The Supreme Court’s 1962 ruling in Engel v. Vitale, which banned prayer in public schools, inflamed the intensifying fights over curriculum relating to evolution, history, and human sexuality. Falwell began floating his belief that public schools should be abolished entirely. Detecting a secular plot to brainwash the next generation, fundamentalists yanked their kids out of local K–12 programs and launched alternative Christian academies at a frenetic clip, foreshadowing the antipathy toward public education that evangelicals have come to practice at a massive scale today.
