In October, parents in the Chino Valley Unified School District east of Los Angeles lined up to address a meeting of their school board. The five-member board was weighing a proposal to make it easier to remove sexually explicit books from district classrooms and libraries.
Those in favor lined up to read from books that they said should be among the first to go. They winced as they repeated lines depicting oral sex, prostitution, incest and rape. One faltered and said he couldn’t go on.
But the room was divided. The books those parents read from included “Glass” by Ellen Hopkins, a raw depiction of methamphetamine addiction. Another was Jesse Andrews’ “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,” an exploration of friendship, peer pressure and grief. Both books are critically praised and widely popular. “Me and Earl” was adapted into a film that won both the grand jury prize and the audience award at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, where it premiered.
Other parents inveighed against the proposal, calling it a book ban and a conservative power grab in a politically diverse district.
A month later, with public opinion still split, the board voted 3-2 to adopt the proposal. “Those that sexually exploit children are never on the right side of history,” board President Sonja Shaw said before the vote.
The new policy drew headlines as yet another demonstration of the divisive power of culture war issues in American schools.
Behind the scenes, a very different kind of power was at work.
The three school board members who voted for the proposal are members of Calvary Chapel Chino Hills, a 10,000-member congregation that is openly committed to steering politics in their city, their region and the nation.
The church’s direct involvement in the school board reflects what critics say is a growing effort to bring the resources and persuasive power of conservative Christian churches to bear on the cultural debates now roiling American schools.
Nationwide, the self-designated parents’ rights movement is faltering in its efforts to elect conservative candidates to school boards and to set policy on issues of race, gender and sexuality. Parents’ rights candidates lost more races than they won last November, and the movement’s flagship organization, Moms for Liberty, has been hobbled by scandals and infighting.
One wing of the movement, however, continues to make strides. Conservative megachurches and allied Christian organizations notched some of the most significant parents’ rights victories in recent years, winning majorities on school boards in multiple districts in California, Colorado and Texas.
From Church to State
Undeterred by federal rules meant to limit religious politicking, churches are building their own political operations, endorsing candidates, starting political action committees, producing detailed voter guides and even propelling their own leaders or members into political office.
Like Calvary Chapel, many are concluding that their only hope to prevent America’s public institutions from sliding irrevocably leftward is to become political players themselves. “In the past five to 10 years, things have happened that have caused people to wake up and realize they don’t have the luxury of staying out of politics,” said Robert Tyler, president and general counsel of Advocates for Faith and Freedom, a California legal firm that represents churches and other conservative organizations in religious freedom cases.
The Chino Valley school board’s book policy was copied almost word for word from a template drafted by the Capitol Resource Institute, a Sacramento-based conservative advocacy organization whose executive director, Karen England, works closely on political issues with Calvary Chapel’s senior and founding pastor, Jack Hibbs.
England was present at the October board meeting and handed reading material to several of the public speakers, some of whom were Calvary members.
Many churches are concluding that their only hope to prevent America’s public institutions from sliding irrevocably leftward is to become political players themselves.
“We had a well-planned school board meeting,” said Gina Gleason, who leads Calvary’s political ministry. “We had six or seven volunteers. They were assigned a particular book that was in Chino Valley [schools], and we had excerpts of the book typed up, and the volunteer went to the microphone and said to the board, ‘I’ll read you an excerpt of a book in Ayala High School.’ … Why is there so much attention on Chino Valley? Because there’s a church in the community that’s involved.”
Conservative Christians say a mounting series of cultural changes has inspired them to political action: Legalization of same-sex marriage; LGBTQ-themed school curricula; relaxed school discipline standards; prolonged pandemic school shutdowns; and, most recently, policies that enable students to learn about and explore gender identities.
Enterprising religious leaders have tapped into that energy with some success. They “have recognized that the church has lost its voice,” said Tyler, the religious freedom lawyer. “They’re rising up and saying, ‘We are going to be the voice for our community.’”
In Colorado Springs, Colorado, churches now engage directly in local school board races, endorsing conservative candidates, hosting political events and using extensive media resources to educate Christian voters.
“Impressionable children are being taught to reject standards of sexual morality [and] that capitalism is evil, and that socialism and Communism are good,” said Richard Harris, executive director of the Truth & Liberty Coalition, an advocacy organization co-founded by local televangelist Andrew Wommack and based in Woodland Park, Colorado. “Our organization stands ready to provide Christians with important information on candidate positions to assist them as they seek to vote according to biblical values.”
In 2021, support from the coalition and allied churches proved decisive for conservative candidates in several local board races. Though parents’ rights candidates lost elsewhere in Colorado that year, conservatives successfully took control or fortified majorities in three districts in and around Colorado Springs. Coalition-backed candidates achieved similar results in two of those districts last year.
Harris credited an array of coalition resources, including “our daily television broadcast, the resources center on our website, our digital media outreach, our conferences and events, and our nonpartisan voter guides. … This enabled Christian voters to make better-informed decisions.”
Ministers are free to discuss political issues in church and even endorse candidates as private citizens so long as they don’t claim that the church itself backs certain candidates or issues.
Federal tax law states that churches and other tax-exempt organizations “may not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.”
The law, however, is rarely enforced against religious organizations, and church leaders feel increasingly emboldened to ignore it. Harris of the Truth & Liberty Coalition flatly declared that the law doesn’t apply to churches.
“Pastors have always been free to speak openly about the application of Scripture to every aspect of creation, including civic life and elections,” he said.
Tyler, the religious freedom lawyer, argued that the law applies only to direct endorsements of individual candidates from the pulpit or spending “a substantial portion” of a church’s budget on politics instead of ministry.
Ministers are free to discuss political issues in church and even endorse candidates as private citizens so long as they don’t claim that the church itself backs certain candidates or issues, Tyler said. “Guidelines by the IRS are vague,” he added.
The law’s narrow scope gives politically minded religious leaders immense leeway. And several have used that leeway to score political wins.
- In Oroville, California, Scott Thomson, lead pastor at River of Life Church, was elected to the City Council in 2016. He told a Christian politics blog that God spoke to him, saying “he was going to give me the city to pastor.”
- Thomson, as vice mayor, led a 2021 push to declare Oroville a “constitutional republic” that had the right to exempt itself from state pandemic restrictions.
- In Temecula, California, Tim Thompson, senior pastor of 412 Church Temecula Valley, founded his own political action committee to change the composition of area school boards.
- Religious ministers in the California cities of San Diego, Thousand Oaks, Redding, Rocklin and elsewhere similarly have backed conservative school board candidates.
Few churches have amassed the sustained political influence of Calvary Chapel Chino Hills.
For nearly two decades, the church has leveraged its substantial size, resources and media reach to lobby state politicians, campaign for ballot measures, support candidates in local political races, research state and local political issues and teach other churches how to become more politically engaged.
Real Impact
Calvary’s political operation, called Real Impact, is headquartered at the church’s 12-acre main campus in Chino Hills. There, four staff members led by Gleason coordinate the church’s political activities and communicate regularly with a network of roughly 200 Real Impact Insider churches. Insider church leaders attend workshops led by Gleason and receive regular legislative updates and other political guidance from Real Impact staff members.
Hibbs regularly endorses political candidates from the pulpit and online, and he broadcasts his message via television, radio, social media and in regular appearances with conservative media personalities, such as activist and talk show host Charlie Kirk.
Hibbs, who founded Calvary as an in-home fellowship gathering in 1990, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. His office said he was traveling and unavailable.
Gleason spoke at length with Capital & Main and explained how the church seeks to influence state and local politics.
Gleason has led political operations at Calvary since 2005, when Hibbs hired her after she served as president of her local Republican women’s club.
The ministry tried several names — Watchman Ministry, Faith and Public Policy — before settling on Real Impact as a complement to Hibbs’ Real Life television and radio ministries.
Over the years, Real Impact campaigned for Proposition 8, which outlawed same-sex marriage in California before being overturned; backed an unsuccessful ballot measure outlawing transgender bathroom policies; lobbied against reproductive rights legislation that conservatives said legalized infanticide (the legislation was amended in response to protests); and backed conservative candidates in local school board races.
In 2014, two Chino Valley school board members were sued for proselytizing during school board meetings, a violation of the Constitution’s prohibition of state-sponsored religion.
Members of the Real Impact Insiders network receive regular updates about candidates and legislation that Hibbs and Gleason believe churches should support or oppose. Insiders also attend periodic training, during which Hibbs explains the biblical rationale for political activism, and Gleason provides the “practical hands-on side of it,” she said.
Gleason declined to specify how much Calvary spends each year on political activities.
As an indication of what the church can afford, last year Real Impact hosted a conference for 500 church leaders and spouses at the ocean-front Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach Resort and Spa in California, at a cost of $350 per participant. The church covered the entire cost of the conference, Gleason said.
“We have a nice budget,” she said. “We’re a very large church.”
In 2014, two Calvary-backed Chino Valley school board members, James Na and Andrew Cruz, were sued for proselytizing during school board meetings, a violation of the Constitution’s prohibition of state-sponsored religion. The district fought the suit, lost and was forced to pay $350,000 in attorneys’ fees.
Angered by the controversy, voters tossed out the conservative majority in 2018 and elected candidates backed by Associated Chino Teachers, the local teachers’ union. Two years later, Cruz and Na were reelected and were joined in 2022 by board President Sonja Shaw. All three received backing from Hibbs and Calvary Chapel, as did Jon Monroe, a former police officer and parents’ rights advocate elected in 2022.
Shaw and Monroe were recipients of $50,000 campaign contributions from Charlie and Sherry Reynoso, members of Calvary Chapel who own a local construction company. The donations enabled both candidates to compete financially with their opponents, who together raised more than $130,000 from teachers’ unions and out of state donors.
In a Facebook video Hibbs posted a month before the election, he and Shaw stood together in what appeared to be an office or conference room. Shaw explained why she’s running, and Hibbs told his 978,000 followers, “Hey, you guys, happy Sunday to you. I want to remind all of you that it’s voting season again, [and] Sonja Shaw in the Chino Valley Unified School District is running for office. … Support her, encourage her.”
Gleason said Calvary’s support for Shaw and the other conservative candidates extended up to election day, when Calvary turned in more than 16,000 ballots it had collected from church members during worship services. The practice, known as ballot harvesting, is legal under California law.
Majority Rule
Since gaining the majority, Shaw and the other conservative board members have backed a series of controversial policies, including a ban on Pride and politically affiliated flags at schools, a requirement that parents be notified if their children question their gender identity at school, and, most recently, the revised book removal policy.
The parental notification policy, adopted last year, has drawn intense opposition. State Attorney General Rob Bonta sued the district in August, arguing that the policy violated students’ civil rights. A judge temporarily suspended the policy while the lawsuit proceeded.
Last week, in an apparent response to the lawsuit, the board amended the policy to remove references to children’s gender. The policy now requires district personnel to notify parents when students request changes to “their official or unofficial records.”
According to the latest figures available, the district has paid three law firms close to $400,000 so far in the 2023-24 academic year — almost double the district’s legal costs at the same point the previous year.
Though the district is receiving pro bono assistance from the Liberty Justice Center, a Chicago-based religious freedom law firm, critics alleged that the conservative board majority is wasting district money on a moral crusade that has nothing to do with core educational priorities.
“If [progressives] want to play a nasty, vicious game with our kids, we have to go on offense.”~ Sonja Shaw, board president, Chino Valley Unified School District
“We have a teacher shortage, and teachers don’t want to teach here,” said Kristi Hirst, a former Chino Valley teacher who now leads Our Schools USA, a nationwide advocacy organization opposed to conservative school policies. “It goes back to [Jack Hibbs.] He draws a large crowd to his church, … and he does a lot of campaigning from the pulpit.”
Shaw denied that Calvary’s support made her election inevitable or gave the church undue influence over school district policy. “It’s not like I came in working with Real Impact,” she said. “To be honest, I didn’t know who Gina” Gleason was.
But Shaw had little previous political experience when she ran for the school board. She said Calvary’s support gave her confidence that she stood a chance against better-funded incumbents. Shaw and fellow conservative Monroe were outspent by their union-backed opponents by roughly $50,000, according to campaign filings.
“People say churches are being political, but they have that right,” Shaw said. “If [progressives] want to play a nasty, vicious game with our kids, we have to go on offense.”
Gleason said she believes churches should be even more politically involved than they already are.
“I’ve heard about this vast right-wing conspiracy,” she said. “But really, it’s the holy spirit that has connected us all and caused us to think this way. We’re not trying to establish a theocracy. There are just some basic things we see, that society will function better if we raise kids and they grow up and get married and have kids and have the freedom to walk with the Lord.”
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