6th place — 2025 grad student essay contest: Claire Lewis

FFRF awarded Claire $1,000.

By Claire Rosemary Lewis

I have no concept of being introduced to Christianity. One of my earliest memories is my first day of preschool, when the teacher at my fundamentalist Christian school told us the Genesis creation story. I was 4 years old and already knew the story, even though I can’t recall anyone telling me the story before then. 

We weren’t called Christian nationalists back then. In my early childhood, being a fervent, evangelical, America-loving Christian, particularly in the Midwest, was treated as the norm and was a very good, patriotic thing to be. Now, under President Trump, Christian nationalists are in the American zeitgeist like they never were when I was a child, accelerating and vocalizing contempt for the concepts of diversity, equity, and inclusion — contempt which existed in the early 2000s, but had yet to achieve a place in the public consciousness beyond those of us who grew up steeped in it.

I am unique among fundamentalist Christian school attendees in that my parents were not Christian nationalists. They were Christians — I wouldn’t have been allowed to enroll at those schools if they weren’t — but they were mainline Protestant and (nonpracticing) Catholic. My parents did not hold to a literalist view of the bible and certainly did not think America must be a nation exclusively made up of Christians the way my teachers and pastors at school did.

Throughout my incredibly Christian upbringing, there remained a secular outlet for me to engage with concepts absent from my sheltered childhood: television. Though I didn’t watch nearly as much television as my friends who grew up going to public school did, it was possibly my only outlet to a non-Christian lens as a child. I vividly remember the cartoons I watched introducing me to things as specific as dreidels, vegetarianism and pop culture references too “out there” for my Christian school to impart on me. And, while I grew up with cable, PBS was the reigning champion of engaging, educational programming.

Republicans wanting to cut PBS funding is nothing new. On May 1, 1969, a then-relatively unknown Fred Rogers famously testified before the Senate Committee on Communications under the Nixon administration, pleading his case for publicly funded television, arguing for its beneficial aspects, particularly for the nation’s children. During his 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney proposed cutting funding to PBS, even caveating, “I like Big Bird” during a presidential debate, spawning a number of memes online at the time. Today, Christian nationalists are pleased that it has been defunded because they are afraid of the fact that America is a diverse country where not everyone is like them.

The push to defund PBS is an attack on public access to information. It is an attempt to restrict access to high-quality educational content, particularly from those who don’t have cable, streaming services or well-funded academic resources in their area. Christian nationalists are often all too happy to push their message on the less fortunate.

The root words of “evangelicalism” and “evangelize” are one and the same, after all. I worry a lack of PBS (and public media more broadly) would lead to a rise in free content available online or over the airwaves pushing a Christian nationalist agenda under the guise of reporting the nightly news or teaching kids how to read. Public media, specifically publicly broadcast news and children’s content, is essential to create a well-educated and equitable country. Especially in an age where fake news, shoddy for-profit content, and AI-generated clickbait roam rampant, publicly funded and nonpartisan media serves an egalitarian purpose to keep all Americans informed. Public broadcasting is worth the minuscule fraction of the federal budget spent on it.

In my tiny basement apartment in a fairly wealthy college town, PBS is one of the only networks my TV antenna can pick up, and I think about people in more isolated, less well-off parts of the country who rely on PBS for their news and educational content for their children. I think about kids who learned about dreidels, vegetarianism and Andy Warhol 20 years after I did because their parents let them have the TV on.

When people ask me if my Christian nationalist schools taught me anything, I often joke, “Well, I can read,” but in truth, I owe much of that to “Between the Lions” and the happenings around the brownstone apartment at 123 Sesame Street.

Claire, 24, attends Duke University and is working toward an MFA degree.

Claire writes: “I am a writer and animator currently earning her MFA from Duke University’s Experimental & Documentary Arts program. I grew up on the southern edge of the Kansas City metro and studied animation and media as an undergrad at DePaul University in Chicago. My creative work often deals with themes related to girlhood in the digital age, asexuality and intergenerational connection.”