In 2021

For decades, the religious right has worked to distort religious freedom into a license to discriminate. This included pushing the use of invaluable aid for public schools to fund private school programs… and now, homeschooling.

Education funding should benefit students of all faiths, identities, and abilities. This week on State of Belief, Interfaith Alliance’s weekly radio show and podcast, we will look into how the religious right is weaponizing education as a tool to deploy culture war battles not just at home – but increasingly, across the globe. This is a burgeoning campaign that is getting very little public attention – even as it creates powerful networks of ultra-conservatives across lines of religious denominations and national borders.

State of Belief host Rev. Welton Gaddy will get the insights of Ryan Stollar, a child liberation theologian and activist for oversight of homeschooling initiatives. Ryan’s newly-published report is provocatively titled, How homeschoolers plan to take over the world.

For a look at the “world” part of that scheme, we’ll hear from Dr. Kristina Stoeckl of the University of Innsbruck. A Sociologist of religion, Kristina was stunned to discover American homeschooling promotional materials and associated “pro-family” strategies exported wholesale from the American political religious right in places like Russia and Eastern Europe.

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