The 'Remnant Alliance' is coming for a school board near you

On February 6, pistol-packing pastor Troy Jackson, a former Republican Party of Texas strategist and current candidate for vice chair of the Texas GOP, beamed as he welcomed a dozen conservative activists into a flag-adorned meeting room at the New Beginnings Church in Bedford. The attendees included the founder of Citizens Defending Freedom, a Tarrant County GOP official, the founder of the local John Birch Society, and a representative from the far-right group Turning Point USA. They were gathering as the Remnant Alliance, a coalition of Christian nationalist groups that are working to educate, train, and mobilize conservative Christian congregations to influence the outcomes of local elections—especially school boards. “Even if I don’t have kids in school, I’m showing up at school board meetings and testifying that you’re not going to teach our children this smut,” Jackson told the group. “You’re not going to sexualize these children. Because, even though I may not have children in the school, it affects the entire community.”

Jackson’s heated rhetoric echoes the talking points deployed by state-level Republican lawmakers, big-dollar political action committees (PACs), and well-connected Republican consulting firms that have descended upon local school board races in recent years—and helped install majorities that have taken books off library shelves and rolled back protections for LGBTQ+ students. The election of those majorities was not coincidental: A recent Texas Observer investigative series revealed the coordinated nature of efforts to back more than 105 hard-right school board candidates across 35 districts since 2021, and how those efforts were funded in large part by billionaire donors who support school privatization. For decades, various far-right, faith-based organizations have been working to train pastors and turn congregants into school board activists and candidates. But now, the Remnant Alliance has united several powerful conservative Christian groups. The overarching ideology of these groups is Christian nationalism, which is “an ideology that seeks to privilege conservative Christianity in education, law, and public policy,” according to David Brockman, a religious scholar with the Baker Institute at Rice University. While conservative churches and outspoken pastors have long played roles in local politics, the Remnant Alliance represents a deepening and broadening of efforts to elect candidates who promise to infuse right-wing Christian values into policy.