The drumbeat of Puritan religious beliefs has never ceased in the four hundred years since those colonists landed on North American shores, carrying forward the intolerance of the Dark Ages. In the last century as industrialization has expanded into the digital age, the zealous efforts of these extremists have entered a feeding frenzy over the social changes which have arrived in tandem with cultural advancement. As women have become more empowered by gaining the right to vote and ensuring bodily autonomy, as well as taking their place alongside men in the workplace, horrified conservatives pushing the ‘way back’ button have been joined by a new class of super-wealthy tech industrialists looking for more power over the government.

While serving as early leaders in support of education and representative governance, never think for a minute that Puritans only fostered positive change in society. They supported and participated in slavery. They encouraged child labor and state-sanctioned corporal and capital punishments, warfare against Indigenous peoples including women and children, and the persecution of religious dissenters. Their use of violence was heavily shaped by their strict religious adherence to Old Testament laws.

Commonalities between the British peerage and today’s super-rich include immense concentrated wealth, significant influence over infrastructure and information, and the creation of insular, exclusive, and self-reinforcing social networks. Both groups operate outside traditional constraints, using their resources to shape policy, maintain elite status, and protect their assets for their heirs, a trademark of aristocracy in earlier regimes. Traditionally, the peerage leaned conservative and was historically resistant to rapid social change, a stance shared by many of today’s economic elites who support the expansion of existing power structures. Both the traditional British peerage and today’s U.S. peerage need voters in order to penetrate the nation’s seats of power, centering on the desire to enforce a specific cultural identity, uphold traditional power structures, and leverage a “golden era” narrative for political influence. While separated by centuries, both often position themselves as guardians of a Christian national heritage.

To date, the forward thrust of the super-rich, especially those with interests in artificial intelligence, is applauded by approximately one-third of the United States electorate, largely religious extremists, racists, and xenophobes, who remain in lockstep with the Trump Administration despite Trump’s conspicuous violation of basic Christian tenets.

Despite Trump’s conspicuous abuse of the exacting moral standards advocated by Christian Nationalists, the new Puritans embrace him because they view him as a “chosen” leader ordained by God to protect their interests, restore the United States to a perceived Christian foundation, and battle against secular, liberal, and globalist forces. Despite his personal history being flagrantly in violation of traditional Christian moral standards, his support among white evangelicals and Christian Nationalists is strong.

It’s worthy of note that Christian Nationalism has gained strength in tandem with the termination of the Fairness Doctrine, a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) policy (1949–1987) requiring radio and television broadcasters to cover controversial issues of public importance and present contrasting viewpoints fairly. It aimed to ensure balanced public discourse due to limited broadcast frequencies, but was repealed in 1987 under President Reagan. Ronald Reagan knew Rupert Murdoch before the Reagan FCC formally ended the Fairness Doctrine, and records show the two men met in the Oval Office in early 1983. Murdoch had already developed connections with Reagan’s inner circle in the early 1980s.That repeal was pivotal to Rupert Murdoch’s expansion in the U.S.

Murdoch is widely recognized as a conservative media mogul whose outlets, including Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Post, generally promote right-of-center, populist, and conservative viewpoints. While he has self-identified as a libertarian focusing on free markets and reduced regulation, his career has centered on supporting conservative politicians and parties globally. This deregulation enabled the rise of modern ideological talk radio and cable news.

By Reagan’s removal of the Fairness Doctrine requirements, Murdoch was able to launch Fox News in 1996 as a distinctly conservative and partisan channel. It should not pass notice that Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News Network (colloquially Dominion v. Fox) was a U.S. defamation lawsuit filed in March 2021 by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News Channel and its corporate parent Fox Corporation. Dominion’s complaint sought $1.6 billion in damages, alleging several Fox programs had broadcast false statements that Dominion’s voting machines had been rigged to steal the 2020 United States presidential election from then-president Donald Trump. Fox News agreed to pay Dominion $787.5 million and acknowledged the court’s earlier ruling that Fox had broadcast false statements about Dominion. The settlement did not require Fox News to apologize.

With the door open to dishonest and/or slanted ‘news,’ what we stand to lose is no less than the backbone of our constitution. Perhaps in 1975 no one could have foreseen that Congress, strapped financially by nearly 20 years of war in Vietnam, would refuse to fully fund the IDEA program. Reagan essentially guaranteed our current crisis in his tax cuts, signing into law in August 1981 a top marginal income tax rate for the highest earners from 70% to 50% and lowered the maximum capital gains tax rate from 28% to 20%. In 1986, a further drop in wealth tax dropped the top individual income tax rate to 35% in 1987, and eventually down to 28% in 1988.

Even now, many legislators cringe at the prospect of providing adequate financial support for this mandate. Yet the outcome is clear. Real and perceived failures of the public school system has led to a crisis wherein religious advocates and their advocates such as Fox News, acting on their perception of their Christian duty, have managed to work their way through the court system to force tax dollars to support religious education.

The effort to at least gain sufficient funding for the IDEA legislation continues. As reported by Peter Greene for Forbes magazine, published April 17-18, 2026, a Senate bill introduced by Senators Mark Kelly, Mazie Hirono, and an additional 28 senators have introduced the Keep Public Funds in Public Schools Act.

• One portion of the President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” was a federal school voucher program that any state could join. But before that plan can go into effect, a new Senate bill has been proposed that would undo the vouchers entirely.
• … The act would strike IRS Code Section 25, the portion of the IRS code that was inserted to create the federal school voucher program, eliminating that program.
• The new voucher program was sold as a tax credit program. It would allow taxpayers to claim a $1,700 tax credit by diverting that payment from the IRS to a scholarship granting organization that would then award at least $1,530 of that donation to a student (the rules governing the program allow SGOs to keep 10% of the donated funds).
• Kelly cites his home state of Arizona as a cautionary tale, where taxpayer-funded school vouchers have become costly:
• “Since 2022, our state’s universal voucher program has diverted and drained money from public schools; last year alone cost Arizona taxpayers nearly $1 billion. Instead of investing in classrooms, special education services, or school safety, lawmakers pushed massive tax giveaways and created a parallel education system that lacks transparency and accountability.”[1]

News reporters including Craig Harris have run a series of reports showing much of voucher money has gone to questionable and disallowed purposes, including dirt bikes, custom tires and luxury hotel stays. Voucher advocates such as EdChoice have pushed back, but have had difficulty debunking Harris’s results. [2]

• “In Arizona, we’ve already seen how universal vouchers are leading to rampant fraud and benefiting people who already had the means to send their kids to private school, while decimating public education for everyone else,” said Kelly.
• …When Kentucky’s similarly-structured tax credit scholarship program was challenged in court, the state made a similar argument that the program did not use any public taxpayer funds. But when the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled against the program, they rejected that argument. “The money at issue cannot be characterized as simply private funds,” they wrote, “rather it represents the tax liability that the taxpayer would otherwise owe.”
• When it comes to granting tax credits, the federal government has one power that states do not. Most states require a balanced budget; the state needs to find a way to cover the money it lost by offering credits rather than collecting on the tax liability. The federal government can just add the uncollected taxes to its deficit tab. Kelly noted in an interview, “It is a deficit bomb, this federal program.”
• The Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan entity that assists Congress on tax legislation, estimated that the credit could cost $25.9 billion between 2025 and 2034 or around $3 billion to $4 billion a year. That would mean potential income of $300-$400 million for SGOs [Scholarship Granting Organizations]; several organizations are preparing to launch national SGOs to work with the federal voucher program.

In addition to Kelly and Hirono, the Keep Public Funds in Public Schools Act is cosponsored by 28 other Democratic senators.

Response to the bill has come from multiple arenas of American society.

• In response to the introduction of the Keep Public Funds in Public Schools Act, Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, President and CEO of Interfaith Alliance, said:
• “Public schools are sacred to our multi-faith democracy. They are fertile ground for religious freedom — places where students from all walks of life can learn and grow together, no matter their faith. We should be strengthening our public schools, not abandoning them and violating religious freedom in the process.”
• “This disastrous federal voucher scheme is straight from the Christian nationalist playbook. It would force every taxpayer to pay for religious education, bolster private schools that can advance extreme religious agendas, and invite the government into religious education, undermining the autonomy of families, houses of worship, and religious schools. To reject this assault on religious freedom and help set students up to thrive in our multi-faith democracy, Congress must pass the Keep Public Funds in Public Schools Act.”[3]

First Focus on Children is a bipartisan advocacy organization dedicated to making children and families the priority in federal policy and budget decisions. In November 2024, the organization issued the following statement: [4]

• Voucher programs may use terminology like “education savings accounts,” “opportunity scholarships,” or “tax credit scholarships.” While policymakers use a range of terms to describe voucher programs, they all function similarly: by diverting public school funding to private schools. Since the term “voucher” can be associated with negative perceptions by constituents, using alternative terminology has become a common strategy to pass unpopular policies.
• While “school choice” sounds good in theory, the privatization of public school funds exacerbates educational inequity and increases the disparities it claims to mend. Data continues to reaffirm that school vouchers are riddled with fraud, show unimpressive results, defund public education, and amount to a handout to the wealthy. Supporters argue that vouchers expand equity and opportunity, but in fact, vouchers divert public money to the private, often religious, education of a handful of students.

The Economic Policy Institute examined the economics involved with vouchers versus public schools: [5]

• The growing popularity of vouchers raises a host of crucial questions and concerns. Key to informing the debate are questions of public finance and education quality. Is allowing public money to leave the public school system and follow kids to private schools the most effective or equitable way to make sure every child has access to an excellent education? Our view is that it’s not. Public dollars allocated to education should go to boosting spending in public systems, not subsidizing private education.
• Proponents of vouchers try to claim that expanding them would not harm public resources for education. Their argument hinges on the fact that public school spending is generally determined by governments setting a per-pupil allocation and then multiplying this allocation by projected enrollment. This funding model allows voucher proponents to claim that if vouchers pull children out of public schools, it still leaves per-pupil spending untouched, even though vouchers might reduce overall spending. In effect, proponents are arguing that vouchers would not degrade public schools’ ability to provide educational services.
• But there are many flaws in this argument. Most obviously, introducing any new demand on public expenditures will lead to some pressure throughout public budgets—including school budgets—even if it does not immediately come directly from public school allocations. Many vouchers end up going to students who have never been in public schools, so funding these students’ private school expenses introduces new pressures on public budgets.

This perverse drive to compromise public education by using tax dollars in support of religious teaching didn’t happen overnight, nor will it end any time soon. But what’s at risk is nothing less than our nation itself, founded on principles now dangling on a precipice. Equal opportunity to education means not only that each child has the right to an education, but also that all education provides balanced exposure to the same fundamental subject matter. The current divide in this nation’s society cannot be remedied without a truly equal education of our young. Our tax dollars must not support religious education.[6]

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[1] Greene, Petere. “Senate Bill Proposes Rollback of Federal School Vouchers,” Forbes, Apr 17, 2026. https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/ 2026/04/17/senate-bill-proposes-rollback-of-federal-school-vouchers/

[2] Links provided in the article include the full text of the proposed bill. https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2026/04/17/senate-bill-proposes-rollback-of-federal-school-vouchers/

[3] McDonald, Tranée. “Keep Public Funds in Public Schools,” Interfaith Alliance, April 16, 2026. https://www.interfaithalliance.org/post/keep-public-funds-in-public-schools

[4] Klam, Lily. “Privatizing Public Schools Funds: Threats to Equity, Access, and Educational Quality,” First Focus on Children, Nov 15, 2024. https://firstfocus.org/resource/privatizing-public-school-funds-threats-to-equity-access-and-educational-quality/

[5] Wething, Hilary. “How vouchers harm public schools,” Economic Policy Institute, Dec 19, 2024.  https://www.epi.org/publication/vouchers-harm-public-schools/

[6] For insights on how minorities can rule over the majority in our republic, see https://www.ie.edu/insights/articles/minority-rules-in-the-united-states/

This is the 8th chapter in the booklet  New Puritans and the U. S. Peerage: The Willful Destruction of Public Education