The end goal? Government-funded religious indoctrination.

Aug 16, 2024

During a training session for future pastors, one Christian speaker urged the audience to have their churches launch their own private schools as soon as possible. It was easy, he told them, because taxpayers were subsidizing the one his church began in Florida to the tune of millions of dollars—and, more importantly, it gave them the chance to win new child converts.

It was a blunt admission of the conservative Christian plan to use government funds to promote religious indoctrination.

The speech was given earlier this month at a Pastors Training Conference hosted by Remnant Alliance, a coalition of Christian Nationalist organizations that the Texas Observer recently described as “working to educate, train, and mobilize conservative Christian congregations to influence the outcomes of local elections—especially school boards.”

The Remnant Alliance is an amalgam of independent organizations that share goals and sometimes personnel. It operates as a sort of clearinghouse for Christian nationalist ideology and is building its coalition with a five-step plan: First, local pastors are trained to have a “Biblical Worldview” through Liberty Pastors; second, pastors begin teaching a “Biblical Worldview” from the pulpit with the help of preprepared notes; third, congregants are trained on “Biblical Citizenship” and “Constitutional Defense” through the so-called Patriot Academy; fourth, pastors form a “Salt and Light” ministry at their church and are paired with a Citizens Defending Freedom liaison; and fifth, entire congregations are mobilized to “extend the Kingdom of God” with the help of advocacy groups—in other words, to vote for “Biblical values” candidates in races that can be decided by a few hundred votes. 

In short: Recruit pastors, build out their churches with a Christian Nationalist agenda, then take over their communities.

One of the speakers at the August 2 training session was Jim Abney, the “Florida Faith Coordinator” and one of the “Salt and Light” liaisons.

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Abney spoke about how the Remnant Alliance’s plan was working back in his hometown of Lake Wales under the direction of Jack Hilligoss, senior pastor at HighPoint Church.

Hilligoss is the sort of pastor who ignores IRS guidelines and just tells the congregation how to vote, as described in a March story published in the Lakeland Ledger:

[Hilligoss told] congregants that if they were not already registered to vote, they could “get right with God” and sign up after the service.

Directing church members to a registration table, Hilligoss said they would find Lake Wales City Commissioner Danny Krueger, “who is a member of HighPoint Church and has been a fantastic commissioner here for Lake Wales, and he needs your support. In fact, when you go to vote, just think of this: Danny and Danny. OK? That’s all I’m going to say.”

He wasn’t just advocating for others; he was the beneficiary of a similar strategy in 2022, when he became mayor of Lake Wales. After that, it was game on:

The pastor-turned-mayor ended a city tradition of offering proclamations for LGBTQ Pride month and has appointed members of his church to city boards. Looking beyond Lake Wales, Hilligoss has launched an initiative aimed at helping conservative evangelical Christians gain majorities on all municipal commissions in Polk County. 

Hilligoss also has invocations at every City Commission meeting, all of which are given by Christian pastors. (He was apparently very upset by the fact that a “transgender atheist” was allowed to give an invocation before he became mayor and vowed to never let that happen again.) Hilligoss is also, predictably, an election denier and anti-masker.

It was ridiculously easy for him to take over the town because he knew that local elections were low-turnout affairs. If he could convince enough of his congregation to vote in those elections—and get those members to canvas on his behalf—it could help tip the scales in his favor.

This is the path that Abney was now promoting to the pastors in the audience.

He told them how Hilligoss appointed like-minded Christians in positions of local power. The “biggest villain, if you will, was the LGBTQ community,” he later said, leading to Christians ending the tradition of Pride proclamations and managing to “shut down” an all-ages drag show.

What’s the end game?

That, Abney said, was winning converts… or, as he put it, “expanding God's kingdom.” The way they were doing that in Lake Wales was by creating their own private school sponsored by HighPoint Church.

Abney told the audience that Hilligoss becoming mayor brought new attention to their church, which increased membership, which led to more students enrolling in the school, which led to more baptisms.

And the best part about it?

Florida taxpayers were covering the bill. The school received nearly $8,000 per kid and a large number of them were pledging allegiance to his God.

… Let me show you the results of participating and engaging our community, all right? So, when Pastor Jack first decided to run for mayor, we were in the middle of a new building program, getting ready to move into the… new building. We had an average attendance of about 400. Since then, we now have an average attendance of 1,300, and 2,000 people now call HighPoint Church their home.

You will lose some people at the beginning when you take a stand, but God will prune the vine and start new growth.

We started a Christian school called Providence Academy. Anybody here located in the State of Florida? All right. State of Florida, if you do not have a Christian school in your church, I don't know what to tell you. The state of Florida will pay your church, out of taxpayer dollars, $7,800 per pupil per year to attend your private school, okay?

So, we started Providence Academy. In our first year, we just completed 103 students. But out of that 103 students, we baptized 32 of them! Remember, it's not about politics! We baptized 32 students in our Academy. And now, this year, we had to add a new building. Eight more classrooms for our Academy. At this moment, we have 173 students enrolled, and we have a waiting list of 200. A private school, small town, Lake Wales, Florida, and the state, this year, will send HighPoint Church Providence Academy $1.3 million to cover our expenses!

If you have a church in Florida, you need to be doing this. You want to make a difference in your community, it's generational, and many of these students now attend—their families now attend HighPoint Church. We have… baptized a total, since Pastor Jack became mayor, 197 in our church.

It’s bad enough that these Christians want to take over local governments in order to act out their theocratic fantasies. They’re literally bragging about how they can use taxpayer dollars to boost their conversion numbers by targeting children.

The irony is that if the local LGBTQ community held a conference like this, the same Christians would undoubtedly call this “grooming” and demand statewide investigations.

Florida isn’t alone here, by the way. Voucher programs are on the rise across the country specifically because they allow taxpayer dollars to flow to private religious schools. But in Florida, where those $7,800 vouchers are available to all students, it has been a drain on resources:

When it was signed into law last year, it was estimated that Florida’s “vouchers for everybody” would cost between $200 and $700 million a year.  However, once this school year started with everybody eligible, the cost exploded, and is now estimated at between $2.8 and $4.2 billion, and about 70 percent of the new recipients were already attending private schools before vouchers.

Public schools in Florida are suffering because Republicans in the state government chose to give a massive gift to Christian schools. All this in a state ranked 48th in the nation when it comes to teacher pay.

In a statement to Friendly Atheist, Freedom From Religion Foundation Deputy Legal Director Elizabeth Cavell said that Abney’s “shameless brag” confirmed what we’ve long known: “Voucher schemes are all about giving greedy churches government welfare, using taxpayer money raided from the public schools that 90% of our children rely on for their education.”

Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, added that this was part of a long-term attack on public education:

The problem isn’t churches starting schools. The problem is taxpayer funding for these schools, or any private schools. Americans United opposes private school vouchers because they force taxpayers to fund religious education—a clear violation of religious freedom. Plus, vouchers just don’t work. Vouchers don’t improve student achievement, and they especially fail students with disabilities, low-income students, and rural students. Vouchers don’t provide the same rights and protections for students that public schools do, and many private religious schools discriminate. Voucher programs also lack accountability and tend to prop up failing private schools.

The bottom line is that public money should fund public schools, which are inclusive, improve communities and strengthen democracy. We should be giving public schools the proper resources to serve all families, not diverting money to private, mostly religious schools that serve relatively few students and do not welcome all children.

The pastors in that audience, however, didn’t seem to care. Who cares if public schools fail as long as a few more kids agree to accept Jesus before they’re old enough to think for themselves?