A Brief History of Homeschoolers Attacking Child Protection

Since its inception in the 1980s, the evangelical homeschooling movement has been a thorn in the side of American child protection. Despite homeschoolers being less likely than other families to have social services called on them, homeschool leaders and lobbying organizations have fought fiercely against efforts to improve or expand our child protection systems—even when those efforts do not impact homeschoolers. With the rise of today’s parental rights movement, which was directly inspired by evangelical homeschoolers, the threats to child protection have only become larger and more diverse. At their core, these threats reflect homeschoolers’ religious conviction that families are sovereign, over which governments have little to no authority.

One of the earliest attacks against child protection from evangelical homeschoolers was Quiverfull matriarch and homeschool leader Mary Pride’s book, The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality. Written in 1985, The Way Home is an anti-feminist text that allegedly sets forth “the biblical understanding of Christian womanhood.” In Chapter 7, “Who Owns Our Kids?,” Pride discusses a group of people she calls “coercive utopians” and repeatedly describes as “evil.” These people “know what’s best for everyone’s children.” They include, but are not limited to, child protection professionals, children’s rights advocates, feminists, and public school employees. All of these individuals, Pride claims, “want total control over everyone and everybody, including our children.”

To get this “total control,” Pride says, coercive utopians prey on the public’s fears about child abuse. “We are hearing an awful lot about child abuse nowadays,” Pride warns. “But the ‘children’s rights’ movement has only one goal in mind: government as Mother… Justice and the child’s best interests are not what the children’s rights people are after.” Instead, “the sentimental appeal of ‘preventing child abuse’ is merely a wedge they are using to crack the American family apart.” Pride argues such government intervention in families is unbiblical: “The Bible does not give anyone the right to remove a child from his or her parents’ custody, abuse or no abuse.”

One year after writing The Way Home, Mary Pride wrote another relevant book: The Child Abuse Industry: Outrageous Facts About Child Abuse & Everyday Rebellions Against a System that Threatens Every North American Family. As I wrote for Homeschoolers Anonymous, The Child Abuse Industry “calls for a ‘Second North American Revolution’ — namely, having babies, abolishing no-fault divorce, going to church, eliminating foster care, homeschooling, re-instituting ‘biblical’ executions of criminals, and getting rid of abuse hotlines. And that’s just scratching the surface.” The book is a no-holds-barred diatribe against child protection. She denies any necessity for the field, arguing that “the major problem is that the public has been convinced that child abuse is a major problem.” And she directly encourages families to avoid child protective services: “Don’t hotline anyone.”

Two years after Pride published The Child Abuse Industry, in 1988, fellow homeschool leader J. Richard Fugate wrote a seminal text on child training for evangelical homeschoolers: What the Bible Says About Child Training. In his book, Fugate is very upfront about his adherence to sphere sovereignty—the idea that God created different spheres of authority (government, church, and family) that should not interfere with each other’s affairs. This idea, which was popularized by Dutch Neo-Calvinist and apartheid influencer Abraham Kuyper as well as American Christian Reconstructionist and homeschool apologist R.J. Rushdoony, is most often used to argue governments should have no authority over families.

Fugate articulates his support for sphere sovereignty directly: “Government has no right to administer justice… or to exercise authority over other independent institutions, like family and marriage.” For Fugate, this means that, apart from parents, “no other institution or person has rulership rights over children.” Parental authority and power is thus unlimited: “There is no such thing as ‘child rights’ sanctioned by the Word of God. The child has only the God-given right to be raised by his parents without the intervention of any other institution.” Fugate assails “child advocacy agencies and child abuse laws,” saying that, “Parents must not allow government to usurp their authority in those areas in which God alone holds the parents accountable.”

Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) founder Michael Farris embedded these concerns about child protection in fiction, writing two novels that villainized child protection professionals: Anonymous Tip in 1996 and Forbid Them Not in 2002. I summarized these books for Fathom Magazine several years ago: “Anonymous Tip—the title of which refers to a core aspect of Child Protective Services, the ability to make anonymous reports of abuse—spins a tale about an evil Child Protective Services worker… Spurred on by a false and anonymous allegation of child abuse by a vindictive ex-husband, Farris’s CPS worker persecutes an innocent woman and her child. In Forbid Them Not, Farris imagines a dystopian future where Hillary Clinton is elected President and the U.S. finally signs the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, causing all sorts of evil things to happen to Christians because of power-hungry child advocates.”

Farris was not alone in demonizing child protection professionals through fiction during this time. Other popular evangelical literature, like Frank Peretti’s Darkness series, similarly portrayed child protection professionals and those they help as evil or influenced by demonic forces. Influential leaders spoke about real child protection professionals with stark and frightening language as well, describing them as everything from “a real threat to Christian families” to “a plague of leeches” to “the Gestapo.” 

But leaders were doing more than frightening homeschoolers. They were also directly encouraging homeschoolers to do everything they could to avoid any contact with child protection professionals. This encouragement can be seen most clearly in these instructions written in 2000 by the late Chris Klicka, Senior Counsel for HSLDA, for homeschoolers who are visited by social workers due to suspicions of abuse and neglect. The instructions, which were published in Pride’s immensely popular magazine Practical Homeschooling, begin with fear-mongering: “More and more frequently, homeschoolers are turned in on child abuse hotlines to social service agencies. Families who do not like homeschoolers can make an anonymous phone call to the child abuse hotline and fabricate abuse stories about homeschoolers.” 

Klicka makes these claims despite the fact that, according to HSLDA’S own numbers, homeschoolers are less likely than other families to have social services called on them. Klicka goes on to encourage families to do everything they can to prevent professionals from entering their homes or talking to their children. He also implicitly endorses adults spanking other families’ children, saying, “Do not spank someone else’s child unless they are close Christian friends.” He explains how “HSLDA is beginning to work with states to reform the child welfare laws,” concluding that, “The child welfare system is out of control.”

The work HSLDA was doing “to reform the child welfare laws” (as described above by Klicka) included faithful efforts to dismantle what few protections for children we currently have. HSLDA has taken aim at everything from anonymous tips to mandatory reporting to school medical exams to criminal background checks to voluntary home visitation programs.

The high point of evangelical homeschoolers’ opposition to child protection was arguably the Men’s Leadership Summit in 2009. The Summit was organized by Christian Home Educators of Colorado director Kevin Swanson, hosted by Institute for Basic Life Principles (IBLP) founder and accused sexual predator Bill Gothard, and sponsored by HSLDA. According to Swanson, the men’s only event had two purposes: first, “to define a vision for the future of the Christian home education movement”; and second, “the development of a Christian Education Manifesto statement.”

The Summit had five headlining speakers: Swanson, Klicka, homeschool apologist and accused child abuser Dr. Brian Ray, Stay-At-Home Daughter advocate Voddie Baucham, and Vision Forum founder and accused sexual abuser Douglas Phillips. Phillips presented two talks during the Summit, and his second one on “Visionary Fathers” is relevant to our current topic. During this talk, Phillips made the following bold declaration: “At the end of the day, the problem isn’t simply Child Protective Services to get better; it is eliminating it altogether.” In other words, reform is not possible. The only solution is the complete abolition of child protection: “The core problem with Child Protective Services is its existence.”

To evangelical homeschoolers, child protection will never be a proper use of government because they believe the sphere of government has little to no authority over the sphere of family. Reform is thus inappropriate. You cannot reform something that should not exist.