Inside the anti-LGBTQ effort to put Christianity back in schools
Some Christian pastors and politicians argue that school prayer would prevent children from identifying as transgender. LGBTQ rights advocates are fighting back.
“Grapevine” is a new NBC News podcast about faith and power — and what it means to protect children — in an American suburb. Listen to the series here.
Political and religious leaders who have long fought to put God and prayer back in schools are seizing on a growing backlash against transgender people to advance their agenda.
Some evangelical pastors who regularly deliver sermons in support of school prayer have recently added a twist — preaching that Christian traditions are needed in classrooms to stop children from identifying as transgender.
At national conservative gatherings, politicians and activists have been attempting to draw direct connections between the lack of religious instruction in schools and the growing acceptance of transgender people in mainstream culture.
“School prayer is banned, but drag shows are allowed to permeate the whole place,” former President Donald Trump said at the Conservative Political Action Conference last year. “You can’t teach the Bible, but you can teach children that America is evil and that men are able to get pregnant.”
In another speech this spring in North Carolina, Trump — the front-runner in polls for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination — marveled at the power of this new talking point to rile up supporters.
“I talk about transgender,” he said, “everyone goes crazy.”
Trump, like other GOP politicians, is tapping into an ascendent evangelical movement that rejects church-state separation as a false doctrine and views LGBTQ acceptance as a threat to America.
The two-pronged fight to elevate Christianity and restrict trans rights in classrooms is the focus of a new six-part narrative podcast by NBC News Studios. The series, “Grapevine,” documents a well-funded campaign to impose conservative, biblical morality in public schools in Grapevine, Texas, and reveals its impact on the lives of teachers, students and parents. While the podcast focuses on the political clash in one suburban school system, similar fights are unfolding in communities across the country.
“What we’re seeing is the culmination of decades of political activism by the Christian right,” said David Brockman, a scholar of religion at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.
Brockman, who has spent years studying the influence of far-right Christian activism, said some evangelical leaders see the vitriolic backlash against transgender people, LGBTQ children’s books and gender-affirming medical care as a powerful new tool to motivate followers.
In Grapevine, newly elected school board members backed by a far-right Christian cellphone company approved a sweeping plan last year that, among other things, banned mention of “gender fluidity” from libraries and classrooms, which the document defined as any belief that “espouses the view that biological sex is merely a social construct.”
