Trump’s Cuts to The Department of Education Are Part of a Long Fight by Conservative Christians

On the campaign trail and in office, President Donald Trump has called for the elimination of the Department of Education. Many believed the proposal would face legal challenges because Congress created the Department by law and approves its budget. However, on Tuesday, the Department of Education announced plans to cut nearly 50% of its workforce.

Even entirely eliminating the Department of Education would not considerably reduce the size of the federal government or limit bureaucracy. It’s the smallest federal department by number of employees. The vast majority of its budget gets spent directly on individuals, states, and local schools through college financial aid for low-income families, grants for school improvement, and funding for special education programs for children with disabilities. Moreover, a disproportionate amount of this money goes to states that voted for Trump in the 2024 election.

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However, shuttering the Department of Education would fulfill the dreams of a significant part of Trump’s base: Christian conservatives. For roughly a century, conservative Christian groups have claimed that education should include Christian teachings and have increasingly concluded that American public schools are unsuited—and even antagonistic—to that task. And while Trump often takes unprecedented actions, this is not one of them. His latest actions are simply the latest move in an anti-Department of Education crusade a century in the making.

In 1926, J. Gresham Machen was the leading fundamentalist theologian in the U.S. His defense of biblical inerrancy against the modernism of mainstream Bible scholars had laid the intellectual foundation for the future of evangelical Protestantism. But on Feb. 25, 1926, Machen was not preaching to the choir. Instead, he was testifying before a joint session of the Senate and House Committees on Education against a bill to create a cabinet-level federal Department of Education.

Read More: Can Trump Dismantle the Department of Education? Here’s What to Know

A Department of Education, Machen insisted, would negate “the individual liberty of the states.” More importantly, he claimed, it was an ideological threat that would result in “the worst kind of slavery that could possibly be devised—slavery in the sphere of the mind.”

Machen wanted to limit public schooling altogether. He saw it as “inimical to parental authority.” To him, the responsibility for “the moral and religious training of children” properly belonged with “individual parents.” “If you give the bureaucrats the children, you might as well give them everything else as well,” Machen proclaimed to applause in the chamber.

The theologian and his allies succeeded in defeating the Department of Education in 1926. 

Yet, Machen remained concerned about the threat of federal action on education—so concerned that over the next decade, he made common cause with Catholics, a surprise in an era of rampant Protestant anti-Catholicism. As a religious minority, American Catholics had long taken issue with public schools. Now, with the rise of liberal modernist Protestantism, Machen had come to agree that Christian private schools were “important for American liberty” and “important for the propagation of the Christian religion.” He even reached out to Catholic leaders proposing that they work together to promote private religious education and oppose federal expansion of public education.

Machen’s fellow fundamentalists and evangelicals were far less sanguine about an ideological alliance with Catholics. They considered the Catholic emphasis on parochial schools to be an ideological threat in its own right. Many still trusted the predominantly Protestant nature of American public schools to instill their religious values on the country, and wished Catholics could not so easily circumvent them. To these peers of Machen, the “separation of church and state” seemed to protect generically Protestant public schools from denominational or non-Protestant influence, not guarantee strictly secular education. In 1947, United Evangelical Action, the magazine of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), bemoaned a Supreme Court decision upholding a New Jersey law that allowed state funding to be used for busing students to Catholic schools as “one of the darkest days for religious liberty on record.”

Just a year later, however, evangelicals changed their tune thanks to another Supreme Court decision. In McCollum v. Board of Education, the justices declared unconstitutional an Illinois program in which students received education in their various religious traditions on public school premises during the school day. The Supreme Court had destroyed “the Christian foundation of public education,” thundered Harold Ockenga, a mentee of Machen’s and co-founder of the NAE to his congregation in Boston.

Ockenga’s sermon reflected how, as the long-standing Protestant majority began to lose its influence in American public schools, evangelicals rebelled against the concept of “separation of church and state.” Since they couldn’t immediately change the Supreme Court, a growing movement called for the formation of new Christian schools to provide a private alternative to secularized public education.

This push brought them into alignment with conservative Catholics, although they initially worked in parallel rather than in tandem. The chorus of evangelical and Catholic critics of secular public education grew louder in the wake of the 1962 and 1963 Supreme Court decisions banning school-led prayer and Bible reading, respectively. America, claimed disgruntled Christian critics, was giving up its religious roots and increasingly resembling the atheistic education of the communist Soviet Union, an alarming charge at the height of the Cold War.

In the ensuing years, the fight shifted from school prayer and Bible reading to battles over public school curricula in everything from American history to sex education. In 1974, in Kanawha County, W.V., conservative Christians boycotted public schools over the introduction of new multicultural textbooks. The curriculum wars reflected increasing conservative Christian fears about the growth of “secular humanism” as a religious heresy—something for which they blamed public schools.

This concern, and their broader fears about the moral damage being done by the federal government on everything from abortion, to threatening to deny tax exemptions for Christian schools, to the Equal Rights Amendment, only intensified conservative Christian fears about the idea of greater federal influence in education. 

In 1979, Congress created a federal Department of Education. President Jimmy Carter (an old-school “separation of church and state” Baptist) celebrated the expanded federal support for education “to meet the great challenge of the 1980’s.”

Read More: How Oklahoma Became Ground Zero in the War Over Church-State Separation

Millions of conservative evangelicals and Catholics strongly disagreed. That same year, the fundamentalist Baptist Jerry Falwell founded the conservative Moral Majority organization, to make explicit the increasing alliance between evangelicals and conservative Catholics. Opposition to the Department of Education, which the Moral Majority called “a major step toward nationalizing our schools,” was a central complaint as the Christian Right mobilized against Carter and for Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980. Timothy LaHaye, founder of the similarly conservative organization Christian Voice, lamented, “Since the educational system has been taken over by humanism, and since humanism is an officially declared religion, we find the government establishing a religion and giving the high priest a position in the president’s cabinet.”

In his 1980 campaign and throughout his presidency, Reagan promised his Christian Right supporters that he would abolish the Department of Education. Yet, he backed away from this pledge because Congress had little interest. Nonetheless, a call to abolish the Department of Education became a frequent, if not universal, promise of Republican leaders in the ensuing decades—especially as conservative Christians cemented their place at the heart of the GOP coalition.

In 2016, while Trump didn’t call for abolishing the Department, he campaigned on a platform that proposed dramatically reducing its portfolio. He appointed Betsy DeVos, a conservative Christian philanthropist to serve as his as Secretary of Education. DeVos had previously promoted private Christian schools as an ideological alternative to public schools. As Secretary of Education, she worked to increase school choice and school voucher programs, and used the Department to foster the shrinking role of public education.

Project 2025, the Republican party’s policy vision propagated by the conservative think-tank the Heritage Foundation, pledged to go even further, and finally fulfill the dream of eliminating the Department of Education. Trump’s campaign also pushed the idea.

On the campaign trail, Trump claimed that the Department had been infiltrated by “radicals, zealots, and Marxists.” The claim makes little sense in light of the generally non-ideological work that the Department of Education actually does. But against the historical background of the long conservative Christian fight against secular public education, it makes much more sense. If Trump were to eliminate the Department of Education, he would deliver a historic win for his base.

Trump’s cuts to the Department of Education may also involve funding cuts for low-income schools and students and the termination of some special education programs. Additionally, his attacks are a major symbolic milestone in what is now a now nearly century long debate over how to—or, how not to—educate children in a religiously pluralistic America.

Austin Steelman is assistant professor of history at Clemson University. His research focuses on the connection between evangelical interpretations of the Bible and the US Constitution in the 20^th century.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.

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