Focusing on the Family

Chapter 5 examines how by the early 1970s white evangelicals utilized the emerging rhetoric of colorblindness in service to the defense of their households. When the Supreme Court forced South Carolina to enact substantive desegregation of the state’s public schools in the closing years of the 1960s, white Christian parents interpreted the move as a threat to their children’s well-being. In response, these parents helped create private religious schools that functioned as havens, they believed, for keeping their children safe. White Christian parents rarely discussed race, maintaining instead that they were merely following God’s mandate to shepherd their children by creating schools with stricter behavioral standards and higher educational expectations than the integrated public schools. But this chapter documents how these private schools, in actuality, represented another bastion of religiously motivated resistance to racial equality and helped extend the legacy of segregationist Christianity into the twenty-first century.