Last August, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reposted a video of pastors from his own church network arguing that women should not have the right to vote. Not in a private message. On social media, with an endorsement. The pastors in the video said votes should be cast by households, with the man of the house making the choice. When pressed, the Pentagon clarified that Hegseth personally supports women’s suffrage. The men he amplified do not.
This was not a formal proposal, but a sitting Cabinet member, at the highest level of the American government, platforming the argument that half the population shouldn’t have a voice in their own democracy. And the reason given was explicitly religious: that this is “the Christian position.”
Moments like this don’t exist in isolation. But this is one of the clearest expressions of something that has been building for a long time, and nowhere is it actually more visible than in what is happening to American schools.
But before we get into classrooms, we need to talk about what is actually happening with religion and this administration, because it gives everything else context.
One historian of American religion at Dartmouth said he cannot recall any administration that has pursued such a broad and deliberate effort to inject religion into government. In 2025, the administration created a White House Faith Office, established a task force to “eradicate anti-Christian bias” from federal agencies, and signed an executive order creating a Religious Liberty Commission whose members have described the United States as a Christian nation and stated that “you cannot have a self-governing nation without a robust expression of Christian faith among its citizenry.” Federal workers received guidance encouraging them to talk about their faith with colleagues and display religious symbols at work. The IRS announced it would stop enforcing the longstanding rule barring houses of worship from endorsing political candidates.
This is not religious freedom. Religious freedom protects everyone equally. What this is, is the installation of one specific theological framework into the machinery of government.
A Baptist minister named Brian Kaylor, speaking about exactly this, put it well. His concern about uniting church and state, he said, is that “it turns faith into just a political tool and ultimately drives people away.” A Christian leader. Warning that this administration is bad for Christianity.
The Heritage Foundation has been the architectural firm behind much of this. Their fifty-year long project to reshape American education is now, by their own measure, winning.
School choice was the flagship. In summary, public money that follows a child to whatever school a parent selects, including private and religious institutions. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of students in these programs more than doubled, from under 600,000 to 1.2 million. By 2025, roughly half of all K-12 students in the country were eligible for some version of this.
What it actually means is that public money is being redirected toward private institutions, many of them religious, with minimal accountability and no obligation to serve every child equally. Kids with disabilities. Kids who don’t speak English at home. Kids whose families can’t navigate an application or afford transportation across town. The public system still has to take them. The choice system doesn’t.
Fifteen states have passed laws restricting how race can be taught in schools. Not limiting it, but actively prohibiting frameworks, banning books, and scrubbing curriculum. Florida became the first state to formally adopt Heritage’s “Phoenix Declaration: An American Vision for Education,” which is a statement of principles about fostering love of country and helping students reach their “God-given potential.”
In Oklahoma, the state superintendent ordered Bibles placed in every classroom, assembled a curriculum review committee that included the Heritage Foundation’s president, and required teachers to incorporate scripture into grades five through twelve. Louisiana and Arkansas passed laws requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in every classroom. Louisiana’s was struck down in federal court. They’re not backing down; they’re betting on the current Supreme Court to give them what lower courts won’t.
This is not a fringe movement having a moment. This is a fifty-year project hitting its stride.
About 35% of Americans are not Christian. That includes 28% who are religiously unaffiliated, and 6% practicing Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, or another faith. Among Americans under 30, nearly half don’t identify as Christian.
The separation of church and state was not invented to marginalize Christianity. It was invented because, at the time of the American Revolution, nine of the thirteen original colonies had official state-sponsored churches, funded by taxes collected from everyone regardless of belief. Dissenters were fined. Some were imprisoned. Thomas Jefferson’s famous “wall of separation between church and state” wasn’t written to atheists or activists. It was written to the Danbury Baptist Association, a Christian community afraid of the government-backed church being used against them. The principle they helped establish was never about persecution. It was for equality.
Jewish kids, Muslim kids, kids raised by atheists have navigated this system for generations, sitting through prayers that weren’t theirs, watching their traditions treated as elective while one was treated as standard. The legal fights that ended mandatory school prayer in the 1960s weren’t attacks on Christianity. They were corrections toward a system that was supposed to be neutral.
What’s being called persecution now is the experience of not being centered. Of having your faith treated as one among many rather than the default. That is not being victimized.
What Heritage has been building is not a restoration of something taken. It’s a reassertion of dominance. The tell is in who benefits: not Christians broadly, not religious Americans broadly, but a specific evangelical framework being written into public infrastructure that everyone pays for and everyone’s children attend.
You can practice your faith freely in this country. You always could. What you cannot do, what the Constitution has always said, is use the government to make everyone else practice it with you.
The Heritage Foundation is winning because people are still treating this like a debate. It stopped being a debate a long time ago. They have the think tank, the model legislation, the state governments, the federal administration, and the Supreme Court. And they have Cabinet members willing to amplify pastors who think my right to vote is a theological problem. I think it’s time to tear it all down and start over.
