Scapegoating Trans Teachers as Political Strategy: The Neoliberal Deployment of Christian Nationalism

• In Event: Positive Peace, Global Transformations, and U.S. Contestations: Decolonial, Ecological, Economic, and Democratic Pathways in Education (Part 2)

Proposal

The resurgence of Christian nationalism, bolstered by neoliberal ideology and consolidated through the political strategies of organizations such as The Heritage Foundation, ALEC, and the Council for National Policy, has increasingly shaped U.S. education policy. This influence is most visible in the legislative blueprint Project 2025, which, now enacted through executive power, seeks to entrench heteronormative patriarchal norms and explicitly targets transgender identities as existential threats to families, schools, and society. The resulting wave of anti-LGBTQ legislation—bathroom bans, mandatory outing policies, book censorship, restrictions on inclusive curricula, and prohibitions on transgender participation in school sports—demonstrates how education has become a central battleground for the operationalization of Christian nationalist ideology. At the same time, states such as California, Oregon, and Washington have enacted protective legislation, highlighting stark regional differences in policymaking across the United States. These divergent trajectories illustrate not only the contested nature of education but also the broader cultural struggle over the meaning of democracy, freedom, and identity.

This study focuses on transgender and nonbinary teachers, a population notably absent in prior scholarship on education policy and Christian nationalism. While research has explored LGBTQ+ students and the effects of book banning, curriculum suppression, and teacher targeting, there remains a significant gap regarding the lived experiences of transgender educators navigating hostile or protective policy environments. This research addresses that gap by examining how Christian nationalism has operationalized trans identity as a scapegoat within education, how these dynamics vary across distinct U.S. regional cultural nations, and how transgender teachers themselves experience scapegoating in their professional and personal lives.

The theoretical framework integrates Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power, Althusser’s ideological and repressive state apparatuses, Gramsci’s cultural hegemony, Poulantzas’ analysis of state structures, and Goode and Ben-Yehuda’s theory of moral panics. Together, these perspectives illuminate how Christian nationalism creates and sustains scapegoating mechanisms that both produce and enforce education policy. By analyzing policies regionally, the study conceptualizes ideological and repressive state apparatuses as regional apparatuses, revealing how cultural, political, and religious forces interact differently across the United States. For example, in Florida and Oklahoma, where policies mandate outing LGBTQ students and insert religious texts into classrooms, Christian nationalism functions through explicit repression. By contrast, in California or Oregon, trans-protective legislation complicates the hegemony of Christian nationalism but does not fully eliminate experiences of scapegoating.

Methodologically, this qualitative study explores the experiences of transgender and nonbinary teachers across two contrasting regional contexts. Through interviews, policy analysis, and regional discourse mapping, the study interrogates how teachers both endure and resist scapegoating in environments shaped by moral panic, political opportunism, and the long-term mobilization of Christian nationalist ideology.

By documenting both repression and resistance, this paper contributes to understanding how authoritarian religious ideologies disrupt pathways to positive peace in education while also revealing how educators cultivate peace in practice, even under hostile conditions. It argues that achieving peace in schools requires confronting structural violence in the form of discriminatory policies, while supporting the creative strategies through which marginalized teachers foster inclusivity and belonging.

Authors

• Shannon Barnes, California State University, Sacramento

• Frank Adamson, California State University, Sacramento