The Power Worshippers

by Katherine Stewart

  Nevertheless, the profile of the organization within the larger movement continued to climb. United in Purpose was a cosponsor of the 2018 Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C, its logo repeating on publicity backdrops along with those of the Family Research Council and other top organizational players. In advance of the summit, United in Purpose held a ticketed breakfast event featuring Dallas, Eldred, and Faith & Freedom Coalition president Ralph Reed. “Remember how we were told we were going away? How we would recede as a political force?” Reed said to the crowd. “Not true, because the thing that matters is not your share of the population. That is declining. It’s the share of the electorate.” Reed nodded. “It only matters who actually turns out.” As the crowd murmured its assent, he continued, “If you take evangelicals who are 27 percent of the electorate and you add to them 11 percent of the electorate that are frequent Mass-attending Catholics, folks, it’s 38 percent of the electorate, and 56 percent of the entire Republican vote nationwide. If that vote goes away, the Republican party ceases to exist as a reliable political party.”

  United in Purpose also doles out awards to hard-right leaders. At the inaugural Impact Awards ceremony in 2017, which took place at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., awardees included the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo; Frank Gaffney, who has warned of a Muslim Brotherhood plot to infiltrate the conservative movement; and Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn—all of whom appear on the leaked membership list for the Council for National Policy.30 An outstanding impact award went to Sean Hannity, and the organization gave its lifetime achievement award to Richard Viguerie. The awards were introduced by Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, president of Liberty Consulting and the wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas.31 In 2018 it was Fox News host Mark Levin’s turn to collect UiP’s outstanding impact award. Ginni Thomas presided over that year’s awards ceremony, too.32 Meanwhile, 2018 tax filings for a new, Southland, Texas–based organization with a similar stated mission, USATransForm, appeared to have many of the same individuals at the helm, including Bill Dallas, Ken Eldred, Vernon Lewis, and Reid Rutherford.33

  It remains to be seen whether United in Purpose’s visibility outside of the Christian nationalist hothouse will increase as the 2020 presidential election approaches. In early 2018, before it was taken down, a question appeared on the UiP website: “Is it possible to transform American culture by bringing together conservative Christian organizations to act in unity to reach their shared goals?”34 The answer, apparently, was “a resounding ‘YES,’ and we’re just getting started. ‘Transformation through Unity’ is a reality that is building momentum as we look to 2018, 2020 and beyond.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Proselytizers and Privatizers

  At the Heritage Academy, a publicly funded charter school network in Arizona, according to a 2016 lawsuit, high school students are taught that “All things were created by God, therefore upon Him all mankind are equally dependent and to Him they are equally responsible.” They are asked to memorize a list of “28 Principles” of “sound government,” among which are that “to protect man’s rights, God has revealed certain Principles of divine law” (the ninth Principle) and that “The highest level of prosperity occurs when there is a free-market economy and a minimum of government regulations” (the fifteenth Principle). To complete the course, students are told they are duty-bound to teach these principles to other individuals outside of school and family.1

  The Texas-based Newman International Academy charter network, which presently operates seven schools, is named after Dr. Hepzibah Newman, CEO of an evangelistic organization, Brook of Life, which was established in February of 2011 “to preach the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Brook of Life runs before- and after-school programs that aim to lead elementary-age children to “worship” and prayer; the programs appear to be installed at every Newman International Academy charter school. Brook of Life’s other founder is Dr. Lazarus K. George, whose wife, Dr. Sheba George, is the superintendent of Newman International Academies.

  Also in Texas, Allen Beck, the founder of Advantage Academy, a four-campus charter school funded by taxpayers, has said he established the schools in order to bring “the Bible, prayer, and patriotism back into the public school system.”2 Students at Advantage Academy are also exposed to heavy doses of libertarian or free market economic ideology.3

  The same pattern is evident at the American Heritage Academy (which is distinct from Heritage Academy), a two-campus charter school also located in Arizona. Describing itself as a “unique educational experience with old-fashioned principles that have worked for hundreds of years,” the school celebrates a set of “Principles of Liberty” that include: “The role of religion is foundational”; “To protect rights God revealed certain divine laws”; and “Free market and minimal government best supports prosperity.”4

  These examples of church-school fusion are far from anomalous in the emerging charter school universe. Over the past four decades, Christian nationalists have achieved remarkable progress toward a longstanding goal: to convert America’s public schools into conservative Christian academies, even as they weaken or even destroy public education altogether. And they have done so in large part by means of an alliance with education “reformers”—in particular, those reformers who are ideologically committed to the privatization of public education.

  Hostility to public education among religious reactionaries has a long history. In 1979, Jerry Falwell made the agenda clear when he said he hoped to see the day when there wouldn’t be “any public schools—the churches will have taken them over and Christians will be running them.”5 But the alliance between privatizers and proselytizers received a major boost in the 1990s in Michigan, the first state to feel the full combined force of economic and religious education reformers. The story really begins with the emergence of a particular kind of billionaire, and it reaches its apex when the daughter of one of those billionaires grew up and became the secretary of education for the United States.

  A century and a half ago, members of the Christian Reformed Church, a small and unusually strict sect of Dutch Calvinists, settled the area around Holland, Michigan.6 The group and region prospered. Yet the ultraconservative nature of their religion left a powerful imprint on the area. Until several years ago it was forbidden to serve alcohol at restaurants on Sundays.

  The region is also known for the surprising number of billionaires it has produced, many of them ultraconservative in their politics. Chief among them were Richard DeVos Sr., the cofounder of Amway, a multilevel marketing business, and his business partner Jay Van Andel. Joining the ranks of the super-rich of Holland was Edgar Prince, an auto-parts magnate who shared with the DeVos family an affinity for conservative politics and antipathy toward organized labor.

  The family summered at Castle Park, where the yacht club functioned as a lively social hub. In 1979, Prince’s daughter Betsy married Richard DeVos Sr.’s son, Richard “Dick” Jr., making her Holland’s version of a crown princess.

  The Holland elite live large. Betsy DeVos’s family owns or has owned a dozen-odd leisure boats, the flagship of which is a 163-foot, $40 million yacht called Seaquest, which boasts space for twelve guests and an equal number of crew.7 They also reportedly own four airplanes and two helicopters.8 One of their vacation homes, a sprawling 22,000-square-foot shingle-style summer mansion in Holland, Michigan, has a nautical design theme.9 Like a well-run aristocratic family, the DeVoses know how to keep the locals happy. They invest in the community, paying for town restoration projects and other initiatives that make the clan popular here in a way that they are not in other parts of the country. It’s what the clan does with its money beyond the flatlands of western Michigan that has had a profound impact on national politics.

  In financial terms, in fact, the Christian right today is to a substantial extent the creation of the Michigan wing of the American plutocracy. Since the 1970s the late Richard DeVos Sr. and his wife and childr
en, including Dick and Betsy, have been major funders of leading national groups on the religious right. The DeVos family donated millions of dollars to the militantly reactionary Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, founded by the broadcaster D. James Kennedy, who instructed attendees at a 2005 conference organized by his ministry to “exercise godly dominion” over “every aspect and institution of human society.”10 Through their foundation, Betsy DeVos and her husband have donated to the Foundation for Traditional Values, a nonprofit with a mission “to restore and affirm the Judeo-Christian values upon which America was established.”11 DeVos money has flowed toward Steve Green’s Museum of the Bible, where the donor wall acknowledges major gifts from multiple members of the extended clan.

  Beginning in the 1970s, Richard DeVos and his wife and children have also worked systematically to build up some of the movement’s leading free market policy groups, including the Acton Institute and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.12 Amway cofounder Van Andel, meanwhile, endowed and served as a trustee of Hillsdale College, which the religious right likes to cast as “the conservative Harvard”13 and which counts Betsy DeVos’s brother, Erik Prince, as an alum.

  Edgar Prince and his wife, Elsa, were equally munificent with the seminal groups on the religious right. In 1983 they substantially contributed to the creation of the Family Research Council. The Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation is a key backer of groups such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, the legal juggernaut of the religious right; Focus on the Family; and other like-minded organizations. Some of the leading figures of the movement, including Chuck Colson, James Dobson, and Gary Bauer, came to be family friends.

  Betsy DeVos’s brother, Erik Prince, founded the private contracting firm Blackwater and presently heads a private equity firm called Frontier Resource Group. He, too, has contributed to the Family Research Council and other advocates of “traditional family values” through the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation, where he served as vice president, as well as through a foundation he ran with his first wife, Joan.14

  Erik, who was widowed after Joan lost her battle with cancer, is presently married to Stacy DeLuke. Possibly the two bonded over shared political passions; she reportedly posted pictures from inside the Trump campaign headquarters the night of the 2016 election.15

  Prince has been uninhibited in his involvement in presidential and partisan politics. He donated $250,000 to support Trump’s campaign effort. He has also acknowledged being present at a widely reported strategy meeting in August 2016 at Trump Tower. Other attendees reportedly included Donald Trump Jr., Joel Zamel, an Israeli expert in social media manipulation, and Lebanese American businessman George Nader, an advisor to the effective ruler of the United Arab Emirates. (In early 2019, Nader was placed in federal custody after FBI agents discovered sexually explicit videos of children in his possession and now faces additional charges of child sex trafficking.)

  At the Trump Tower meeting, according to an article in the New York Times, Nader mentioned to Donald Trump Jr. that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates wished to help Trump win the election.16 Prince has said the purpose of the meeting was “to discuss Iran policy.”17 Prince was also named in the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections in connection with alleged meetings with foreign agents in the Seychelles.

  The economic ideology that the Michigan billionaires have favored, not surprisingly, is of the kind that celebrates their own multilevel marketing fortunes as the mark of divine blessings. In this context, at least, Erik Prince’s financial contributions to the Trump campaign were far from unusual. According to a 2014 article in Mother Jones, “Since 1970, DeVos family members have invested at least $200 million in a host of right-wing causes—think tanks, media outlets, political committees, evangelical outfits, and a string of advocacy groups.”18

  When it comes to efforts to eviscerate labor unions, the Holland elite can be counted upon to fund the necessary political campaigns with gusto. And when DeVos was heading into her Senate confirmation hearing for education secretary, twenty-two of the senators considering her nomination—including four of whom sat on the Senate education committee that oversees the process19—were recipients of the largesse of the DeVos family and their affiliated PACs, receiving in total nearly $900,000.20 Commenting on her family’s political giving, Betsy DeVos once wrote, “We expect a return on our investment.”21

  In the Devos-Prince universe, the economic activism and religious activism are often indistinguishable from one another. Shortly after its inception, the DeVos-funded Foundation for Traditional Values distributed a book, America’s Providential History, which asserts that “a civil government built on Biblical principles provides the road on which the wheel of economic progress can turn with great efficiency.”22 According to a chapter titled “Principles of Christian Economics,” “Secularists are cut off from the Bible and the mind of Christ (the chief source of creativity), and so they get fewer ideas for inventing new and better tools.”23 Posing the question, “Why Are Some Nations in Poverty?” the book goes on to explain that “the primary reason that nations are in poverty is lack of spiritual growth … Today, India has widespread problems, yet these are not due to a lack of food, but are a result of people’s spiritual beliefs. The majority of Indians are Hindus.”24

  The book also offers a distinct perspective on education policy: “Privatizing education would be a great step forward in correcting the problems of modern day education.”25

  At some level, the world of the Holland plutocracy was always interested in the topic of education and fundamentally hostile to public education. In a 1986 sermon titled “A Godly Education,” Pastor D. James Kennedy, whose ministry profited mightily from DeVos-Prince clan largesse, asserted that children in public schools were being “brainwashed in Godless secularism.”26 This harsh characterization no doubt met with approval by the family of the future education secretary. The foreword to a 2010 posthumously selected collection of Kennedy’s work, Well Done: A Christian Doctrine of Works, was written by a Mr. Rich DeVos, who also used the occasion to praise Amway’s expansion into Russia.27

  The Devos/Prince-supported Family Research Council rather awkwardly advocated the abolition of the department that Betsy would one day come to lead. “The Department [of Education] is unconstitutional, ineffective, and wasteful. In short, it should be abolished … Aim carefully and slay the dragon for once and for all,” wrote Rob Schwarzwalder, then senior vice president of the Family Research Council, in 2010.28 However, it was not until the late 1990s, when discussions about school vouchers and education reform began to gain traction across the country, that the heirs to the fortune—and in particular Betsy DeVos—likely realized the best way by far to advance their radical vision for America would be to mount a devastating assault on the nation’s system of public schools.

  Vouchers first came to prominence in the 1950s and ’60s as a way to funnel state money to racially segregated religious academies.29 In the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, as we saw in chapter three, white Americans in the South organized massive resistance against federal orders to desegregate schools. While some districts shut down public schools altogether, others promoted “segregation academies” for white students, often with religious programming, to be subsidized with tuition grants and voucher schemes. Today vouchers remain popular with supporters of religious schools, many of whom see public education as inherently secular and corrupt.

  Vouchers are also favored among disciples of the free market advocate Milton Friedman, who saw them as a step on the road to getting government out of the education business altogether. Speaking to an audience at a convention of the American Legislative Exchange Council in 2006, Friedman said, “The ideal would be to have parents control and pay for their school’s education, just as they pay for their food, their clothing, and their housing.” Acknowledging that indigent parents might be unable to afford their children’s education in the same way that they might
suffer food or housing insecurity, Friedman added, “Those should be handled as charity problems, not educational problems.”30

  Friedman was a free market fundamentalist, not a religious one. But his ideas were hailed by Christian conservatives, and the admiration was mutual. In 2004, when “school choice” pioneers Mae and Martin Duggan were honored at an event hosted by the Heritage Foundation for their work with Citizens for Educational Freedom, the pro-voucher group that Mae founded and that at one point represented three hundred voucher organizations, Friedman sent a letter praising the Duggans as “allies in a common cause.”31

  For many supporters, of course, the underlying motive for voucher programs is not to improve education but to eliminate nonsectarian education. As Mae Duggan once said, “We don’t want people teaching humanism. Humanism is the basis of the public schools.”32 When Martin Duggan died in 2015, he and Mae were honored for their efforts by American Federation for Children—a charter lobbying and advocacy organization funded by the family of Betsy DeVos.

  Up in western Michigan, the combination of religious conservatism and economic libertarianism in the voucher movement found a natural home. In the mid-1990s the DeVos-backed Foundation for Traditional Values founded the Student Statesmanship Institute, which describes itself as “Michigan’s premier Biblical Worldview & Leadership Training for High School Students.” Betsy DeVos was listed on the SSI advisory board as recently as 2015 and has been featured as an active SSI participant nearly as far back as the program had a functional website. SSI, which presently holds summer camps in several states as well as yearlong programs and sundry workshops, functions as a pipeline for teens seeking to engage in right-wing political activism. Students participating in the SSI role-play as political leaders and participate in mock legislative hearings and committees. According to the SSI website, SSI “Legislative Experiences” have instructed students in topics such as “Laying a Biblical Foundation, Ambassadors for Christ, Christian Citizenship, Worldviews in Action,” and “Science and the Bible.”33