Although President Trump’s executive order on elections signed earlier this week is probably unconstitutional, it closely resembles the stalled SAVE Act, which requires voters to present a passport or birth certificate in person when registering to vote or updating their voting registration.
The uproar surrounding the SAVE Act often focuses on the obvious people who would be disenfranchised by the bill—namely transgender and lower-income citizens. But homeschool alumni spotted something even more sinister: a movement toward head-of-household voting.
Without a passport that matches her legal name, any woman who has taken her husband’s name will be unable to vote. Fundamentalist Christian leaders seeking to repeal the 19th Amendment rejoice: if women can’t vote, their husbands can vote for them. And many proponents of this view want the male head of the household to vote for his unmarried adult daughters as well. That disenfranchisement would be exponentially easier for homeschooling parents who practice identification abuse, denying their children birth certificates and social security numbers.
Head-of-household voting may seem far-fetched to many who believe their political opponents operate within a shared value of democracy. Survivors from the Christian fundamentalist homeschooling movement of the 1980s and 1990s know better. As my father informed me: theocracy is the only biblical form of government.
Days after Trump’s second inauguration, the New York Times published an article on conservative Christian homeschooling mothers’ admiration for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who is now the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The mothers frame their crunchy, back-to-nature homeschooling as “rebel stuff” and argue that many parents are “waking up” to reality. But there’s nothing new about homeschooling or the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) lifestyle. It only seems fresh because journalists and pundits have largely excluded the voices of those positioned to offer context and a dose of reality—the generation who already lived this life.
Having grown up in the world envisioned by Project 2025 I’m not, for once, at a loss for words. In addition to sharing our experiences of growing up in a world that resembles Project 2025, homeschool alumni like myself can offer insight into the principles that undergird both Trump’s cabinet picks and much of Project 2025 itself.
The homeschool God is authoritarian
Many leaders in homeschooling circles start from an understanding that God is the ultimate head-of-household and he expects his surrogates to wield the same authority on earth. God’s plan for the nuclear family notably does not include democracy; the father is God’s representative in the mini-kingdom of his family. Children are God’s property on loan to parents. As homeschool alumnus and RD contributor R.L. Stollar puts it, we’re simply our parents’ divine rental property; they own us.
When I married at 27, my father placed my hand in my husband’s, saying, “I now transfer the headship to you.” I was property to be transferred, not a person. This patriarchal worldview explains how Project 2025 can roll back rights for so many citizens. Men, particularly fathers, are the rights-holders and everyone else is their property.
Children are weapons
When children are weapons in a culture war, homeschooling parents can be tempted to dehumanize them in service of ideology. Project 2025 lends a helping hand to this project by gutting health and education laws—even taking aim at the Department of Education itself. To train their armies of children, conservative Christian parents look to homeschooling to prevent any contaminating influence. Homeschool alumni Krispin and D.L. Mayfield trace this emphasis on breeding and training the right kind of family back to eugenicist Paul Popenoe and his protegee, James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family.
Project 2025 seeks to reduce regulations on already under-regulated homeschooling. The state of Utah recently passed HB209, which allows parents convicted of child abuse (including sexual) to homeschool their children. I can tell Utah voters and legislators how well that bill, which takes effect on May 7, will work out. My home state of New York puts no restrictions on homeschooling parents, which means that a homeschooling father from my former church could molest two of his children and retain 24/7 access to (and thus control over) his homeschooled child victims.
Pain is redemptive
The final principle that informs Project 2025 is rooted in an atonement theory that sees Jesus satisfying God’s wrath with his death, rendering pain a tool of sanctification and virtue. Homeschooling parents spank their children because they believe it will instill virtue.
Taking that principle to its logical conclusion, Project 2025 authors have sought to “put [federal workers] in trauma” because the redemption of our country comes through Christian nationalism. Homeschool alumna Christy Lynne Wood explains how a generation of homeschoolers were indoctrinated with that same Christian nationalist perspective:
I genuinely believed that if we could make (i.e. force) the people in the world to follow our rules, then they would be happier and more successful.
The Christian homeschooling embrace of this principle is embodied by Anglican priest and homeschooling father, Matt Kennedy, who wrote in a chilling October tweet: “Millions of indigenous people in heaven are grateful for Christopher Columbus.”
Proponents of Project 2025 and homeschooling leaders dangle promises to “[empower] American citizens to achieve the American dream”—but their utopia is an illusion. The illusion only holds if we erase the experiences of my generation, the generation that was raised to take over the world for Christ. But what I and many others raised in religious homeschooling communities offer is an inconvenient truth: that previous generations already tried to build this utopia, and they lost their children in the process.
