should understand the Christian nationalist movement as one fraction of a coalition which also includes libertarians, garden-variety conservative Republicans, and a vast network of think tanks representing the wishes of billionaire donors.
While Christian nationalists are currently the tip of the right-wing education coalition’s spear, they are not – for the most part – the source of its funding or the architects of its strategy. Those tend to be the domain of the coalition’s more secular partners: political consultants, pollsters, donors.
Messy though it might be, the coalition has found a way of making it work in districts across the country. Parents soften the ground by screaming their way through a neverending list of moral panics, and then the big money and political professionals come in to finish the job. New board members. Then a new superintendent. New curricula. New conflicts with the teachers’ union, and, eventually, new teachers. A district remade in as little as two years.
If this story sounds familiar to you, it is because it has happened in Colorado. And not just once. In 2015, in the earlier years of this strategy, the Jefferson County school board was taken over by a coalition of Christian nationalists and right-wing ideologues who quickly worked to bring in friendly lawyers and administrators as part of their push to institute a deeply flawed right-wing history curriculum in the state’s second largest school district.
In 2022, the same thing started happening in Woodland Park, where conflicts over the direction of the local school board have gone a long way towards tearing the beautiful small town apart. And, uncoincidentally, some of the players involved in the takeover of Woodland Park schools were also involved in the takeover of JeffCo schools the decade before. They are part of the Colorado contingent of the right-wing education coalition, and a unified Democratic government at the state level has done nothing to slow them down at the local level.
I have covered these stories in the past, but usually after the fact. And I have written about Colorado’s right-wing education coalition, but usually with a focus on specific districts where their strategy has been successful. This year, I want to do something different – something I hope will be more useful – and I need your help to do it.
This year, more than 30,000 school board seats in 20-plus states come up for election, including seats in all 178 of Colorado’s school districts. In Colorado, a handful of those districts will be singled out for takeover by the same crowd which brought chaos to Jefferson County, Woodland Park, and a dozen other districts on a smaller scale. If the past is any indication, they will identify vulnerable districts, recruit ideologically aligned candidates, supply them with endorsers, donors, and platforms, and then turn on a spigot of outside money to cover the districts with mailers and TV ads. When the dust settles, they will control a few more school boards, and set about making them work for the cause. It has worked before, and it will work again, somewhere.
The bad news is that we probably can’t stop it – at least, not everywhere. The good news, though, is that we might be able to expose it, and in doing so, we might learn a thing or two which will help us stop it next time.
My hope this year is to catch Colorado’s right-wing school reformers in the act, to tell the story of their 2025 campaign while it’s happening. I want to look at it how they are looking at it: not as individual fights in individual districts, but as a statewide battle map where a retreat in one theater might open-up an advance in another. As a holistic effort to seize and redirect the schooling of as many Colorado kids as they can manage.
To do that, though, I need to know where they’re aiming, and I only know part of that answer at this point. That’s where you come in. There are 178 school districts in Colorado, and though I can identify 5 or 6 where they will direct resources this fall, the right-wing coalition will likely target twice that many. Do you have reason to think your district might be one of them? If so, I would love to hear from you.
Are controversial candidates being conspicuously recruited to run for your local school board? I’d love to hear from you too.
Are there suddenly new lawyers in your district? New superintendents? New curriculum? Something which just doesn’t smell right? I definitely want to hear from you.
If you are one of the people successfully reading between these lines – one of the people already familiar with and diligently working against the various tentacles sprouted by Colorado’s right-wing education reformers – you know that there is a lot I am not saying right now. Names I am avoiding using, districts I am avoiding listing. That’s the nature of ongoing investigations: you don’t want to set off anyone’s Google alerts too early.
Normally, I wouldn’t tease you with unanswered questions or intentionally withheld facts, but I hope you will bear with me in this instance: there is a story to be told here, and it may never become fully tellable without your help. Together, though, I believe we can tell it – and, in the telling, I believe we can make a difference.
