Compared to Donald Trump’s prior term in office, the current Trump administration looks different. The gleefully Nazi-saluting billionaire Elon Musk is front and center in an unprecedented and unconstitutional role. According to RD’s Annika Brockschmidt, he “appears to be functioning as an unelected co-president,” which about sums it up. To be sure, last year Musk joined Richard Dawkins in signaling his reactionary views by identifying himself as a cultural Christian. But he’s hardly a poster child for Christianity, let alone of the evangelical and trad Catholic varieties that animate Trump’s base.
Meanwhile, although she’s been made senior advisor to the new White House Faith Office, NAR-connected megachurch pastor Paula White hasn’t dominated a single news cycle, even as Musk and his DOGE trolls seem to dominate all of them. It’s impossible to pay attention to everything amid the incompetence, chaos, and general surrealism of their “move fast and break things” approach to running the federal government. Predictably, institutions that more or less held during Trump’s first presidency are now failing in real time.
Even so, it’s critical to understand that beneath the surface, the new Trump-Musk duumvirate is pursuing the same authoritarian Christian agenda as the old Trump administration—and they’re doing so more aggressively than ever. Now, with the Senate confirmation of former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon as secretary of education, America’s right-wing Christians are well on the way to achieving one of their longstanding goals: the near complete dissolution of federal involvement in education. They would, in all likelihood, continue to funnel some money to states and local school districts to support “parents’ rights” and “school choice” as public schools withering on the vine are replaced by homeschooling, evangelical schools, Catholic schools, and a variety of charter schools that promote right-wing ideologies.
McMahon might seem to be a strange choice to serve as what the Trump administration and its supporters hope will be the last secretary of education. While not remotely qualified for the role, Trump’s first education secretary, Betsy DeVos, was a natural enough fit for an administration that hoped to dismantle the Department of Education. A staid Reformed Protestant in a family of conservative Christian megadonors, DeVos brought to the role a veneer of patrician respectability. The DeVos clan also have a long history of pushing for “school choice” via vouchers that predominantly benefit right-wing Christian institutions at the expense of public schools.
McMahon, by contrast, married into a family of pro-wrestling carnies and, along with her husband Vince (from whom she has recently separated), hit the big time by taking the spectacle mainstream. She ran what was then known as the World Wrestling Federation (now World Wrestling Entertainment) during its raunchiest years, known as the “attitude era” (1997-2002). Notably, pro wrestling hasn’t exactly been kind to Christian-themed wrestlers. Although the vast majority are undoubtedly Christians themselves, fans have generally despised wrestlers whose gimmicks are based on drunk Catholic or Bible-thumping, hypocritical evangelical stereotypes.
McMahon herself is an adult convert to Catholicism, and she spent about a year on the Connecticut State Board of Education. She’s no more qualified than DeVos was; but she is arguably no less qualified either. But the two women’s paths to the Department of Education couldn’t have been more different. With her checkered past, McMahon hardly stands out in Trump’s current administration where “respectability” seems not to matter at all—even if the secretary of housing and urban development (an associate pastor at Prestonwood Baptist Church), Scott Turner, does start cabinet meetings with a prayer, and charismatic Christian singer and agitator Sean Feucht will be joining Turner in a tour to assess wildfire damage in Los Angeles.
For her part, McMahon has signaled her readiness to comply with Trump’s desire to abolish the Department of Education, although in theory only an act of Congress can eliminate an entire federal department. And while it looks like Trump and McMahon are hoping to get legislation passed to do just that, such a bill seems unlikely to pass despite GOP control of the Senate. Of course, anything can happen. A key architect of Project 2025 and Trump’s director of the US Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, contends that “we are in a post-constitutional moment,” a sentiment shared by the Trump administration which has made a habit of issuing unconstitutional executive orders and pushing for their implementation—even in the face of court orders to stay them.
Yet even while her department continues to exist, as education secretary there’s much that McMahon can do to harm American schoolchildren and college students. Rules changes in federal agencies theoretically require a lengthy process involving public comments, but whether or not these formalities are observed, McMahon will likely work to cut off funding, as Trump has ordered, for schools that engage in activities deemed “DEI” (observing Black History Month, for example) and for schools that stand up for the rights and inclusion of trans students. Columbia University has already been specifically targeted for massive funding cuts for supposedly not doing enough to support Jewish students in the face of pro-Palestine protests. While efforts like these will surely please Trump’s authoritarian Christian base, if McMahon succeeds in abolishing her own federal department, that base will be absolutely jubilant. It is a deeply sad commentary on the United States that this appears to be a real possibility.
But why does the Christian Right so deeply despise public education, and especially federal involvement in shaping it? The short answer is that America’s authoritarian Christians, the majority of whom are evangelicals, desire complete control over the information and perspectives their children are exposed to, which they claim is their right by virtue of the “biblical worldview” and the will of God. Rejecting the notion that education can be religiously neutral, they want to keep their children from being exposed to uncurated science instruction (which includes reproductive health and evolution), LGBTQ acceptance, and secular influences. Those Christians who opt out of public schooling typically also want to use the isolation and control that affords them to practice corporal punishment, which their churches teach is a divine mandate for childrearing.
A longer answer would involve unpacking the ways in which the progenitors and proponents of one of the most extreme dominionist Christian ideologies, Christian Reconstructionism (which clearly influenced Betsy DeVos), came to exert massive influence over the beliefs of “mainstream” evangelicals on education, a topic covered thoroughly in religious studies professor and RD contributor Julie Ingersoll’s 2015 book Building God’s Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction. As a Christian school alum, I’ve lived the reality of intense ideological indoctrination in the classroom, and I would like to see as many American children spared from that fate as possible.
Unfortunately, the authoritarian Christians are winning. They’re tactically working to make public schools conform as much as possible to their right-wing Christian positions, even as they continue to undermine the efficacy of public education by funneling as much funding as possible to private, and often explicitly Christian, alternatives. Authoritarian Christians have never been shy about their goals here, though American liberals have failed to take them seriously.
In 2020, I covered the explicit efforts of well-connected evangelicals affiliated with the John Birch Society and the Council for National Policy to exploit the pandemic to funnel children into Christian homeschooling as a means of radicalization. One of them, E. Ray Moore, Jr., described the pandemic as an “incredible chance to rescue millions from anti-Christian indoctrination,” which is what these ideologues maintain happens in the public schools they refer to derisively as “government schools” and “indoctrination centers.”
It’s bemusing that a former pro wrestling executive is in a position to do more to further this right-wing Christian fever dream than arguably any politician has been before. And if a carny ultimately dismantles the federal department of education, it will certainly be surreal, if probably not even in the top five or ten surreal things we’ll remember this awful era for. In any case, for the sake of this country, and its children, and our future, I hope she fails.
