Janet Reitman, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and author of “Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion,” investigated the like-minded evangelical world of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in this article.
The appointment of DeVos is a big win, she says, in the religious right’s crusade to capture control of American culture. “Her appointment as education secretary marks the crowning achievement of the Christian right’s campaign to infiltrate America’s secular institutions.”
Reitman documents the evangelical organizations that have carefully prepared the way for this moment, building power in state races and now wining the presidency. There is irony, to be sure, in the fact that Donald Trump was their instrument to win national power since he embodies the antithesis of their values in his own life.
The DeVos family is part of a super-rich cabal of the right that has worked behind the scenes for many years to create institutions that would advance their policies and values.
The DeVos family – which includes 91-year-old patriarch and Amway co-founder Richard “Rich” DeVos Sr., his wife, Helen, their four children and their spouses – has been one of the driving forces behind a stealth campaign powered by a small group of Republican billionaires to chip away at America’s secular institutions: the pig bones, so to speak, of our society. According to a recent analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics, the family, whose net worth is estimated at $5.6 billion, gave $10 million to national GOP candidates and committees during the 2016 cycle alone. But this amount pales to the gargantuan sums they have channeled into state and local races, evangelical and free-market think tanks, advocacy groups, foundations, PACs, Super PACs and other dark-money organs that have effectively created a shadow political party within the GOP.
Regular attendees at the Koch brothers’ biannual summits, the DeVoses have been healthy benefactors of several Koch-seeded groups that advance an anti-tax, anti-regulatory agenda, including the charitable arm of Americans for Prosperity and the FreedomWorks Foundation. What distinguishes the DeVoses within the Kochs’ circle of power, however, is their conservative Christian worldview, which over the past four decades has helped fuel what is now a $1.5 billion infrastructure composed of thousands of churches and “parachurch” ministries, as well as Christian TV, radio and Internet channels; Facebook pages and other forms of social media; books; conferences; camps; prayer groups; legal organizations – an entire universe that many Americans may be wholly unaware of. Through these channels has come a single, unified message merging social conservatism, free-market capitalism and American exceptionalism: the belief that the rights and freedoms spelled out in the U.S. Constitution were mandated by God….
A staple in modern evangelical teachings is the concept of Christian spheres of influence – or what the evangelical business guru Lance Wallnau dubbed the “Seven Mountains” of society: business, media, religion, arts and entertainment, family, government, and education – all of which urge the faithful to engage in secular culture in order to “transform” it. The goal is a sweeping overhaul of society and a merging of church and state: elevating private charity over state-run social services, returning prayer to school and turning the clock back on women’s and LGBTQ rights. It would also be a system without a progressive income tax, collective bargaining, environmental regulation, publicly funded health care, welfare, a minimum wage – a United States guided by a rigorously laissez-faire system of “values” rather than laws….
What became clear as the 2000s progressed was just how much these two agendas had fused. Under the direction of Charles and David Koch, and with increasing influence from the likes of the DeVos family, the Republican big tent shifted, from the Grand Old Party to what one longtime strategist who’s spent years mapping these networks refers to as the “Grand New Alliance” of libertarianism, populism and religious conservatism. (In the last election cycle, the DeVoses pledged $1.5 million to Freedom Partners Action Fund, which has been called the Koch network’s “secret bank.”) This new perspective, sometimes called the “biblical worldview,” was being sold at special “pastor policy briefings” across the country, in the hopes of politicizing the evangelical leaders who would then, in turn, rally their troops. At one I attended in Orlando, in 2012, David Barton, a former vice chair of the Texas Republican Party and a leading Christian nationalist, patiently explained to a room of Florida pastors why a radically reduced federal government was part of God’s plan. Jesus, for example, was opposed to the capital-gains tax, Barton said, citing passages in the books of Romans and Matthew.
“Without the libertarians and Tea Party brand, the Christian right would still be somewhat on the fringe of American politics,” the strategist, who asked for anonymity, explains. “But with the economic message, now we’ve got something that is more powerful and more dangerous from a progressive point of view.”
The result has been sweeping electoral power: According to figures published in The Washington Post, in states where the Koch network is most active, including the DeVoses’ home state of Michigan, Republicans control 100 percent of the state legislative majorities, 80 percent of governors, 77 percent of senators and 73 percent of U.S. House members. In 2016, evangelicals and born-again Christians constituted 43 percent of Trump’s total vote. Conservative Christians have been tapped to occupy the top Cabinet posts in the departments of Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, and Justice; they are also set to serve as the president’s director of National Intelligence and head of the CIA. The vision is simple, as the political strategist puts it: “What they want is for churches and nonprofits and business to run the country.”
The issue that Betsy and Dick DeVos adopted as their own is school choice. They ignored its racist origins and concentrated on selling it to black and brown communities. Their highest priority was vouchers to allow public money to flow to religious schools. When their effort to revise the Michigan state constitution to permit vouchers was revpbuffed by voters in 2000, they embraced charters as the best vehicle to undermine “government schools.”
Betsy DeVos became the chairwoman of several nonprofits that were consolidated to become the national powerhouse behind the movement: the American Federation for Children. Along with its tax affiliate, the Alliance for School Choice, the organization published glossy brochures featuring pictures of smiling children of every race, with endorsements from African-American and Democratic politicians, including Sen. Cory Booker, then an upstart city councilman from Newark, New Jersey, who joined the board of Alliance for School Choice in 2002.
But the movement’s real agenda was less about helping black families than creating a nationwide push for school choice. Leading the charge was the Great Lakes Education Project, or GLEP, a Michigan-based group created by the DeVoses to strong-arm state legislators. The result was a complete overhaul of the Michigan legislature. “In education policy, there would be times where they didn’t have votes – maybe 10 or 15 Republicans who didn’t want to vote for totally expanding the charter-school cap,” says Brandon Dillon, who served in the Michigan Statehouse before becoming the state Democratic chair. “And they would slowly, through the speaker of the house, bring them in, one by one, and basically threaten them with hundreds of thousands of dollars spent against them in the primary.” Though the voucher fight had been lost, charter schools, which receive government funding but operate independently of the public-school system (and are seen by conservative policy groups as a gateway drug to privatization) sprang up across the state.
At the national level, Dick and Betsy DeVos founded a group called All Children Matter, which funded PACs to repeat the process in multiple states. In 2003, its first year, ACM spent $7.6 million “directly impacting statewide and state legislative elections in 10 targeted states,” according to its media materials, winning 121 out of 181 races, “phenomenally successful for a political organization.” Thirty states and the District of Columbia currently have some form of school-choice legislation on the books. Some of the most expansive are in Louisiana, Arizona and Indiana, where Gov. Mitch Daniels, backed by ACM, launched a private-school vouchers program in 2011. Two years later, then-Gov. Mike Pence greatly expanded the program, creating what Mother Jones described as “a $135 million annual bonanza almost exclusively benefiting private religious schools.”
The downside of this, as became clear in public-school systems across the country, is charter schools and voucher programs entice parents with the promise of more “options,” while weeding out the children that neither charters nor private schools have the capacity to educate. Many parents have opted for “choice,” only to be turned away. This is particularly acute with regard to kids with behavioral issues like attention-deficit disorder. “The words are ‘Your child may be better served elsewhere,’ ” says one Michigan legislator.”
Her goal: diminish the role of government, rely on the private sector.
To see that philosophy at work, Reitman traveled to Grand Rapids and Holland, Michigan, home of the DeVos family and Amway. There she interviewed a man who works for the family and praised their generosity:
“If there’s a kid on the corner without a coat, the city will rally behind him and there’ll be hundreds of coats donated,” Ross says. “But very rarely does anybody take the time to ask, ‘Why doesn’t he have a coat?’ ”
