Abstract
This article investigates why some Americans see public schools as hostile to their moral and spiritual values and whether churchgoing Protestants favor abandoning public schools. Through an analysis of 1996 survey data, it finds that religiously conservative groups, especially Pentecostals and charismatics, express alienation from public schools and that alienation is associated positively with the lower and middle classes and with several contextual factors, such as ruralness, residential instability, racial heterogeneity, and religious adherence and homogeneity. Among churchgoing Protestants, Evangelicals, in contrast to members of other conservative religious traditions, support public schooling over the alternatives. These religious and class differences are explained in terms of religious histories and organization; and relative investments in and evaluation of the cultural divide between a normative sphere of religion and family, and secular public institutions.
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