We recently summarized the many ways Commissioner Edelblut has undermined our public education system and last week he was handed 1,000 letters from citizens calling for his resignation. His policies have been extreme and the public deserve to know more about what has motivated Edelblut’s decisions as commissioner, including his specious accusations against classroom teachers.

Perhaps Edelblut’s radical policies are best explained by his decade-long work with Patrick Henry College (PHC), a 4-year Christian fundamentalist college founded and run by Michael Farris, where Edelblut served as a fundraising board member and chair of PHC’s Business Task Force.

Farris built his career opposing the Equal Rights Amendment and defending anti-sodomy laws, and he is currently president of Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a group designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. In 1983, he started the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) in response to public schools implementing bans on school prayer, the teaching of evolution, and the promotion of contraception as public health policy.

As explained by Julie Ingersoll in Building God’s Kingdom, homeschooling as an ideology started in the 1960s as part of Rousas J. Rushdoony’s “Christian Reconstructionism” movement, and Michael Farris has been the most effective leader at promoting Rushdoony’s vision of Christian nationalism, including aggressive legal action to eliminate any community input and government oversight of parental homeschooling.

In 2000, Farris launched Patrick Henry College as a “forward base camp in the culture war” with a Christian fundamentalist curriculum that is profoundly anti-science. PHC promises parents their child will remain a creationist. Students are taught that every single word in the Bible is divine and “inerrant” (i.e., can’t be wrong), that Eve literally came from Adam’s rib, and that those who do not adopt PHC’s faith system will go to Hell. These views have been rejected by the vast majority of Christians who are able to combine their faith with science, and tolerance for other religious views.

Most recently, The N.Y. Times reported that Farris played “a central behind-the-scenes role” in the soft-coup lawsuits that tried to overturn the 2016 election, and his ideology was represented on the Capitol steps on January 6th.

With Edelblut’s decade of fund-raising and business leadership support, PHC has become Farris’ primary mechanism for pursuing his end game of turning our secular pluralist democracy into a Christian state that is intolerant of many aspects of cultural diversity, scientific understanding related to evolution, and freedom of religion.

In short, Farris’ aim is to turn the United States into a nation more akin to Putin’s autocratic Russia. Katherine Stewart warns in her book, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, that;

The Christian nationalists’ affection for Mr. Putin and all things Russian goes much deeper than a tactical alliance aimed at saving souls and defeating ‘homosexuals’ and ‘gender ideology.’ At the core of the attraction lies a shared political vision. America’s Christian nationalists have not overlooked Putin’s authoritarian style of government; they have embraced it as an ideal (p. 272).

According to Stewart, the immediate goal of Christian theocrats is to undermine public education through school privatization efforts (like vouchers) and to access public taxpayer monies for religious schools through court rulings that tear down church / state separation.

These efforts are currently at the Supreme Court in Carson v. Makin, a case which, according to Slate, threatens to compel “individuals of every faith to help finance the indoctrination of children by conservative Christians to discriminate against LGBTQ people, women, religious minorities, and liberal Christians.”

Edelblut certainly did not distance himself from elements of Patrick Henry College’s belief system when questioned by the Executive Council back in 2016. In that interview, Edelblut refused to explain what he’d do, as commissioner, if biology teachers taught “creationism on par with evolution in their life sciences curriculum.”

He would also not offer an answer when asked how, as the state’s educational leader, he could continue to “believe, and act upon the belief, that women are subservient to men.”

He was also evasive about his views on gay and transgender “Conversion Therapy,” a ‘treatment’ thoroughly discredited by every major medical, psychological, social service, and mainstream religious organization in the country.

Edelblut left much doubt regarding his commitment to keeping Creationism out of science classes, he failed to affirm that all people are created equal, and he left unanswered whether religious ideology should remain separate from government policy. He certainly did not communicate uncompromising support for public education.

Given his undermining of public education for the past 5 years, Edelblut should be pressed to provide more fulsome answers to these 2016 Executive Council questions, and he should explain his current association with Michael Farris and Patrick Henry College, answering if this association has influenced his policy decisions as commissioner.

What a tragic and dangerous irony that a radical school privatizer, intent on undermining public education, is now running New Hampshire’s education system.

Libertarians and other ‘small government’ advocates must rethink their alliance with Edelblut who has closely associated himself with, and fundraised for, authoritarian Christians who eagerly await the day enough power has been amassed to ban a panoply of freedoms achieved in the West through liberal constitutional democracies.

Governor Sununu must explain why he gave Edelblut another 4-year term to further undermine morale and confidence in our community-owned and operated public schools that serve 89% of New Hampshire children.

Joe Onosko, UNH professor emeritus and Jeff Frenkiewich, UNH adjunct professor. The views expressed here represent those of the authors, not UNH.