Justin Parmentier, an NBCT-certified high school teacher in North Carolina, has been scrutinizing the nonpublic schools that receive voucher money from the state. he found that nearly 90% are religious schools where discrimination and indoctrination are commonplace.
Parmenter remembers when now-disgraced Lt. Governor Mark Robinson opened a search for public schools that indoctrinate and came up with nothing.
Public funds in NC support religious schools that openly and egregiously indoctrinate students. Not a peep from the culture warriors. It wasn’t indoctrination they objected to; it was public schools.
Parmenter wrote the following in March 2024, before Robinson was disgraced by the CNN report on his history of posting on pornography websites. To call Robinson a hypocrite would be an understatement:
With billions of dollars now on tap for North Carolina’s private schools, and 88.2% of those dollars going to religious schools, scrutiny is rising over exactly what our taxes are supporting.
Private schools are legally able to discriminate against children, and many of North Carolina’s Christian schools deny admissions to students based on religious beliefs, sexual orientation, or learning disabilities.
For example, Fayetteville Christian School, which pocketed nearly $2 million in voucher dollars this school year, expressly bans students who practice specific religions like Islam and Buddhism, and they also bar LGBTQ+ students–whom they brand “perverted”–from attending.
North Raleigh Christian Academy won’t accept children with IQs below 90 and will not serve students who require IEPs (a document which outlines how a school will provide support to children with disabilities).
If this public funding of widespread discriminatory school practices rubs you the wrong way, I have bad news for you.
It gets worse.
That harmful indoctrination Mark Robinson was howling about a couple years ago in his disingenuous attempt to generate political momentum? Turns out it’s real. It just isn’t happening in the traditional public schools Robinson was targeting.
The Daniel Christian Academy is a private school in Concord, NC. This school has received public dollars through school vouchers every year since Republicans launched the controversial Opportunity Scholarship voucher program in 2014-15 for a grand total of $585,776.
Daniel Academy’s mission is to “raise the next generation of leaders who will transform the heart of our nation” by equipping students “to enter the Seven Mountains of Influence.”
The Seven Mountains of Influence (also referred to as the Seven Mountains of Dominion or the Seven Mountains Mandate) refers to seven areas of society: religion, family, education, government, media, arts & entertainment, and business. Dominionists who follow this doctrine believe that they are mandated by God to control all seven of society’s “mountains,” and that doing so will trigger the end times.
The Seven Mountains philosophy has been around since the 70s, but it came to prominence about ten years ago with the publication of Lance Wallnau’s book Invading Babylon: The Seven Mountains Mandate. Wallnau touts himself as a consultant who “inspires visions of tomorrow with the clarity of today—connecting ideas to action,” and his book teaches that dominionists must “understand [their] role in society” and “release God’s will in [their] sphere of influence.”
Wallnau does caution his followers that messaging about taking control over all seven areas of society on behalf of God might freak out non dominionists, saying in 2011 that “If you’re talking to a secular audience, you don’t talk about having dominion over them. This … language of takeover, it doesn’t actually help…”
So why should North Carolinians care that their tax dollars are subsidizing this sort of indoctrination of children through private school vouchers?
I posed that question to Frederick Clarkson, a research analyst who has studied the confluence of politics and religion for more than three decades and lately has been focusing on the violent underbelly of Christian nationalists who want to achieve Christian dominion of the United States at all costs. Here’s what Clarkson said:
North Carolina taxpayers should be concerned that they are helping to underwrite an academy for training children to become warriors against not only the rights of others, but against democracy and its institutions. The idea of the Seven Mountain Mandate is for Christians of the right sort to take dominion — which is to say power and influence — over the most important sectors of society. It is theocratic in orientation and its vision is forever.
This is not something that is about liberals and conservatives . Most Christians including most evangelicals, Catholics, and mainline Protestants are deemed not just insufficiently Christian, but may be viewed as infested with demons, and standing in the way of the advancement of the Kingdom of God on Earth. And they will need to be dealt with.
Diane Ravitch's blog 