A suburban Houston school district has banned 34 books this fall in a show of force by trustees supported by a coalition of Christian nationalist advocacy groups that has ties to a former Southern Baptist pastor in Houston.
By some accounts, Katy Independent School District west of Houston has become a key battleground for the school board culture wars that are most evident in banning books from school libraries and classrooms.
In late November, the Katy school board added 14 more books to its banned list, in addition to 20 already sent packing since the start of the fall term.
Newly banned books include bestsellers Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.
Conservative trustees likely aren’t done banning books, either. Most of them are endorsed by a coalition of activist groups that has published a list of 676 books objectionable to conservative evangelical Christians.
Screencap of Katy ISD school board meeting
Working across Texas
Those same groups — led by Citizens Defending Freedom and Remnant Alliance — are working across Texas and beyond to instill their particular values on school district policies. One Texas newspaper reported the groups are so threatening to some school administrators that they take preemptive action to keep the activists from showing up at school board meetings.
The Progress Times of Mission, Texas, reported in May that leaders of McAllen Independent School District had received threats from the two groups: “Purge your schools’ libraries of 676 books or else.”
Harlingen, Texas, pastor Luis Cabrera addressing the Brownsville, Texas, school board. (Screencap)
The local leader of book bans there is Luis Cabrera, pastor of City Church in nearby Harlingen.
“It’s time to hold the (schools) responsible and it’s time to hold them accountable, because we are trusting them to educate our children, not indoctrinate them with pornography,” he told the Progress Times.
School board elections
What these conservative evangelicals consider “pornography” doesn’t fit the same definition for many other parents and educators in the region. In their view, these activists are agitators who do not represent the views of the larger community.
Back in suburban Houston, Katy is a small town of about 26,000 people with a school district that reaches beyond the city borders to encompass nearly 100,000 students. Katy is a sea of Republican red in Harris County, which leans so blue state Republican officials have sought to make it more difficult to vote there. But the school district boundaries extend into two other counties and take in parts of the city of Houston as well.
In Katy, as in most communities, school board elections often are decided by about 10% of the registered electorate. And Citizens Defending Freedom and Remnant Alliance have worked that small turnout to their advantage. It doesn’t take nearly as much effort to swing a school board election as to influence a race for the state Legislature.
As a result, four of the school board’s seven trustees have been elected since 2022 with support from a political action committee called Texans for Educational Freedom, which claims it is “taking politics out of the classroom.” Its website warns not only of Marxism but also communism taking root in public schools through Critical Race Theory and liberal indoctrination.
Webs of influence
The Texas Observer published an article a year ago explaining the complex web of advocacy groups and PACs collaborating to get conservative candidates elected to school boards statewide. BNG previously covered the influence such groups have had in North Texas at Carroll ISD and Grapevine-Colleyville ISD.
Graphic from Texas Observer
The Observer explained: “Candidates backed by Texans for Educational Freedom have regularly run on hot-button issues that tie in with state-level Republican policy and rhetoric, such as notions that children are being ‘indoctrinated’ into radical ideologies or ‘sexually alternative lifestyles.’”
But in Katy, local residents have begun pushing back against the conservative takeover. In school board elections last May, two moderate incumbents fended off challenges from conservatives, drawing the largest number of votes in district history.
From the perspective of moderates, much damage already has been done. That includes not only the book bans — and creation of a special warehouse to hold incoming library books for closer scrutiny — but also a highly controversial gender policy that bans mention of gender fluidity in school settings and requires district staff to notify parents when a child changes their name, requests different pronouns or identifies as transgender.
At least 19 students have been outed to their parents as a result of the policy.
According to one critic of the policy quoted by the Houston Chronicle, at least 19 students have been outed to their parents as a result of the policy. Federal authorities also have opened an investigation into the district and possible Title IX violations — although that investigation is likely to be shut down by the incoming Trump administration.
Across Texas, school boards are facing an onslaught from this constellation of loosely related — but often commonly funded — far-right groups. The Texas Observer created a graphic to illustrate it.
Remnant Alliance
Citizens Defending Freedom is a group focused on book bans. It is directly related to Remnant Alliance, which the Texas Observer describes as “a coalition of Christian nationalist groups that are working to educate, train and mobilize conservative Christian congregations to influence the outcomes of local elections — especially school boards.”
And Remnant Alliance is deeply embedded in churches.
“For decades, various far-right, faith-based organizations have been working to train pastors and turn congregants into school board activists and candidates. But now, the Remnant Alliance has united several powerful conservative Christian groups. The overarching ideology of these groups is Christian nationalism,” the Observer explained in a May article titled, “The ‘Remnant Alliance’ Is Coming for A School Board Near You.”
Nine groups make up the Remnant Alliance coalition, the news outlet said, involving “thousands of churches and hundreds of thousands of activists.”
The list of partners includes some well-known names and some lesser-known names:
- Citizens Defending Freedom
- Liberty Pastors
- Recover America
- Patriot Academy
- Turning Point USA
- ACT for America
- Salt and Light Council
- Liberty Counsel
- All Pro Pastors
Behind these groups are many well-known names: Mike Lindell, Matt Staver, Charlie Kirk, David Barton — among others.
Rick Scarborough preaching (Photo: PAW)
Return of Rick Scarborough
One notable name behind Remnant Alliance is Rick Scarborough, an ordained Southern Baptist minister who once was pastor of First Baptist Church of Pearland in Metro Houston. During his pastorate there from 1990 to 2002, members of his church practically took over the local city council and school board.
He and his books are promoted on the website of Mike Huckabee, also a former Southern Baptist pastor who is Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as U.S. ambassador to Israel.
After resigning the Pearland pastorate, Scarborough commuted from Houston to Washington, D.C., to lead Bible studies for members of Congress and employees of the State Department, Pentagon and other federal agencies. In 2018, he founded Recover America and Recover America Action to advance his Christian nationalist agenda.
This is far from Scarborough’s first rodeo, however.
On Nov. 16, 2009, gay rights activists hold placards in the background as Rick Scarborough of Vision America and an ad hoc coalition of concerned ministers from various denominations hold a rally to “boldly preach biblical truth concerning the subject of homosexuality” in front of the US Justice Department in Washington, D.C. ( JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)
In 2003, having just created his first nonprofit advocacy group called Vision America, Scarborough was among allies of Alabama Judge Roy Moore, who was found in violation of the U.S. Constitution for erecting a massive statue to the Ten Commandments in the Alabama state judicial building.
That August, Scarborough sponsored a “Restore the Commandments” rally on the steps of the Alabama State Supreme Court building.
Members of Vision America’s advisory board at the time included prominent Southern Baptist pastors Jerry Falwell, Ronnie Floyd and Adrian Rogers, as well as Houston layman Paul Pressler.
Scarborough also has ties to James Dobson and Focus on the Family.
SBC connections
Scarborough played a role in the “conservative resurgence” in the SBC not just because he is from Houston — what some consider the epicenter of the movement — but because he was an early foot soldier in that denominational battle.
He sided with the conservative movement and got elected a trustee of what was then the SBC Foreign Mission Board, “intent on getting all liberal missionaries off the payroll,” according to a former professor at Houston Baptist University.
Scarborough’s 1996 book Enough is Enough was mailed free to every Texas Baptist pastor and was endorsed by Paige Patterson, one of the co-architects of the “conservative resurgence.”
‘Yes, we’re Christian nationals’
In August this year, Remnant Alliance held a three-day “pastors training conference” in Texas that featured Scarborough as a speaker alongside people like Charlie Kirk, Jim Garlow and Rick Green.
People for the American Way reported of this event: “Among the speakers at the coalition’s ‘For Such A Time As This Gala’ was Steve Maxwell of Citizens Defending Freedom. During his remarks, Maxwell openly admitted that the Remnant Alliance is a Christian nationalist effort to inject its far-right ‘biblical worldview’ into every level of society.
“’The question before us tonight is can America rise once again to defeat a multi-headed enemy that is both inside our homeland and overseas?’ Maxwell said. ‘My role here tonight is to share with you the mission, the mindset, the model that has been proven successful throughout all of human history and how this model is being implemented once again in these United States.
“’It’s called the Remnant Alliance,” he stated. “The Remnant Alliance is a group of Christ-centered organizations that have come together, combining skill sets and resources, creating a plexus of support for our pastor leaders and citizens throughout the United States through the local church. You say, ‘Steve, you sound like a Christian national.’ And I say, ‘You’re daggum right we sound like a Christian national!'”
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