Evangelical education nearly ruined me. Now the Christian right is coming for public schools

From Bible stories to the Ten Commandments, public schools are starting to look a lot like the fundamentalist system I escaped

When I got the chance to attend a conservative, evangelical high school in rural Iowa, I was ecstatic. My early education had been in a similar school - where creationism was the one true science, and evolution was satanic propaganda - and I'd spent the interim as a frightened pilgrim in the unholy land of public school. I was a teenage zealot and longed to be among my people.

Throughout those years, my church leaders urged me to proselytize to the public school students, to debate teachers about the age of Earth or the founding of our Christian nation, to be a spiritual exhibitionist, praying loudly at my locker or the flagpole. The apocalypse was at hand, so who had time for algebra?