Taxpayer dollars, Christian lies: What Alabama’s voucher program really buys
Christian textbooks that deny evolution, downplay slavery, and avoid critical thinking are now being subsidized with public funds
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Perhaps the most glaring church/state separation problem in America right now is how a number of states are taking money that should be going to public schools and using them to fund private schools. Those private schools are almost always religious schools. And those religious schools are almost always Christian schools.
In short, they’re using taxpayer dollars to fund religious indoctrination.
Last year, Alabama passed the CHOOSE Act, which gives families up to $7,000 per child to spend on private school tuition, private tutoring, or educational material. Families could also get $2,000 per child if they’re homeschooling their kids. While lawmakers are initially limiting the program to families making about $75,000/year (for a couple with one child), by 2026, it’ll be open to far more people and cost the legislature over $100 million/year. Families representing nearly 37,000 children applied for cash during the first year of the program.
That also means we now have a sense of where that money is being used.
According to Rebecca Griesbach of AL.com, over 15,000 of those applicants attend private school and over 9,000 are home-schooled. And that suggests a lot of the money is funding Christianity.
We know that because public records show that money is going to schools that use fundamentalist Christian textbooks that teach lies about the age of the Earth, claim that rock music is a sign of “rebellion” against God, and deny evolution.
Many providers that receive taxpayer dollars, AL.com found, sell or use materials that downplay slavery, teach that humans lived among dinosaurs, and state that rock music and mental health issues are “signs of rebellion.” AL.com reviewed curricula from nearly 300 schools and verified homeschool vendors.
Of the 184 private schools that published their curricula online, nearly half – at least 79 – use materials that have been flagged by experts for a lack of depth and rigor.
Those private Christian schools are using textbooks that are well-known for keeping children uneducated. Vendors include “Abeka, Bob Jones University and the Association of Christian Schools International.”
In an Abeka history textbook, authors write that “slaves seemed to be better investments than indentured servants,” and claim that freedmen promoted “fiscal irresponsibility” during Reconstruction. Authors also blamed the decline of “American’s views on race relations” on the nation’s first Black president.
Another popular provider, Bob Jones University, stresses abstinence and encourages students to reject same-sex marriage in its health curricula.
“Contemporary culture emphasizes the importance of love with slogans like, ‘love wins,’” a BJU teacher’s guide reads. “But this slogan twists the virtue of love by disconnecting it from Scripture, using it to promote the LGBTQ agenda.”
When researchers looked into these books just a couple of years ago, they found evidence of climate denial, the false claim that certain scientists made their discoveries only because God helped them, and passages encouraging students to memorize what God made during each of the first six days of Creation. The practice questions at the ends of chapters were also laughable because they offered no challenge to students. (In one textbook, students were asked if “Deck means (a) an angry elephant (b) a floor of a boat.”)
What happens if you use your voucher money on a regular science textbook? Well, even that’s not a safe bet because we’re still talking about Alabama:
(Alabama public school science textbooks include a disclaimer that calls evolution a controversial theory.)
I swear I forgot that was still in there...
In any case, that means students who use these religious books aren’t just staying ignorant without realizing it, they may be screwing themselves over when they get to college and realize they don’t know any of the basic material. And that’s assuming they even get into college.
“It’s straight up propaganda,” said Aimee Jurjevich, who learned from two of the three textbooks as a homeschooler and at a Birmingham-area private school. When she went to college, she said she confronted the amount of information she had to catch up on.
“The biggest surprise to me was taking history and science classes, and just thinking I’ve been lied to,” she said. “And that just adds to the mental load, because you’re having to relearn it all over again.”
As Jurjevich says in the article, it’s not that you learn nothing using those Christian textbooks. It’s that religious education is often built on memorizing and regurgitating. There’s no critical thinking because there can’t be. If you thought about this stuff long enough, none of it would make any sense.
That’s not just in science, either. It happens with Saxon Math, where the focus is on algorithms and examples, rather than acquiring the kind of “number sense” that will make it easier to make sense of higher-order problems in the future. (Remember when people complained about “Common Core”? This was one of the big concerns because students were initially taking longer to solve basic problems instead of just applying an algorithm and spitting out an answer. The former helped them understand the process, which would serve them well down the road; the latter left many students ignorant of the process even if it got them the right answer more quickly. Trust me on this one: The students who excel in higher-level math classes are the ones who understand the process.)
This isn’t just me saying this. The research backs it up:
A 2018 Orlando Sentinel investigation into Abeka, BJU Press and Accelerated Christian Education found that the texts “focus on simple reading passages, basic math and repetitive activities, such as copying sentences, with little to demand students think critically.”
A 2013 study by Chris and Sarah Lubienski found that among students from similar social and economic backgrounds, public school students tested higher in math than their peers in private schools.
They also found that several private schools were using outdated math curricula – including many of the materials currently used by Alabama private schools.
And yet some of the companies publishing these textbooks have been approved by the state anyway, making it possible for taxpayer dollars to be funneled to them.
Apologia, a North Carolina-based company that publishes Christian textbooks and online courses, states in its biology curriculum that the Earth is thousands of years old, rather than millions of years old. In a zoology textbook, authors claim dinosaurs came into existence on the sixth day of Creation and suggest that they lived among humans.
Even when a Christian curriculum is rigorous in certain ways, it’s deficient or worse in others. The founder of one approved curriculum, Lemons-Aid Learning, said her books were “research-validated and evidence-based.” But it’s also aligned with a conservative Christian worldview that says homosexuality is a sin and that “Marxism” will “short-circuit God’s design and result in human suffering.”
All of that’s to say Alabama is already making a mistake by sending taxpayer dollars to private religious schools. Now they’re compounding that mistake by not having any kind of serious oversight when it comes to the curricular choices made at these schools or the textbook companies that the money can be spent on, which means people are wasting their vouchers on books and schools that aren’t preparing their children for any kind of academic success outside their bubble.
None of this is an accident. It’s not like this is some glitch in an otherwise flawless program. This is why conservatives want vouchers: They want to siphon public money into private religious pipelines where accountability is non-existent, expertise is optional, and indoctrination is marketed as “education.” The CHOOSE Act isn’t empowering families. It’s subsidizing ignorance. The state is rewarding companies that actively miseducate children, largely because of their Christian focus, all while starving public schools of the resources they need to deliver an honest, evidence-based curriculum.
The worst part—what makes this genuinely unforgivable—is that the children caught in this system will pay the highest price. They are collateral damage in the right-wing quest to destroy public education. They will graduate thinking they were educated, only to realize when it’s far too late that they never actually learned what they needed to. They were preparing for a world that doesn’t exist except in fiction. If they ever try to get a job in the secular world, or go to a secular college, they’ll realize how ill-prepared they are, all because Republicans handed their futures to whoever cited a Bible verse.
It’s not education. It’s just sabotage.
Christian churches who pay no taxes keep sticking their hands inside the pockets of taxpayers to fuel their indoctrination.
They want to groom children? Let them pay full boat. If they don't want to do that, then let them pray for their needs like Jesus told them. Or is prayer not all it's cracked up to be?
I would be curious to learn the racial demographics of these private schools. I have a feeling most would be majority white with a few token minorities.
Segregation was, after all, the reason for most of these schools existing in the first place even if the people running them won't admit that now.