Indeed. Any essay discussing this topic without mentioning Jimmy Carter siccing the IRS on Christian schools is ... by someone not quite inhabiting the same un

Indeed. Any essay discussing this topic without mentioning Jimmy Carter siccing the IRS on Christian schools is ... by someone not quite inhabiting the same universe as I do. Maybe. This essay doesn't really go into that, its thesis at 0th approximation is that Christians setting up an independent school system/society is axiomatically illegitimate ("diversity", as many have noted, doesn't extend to thought/worldviews/ideology, and "liberalism" or whatever you want to call it is a competing non-religion religion every bit as doctrinaire and severe as these Christians'). But the article claims that this had an outsized affect on politics and particularly the Republican party, and that simply would not have happened without Carter's action. "Live and let live" is an old and sound American tradition. Taking people's children away from them, in wherever on the scale of figurative to literal in this case you'd put it ... well, you might as well try it with a mother bear and her cubs. That's what really energized the Religious Right in politics, and why its time in the sun was so short.