In 1629 the King of England, Charles I, in partnership with the Church of England issued a new colonial charter. The “Royal Intention” of Crown and Church for the soon-to-be Massachusetts Bay Colony, the charter decreed, was the “Knowledge [of] and Obedience [to] the only true God and Savior of Mankind, and the Christian Faith,” this task “the principal End” of the colony. Massachusetts Bay, in short, was chartered as a theocracy.
Among the colony’s leaders, the Rev. John Cotton emerged as a principle figure who civil officials often consulted in matters of law. In 1636 Cotton was tasked with compiling a list of laws observed in the colony. His resulting An Abstract of the Laws of New England cited more than one hundred Old Testament references as justification for many of Massachusetts’ laws. Abstract listed 24 serious crimes, most cribbed straight from the Bible. Crimes deemed worthy of death, as decreed by scripture, included blasphemy, idolatry, witchcraft, heresy, worship of false gods, adultery, incest, sodomy, prostitution and “Profaning of the Lord’s day.”
But there was more: Crime no. 16 in Abstract declared “Rebellious children whether they continue in riot or drunkenness after due correction from their parents, or whether they curse or smite their Parents, to be put to death. Deu. 21:18, 19:20. Ex. 21:12,13. Num. 35: 16,17,18 to 33.”
Five years later in 1641, the General Court of Massachusetts Bay enshrined the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, the first legal code established by European colonists in New England. Liberties incorporated many of the capital crimes listed in Cotton’s Abstract, also [formally] published in 1641. Although Abstract’s Bible-based death penalties abounded in Liberties, few personal freedoms were to be found, most pertaining only to white men.
Women had but two freedoms: a wife’s right to petition a court for an inheritance upon her husband’s death, and protection “from bodily correction or stripes by her husband, unless it be in his own defense upon her assault.” Parental rights (principally that of the father) had but few boundaries. Children’s scant freedoms consisted of a general right (of at least the eldest son) to some portion of their parents’ estate; the right to “complain” to authorities if denied by one’s parents a “timely or convenient marriage”; and a limited right of orphans to appeal to courts for help.
Mercifully, Liberties omitted Abstract’s biblical death penalty for rebellious, rioting or drunken children.
For some 250 years thereafter, the overarching right of white Americans to raise their children as they saw fit remained largely uncontested. At the same time, children of enslaved Black parents, denied any rights in a white supremacist world, were born into a lifetime of slavery void of education. Often oppressed by whites and stripped of their culture and heritage, many Indigenous children suffered greatly in demeaning Indian boarding schools designed to instill white Christian dominance.
Remaining committed to white superiority, the Democratic Party’s 1892 platform included a policy of educational “parental rights.” Two years prior, the federal government had compiled the first comprehensive “Report on Education in the United States.” At that time the education of children remained optional. Public schools had been non-existent in the South prior to the Civil War, that region’s first public schools having been established with federal approval to educate newly freed Black children. Southern public schools for white children emerged after the war.
Some 25 years following the Civil War, the “school is but one agency to aid the family and the individual,” the government’s 1890 report noted. “The family is responsible for the child’s ignorance, and the individual is responsible for his own continued ignorance.” Limited educational opportunities existed for either Black children or poor white children. “A constant diversity exists between rural and city conditions,” the report on Education continued. Schools remained more common in the urban North than the rural South.
Existing schools, the report continued, had begun with parents joining “other parents” in the cooperative endeavor of the “instruction and training” of children. Initially “domestic life” had been the “dominant factor” in educating children, “till the union of families” created “such multitudes” of children that schools took “on a municipal character.”
At the town and city level, educational challenges arose. “As a co-operative agency the school ceases to secure public sympathy and support when it goes beyond the work in which the co-operators can unite,” the 1890 report observed, foretelling the rise of the modern parental rights movement in opposition to diversity. “When the people are essentially agreed in their views of religion and science it is comparatively easy to arrange extended courses of study; but when wide diversities of conscientious conviction exist in the community, all religious, scientific, and historical instruction, beyond commonplace axioms, endangers the co-operation.”
Regional “wide diversities” remained. Southern whites, having violently resisted federal government attempts to enforce Reconstruction-era constitutional rights for Black southerners, refused to give in. Increasingly enacting laws criminalizing blackness, southern states, dominated by the Democratic Party, created an apartheid South. “The democratic party is opposed to state [federal] interference with parental rights and the rights of conscience in the education of children,” the political party of the South decreed in its 1892 platform.
Nevertheless, a series of state court decisions in the early decades of the 20th century demonstrated the national scope of many white Americans’ resistance to public education. Notably in the North, State ex rel. Kelley v. Ferguson, a 1914 Nebraska Supreme Court decision, on the one hand acknowledged public school as “one of the main bulwarks of our nation,” the justices pledging to “not knowingly do anything to undermine it.” Those same justices, however, deemed “our love for this noble institution” to be subject to “the God-given and constitutional right of a parent to have some voice in the bringing up and education of his children.”
Common in the North, integrated public schools long remained absent in the old Confederate South, where white Christian parents cited God’s will in denying Black children the right to sit in the same classrooms as white children. Following the fall of southern apartheid during the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, enraged white Christians resisted federally mandated public school integration, often flying Confederate flags and resorting to violence. Failing in their new war against the federal government, many white southern parents — often citing religious and parental “freedom” — withdrew their children from public education and placed them in privately funded, whites-only Christian segregation academies typically housed in church buildings.
A second federal mandate – the early 1960s removal of government-sponsored prayer from public schools – also angered many white Christians. Collectively, racial integration and the absence of official school prayers in public school classrooms created lasting resentment and birthed political opportunities. In 1980 Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, seeking votes from an emerging white Christian Nationalist Religious Right, dog-whistled racism and made open verbal overtures to restoring government-sponsored public school prayer.
Although Reagan did set about undermining civil rights advances while in office, he failed to pursue the restoration of public school prayers. Sensing an opening nonetheless, Christian Nationalists began systematically building grassroots infrastructure to restore white Christian dominance in America. When inclusive-minded Democrat Bill Clinton won the White House in 1992, a new generation of anti-public education activists were ready. “The liberals just now beginning to feel snug again in Washington should beware,” conservative writers Bill Kristol and Jay Lefkowitz warned shortly after Clinton took office. “A new revolt by parents is brewing in the country against the cultural elite and the liberal bureaucratic state.” Demanding “parental rights,” the “parents revolt” represented a renewed movement for “parental choice and control over their children’s education.”
Although restoring segregation was not possible, the renewed parental rights movement channeled racial anxiety and anger into protesting emerging “gay rights” curriculum. A Louisiana court ruling that “teaching sexual abstinence in a public high school violates the U.S. Constitution’s separation of church and state” also riled many white conservatives, who criticized public education for “usurping the role of parents.” Kristol and Lefkowitz deemed the movement an expanding “populist rebellion” against a liberal federal government.
Growing in intensity, the extremist movement led 1996 presidential candidate Pat Buchanan to pledge to “shut down the U.S. Department of Education, and parental rights will prevail in our public schools again.” Nevertheless, Buchanan failed in his presidential bid. Also fizzling, the short-lived 1990s parental revolt against public education failed to enact any of more than two dozen proposed state legislative parental rights bills. Nor did a proposed parental rights constitutional amendment find any traction.
READ: The Donald Trump-Moms for Liberty-Heritage Foundation Project 2025 Alliance
Re-emerging in 2020-21 with a ferocity magnified by opposition to pro-public health measures protecting Americans from COVID, yet another generation of extremist parental rights advocates is now active. Pushing anti-freedom, anti-life discriminatory education legislation in dozens of states, their efforts hearken back to the era of racial segregation.
Speaking at a memorial event to honor Benjamin Thomas — an Alexandria, Va., Black teenager lynched Aug. 8, 1899 — Americans United President and CEO Rachel Laser noted that the goal of today’s parental rights movement “is to reinforce the hierarchy of traditional power structures in our country and to perpetuate a culture where white, Christian, male, straight and cisgender people are higher status than all others.”
Central to the movement is the suppression of truth and our common humanity. “Their strategy,” Laser continued, “is to take over public education and abuse the power of government to impose their narrow beliefs on everyone.” In some instances their efforts have succeeded in banning discussions of race, gender and/or sexuality; restricting the use of a name or pronoun unaligned with a student’s birth-assigned sex; and/or allowing parental control over curriculum materials.
Enabling the parental rights movement is a Christian Nationalist-led Supreme Court. In August the court, in Department of Education v. Louisiana, temporarily granted the movement’s request to discriminate against transgender students in Christian Nationalist-led states, in violation of a federal act prohibiting such discrimination.
Successes aside, there may be signs that the movement is once again fading. Journalist Jennifer Berkshire, co-host of the education policy podcast “Have You Heard” — and one of few reporters spending significant time in conversation with children — is hopeful.
Speaking on a “Harvard Edcast” episode titled “Parental Rights or Politics,” Berkshire noted that “an interesting and, frankly, almost never acknowledged part of the parent’s right conversation, is that kids have rights too.” Perceiving the current parental rights landscape as being “about the tension between kids trying to find their own way and parents trying to hold onto them,” she observes that children “are out in front of the parents, they are out in front of the culture, and they are driving the expansion of civil rights.”
Is the parental rights movement “a wave that’s on the decline?” Julie Marsh, a professor at the University of Southern California, asked in an Aug. 30, 2024, New York Times article. “We’re perhaps seeing signs of parents being turned off by” the excesses of the movement. She noted the seemingly declining influence of the leading anti-freedom parental rights group misnamed Moms for Liberty — a coalition partner of the Heritage Foundation’s Christian Nationalist Project 2025.
To Marsh’s point, the three-year-old Moms for Liberty organization does appear to be in disarray, in the past two years being embroiled in a sex scandal, experiencing declining participation and suffering big losses in school board elections. Reasonable-minded parents seemingly perceive the anti-freedom nature of the movement. In 2024 alone, according to Brookings Institution data, the group’s school board candidates in Florida and across the country have won a mere 54 of 166 known contests.
From the early colonial era “Body of Liberties” to today’s “Moms for Liberty,” theocrats for centuries have proclaimed their “freedom” in the name of God to punish and oppress persons whom they dislike. Today it is time to call the politicized parental rights movement for what it actually is: yet another battle in the war against freedom, life and democracy, a war waged by, in the words of Americans United’s Laser, “predominantly Christian people protecting their traditional privilege and power in the face of changing demographics and civil rights movements in our country.”
This article was originally published in the July/August 2024 issue of Church & State magazine, a project of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. It is reprinted here with permission.
