Christian Education: Before 1940
The Christian school movement grew less from a single educational philosophy than from a century-long evangelical project of building parallel institutions — first in reaction to Darwinism, then to desegregation, then to public school secularization.
View in the interactive map →The evangelical project of controlling education began well before the Religious Right made it a political platform. The founding of Moody Bible Institute in 1886, the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (Biola) in 1908, and dozens of similar institutions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflected a conviction that secular universities had been captured by enemies of the faith. These schools did not merely teach the Bible — they trained a cadre of pastors, teachers, and lay leaders who carried a specific theological and cultural formation into every institution they touched. The Scopes trial of 1925 crystallized the conflict. William Jennings Bryan's prosecution of John Scopes for teaching evolution was not about science — it was about who controls what children are taught and by what authority. When Bryan lost in the court of public opinion, evangelicals did not abandon the project. They redoubled efforts to build their own institutions. By the 1930s, a network of Bible colleges, Christian day schools, and home education advocates had established the organizational model — and the theological rationale — that would expand dramatically after Brown v. Board. The critical insight is that the post-1954 explosion of segregation academies and the post-1962 Christian school movement were not new phenomena. They were the activation of infrastructure that had been built over decades, in response to threats that predated desegregation by half a century. Control of education — who teaches children, what they are taught, and within whose authority — has been an evangelical political priority since before anyone called it politics.
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Connections from Christian Education: Before 1940
- influenced → Bob Jones University (1927) — Bob Jones Sr. recalled that in 1924 William Jennings Bryan told him at a Winona Lake Bible conference, 'If schools and colleges do not quit teaching evolution as a fact, we are going to become a nation of atheists.' Concerned about secularization in higher education, Jones opened Bob Jones College in Florida in 1927.
Sources
- The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America — Frances FitzGerald (2017)
- One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America — Kevin Kruse (2015)