Patriot Academy’s influence spreads across country
BETHLEHEM, Pa. — Linda Wenhold closed her eyes, bowed her head and offered a prayer. “Lord, let us see that the further we move from biblical truth, the further we move from our liberty and freedom,” she began.
The 60-year-old grandmother stood at the front of a modest stone church in this former steel town just beyond the exurban sprawl of Philadelphia. About a dozen people had turned out on a cold February night for the fourth week of a 10-week course she was leading on the Constitution and America’s Christian roots, one of 500 that were underway at churches and community centers across the country. Radiators clanked. The attendees sipped coffee from foam cups.
Wenhold hit play on a video that opened with soaring music and scenes of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. The classes were the product of the Patriot Academy, a Texas-based nonprofit whose mission is to “restore our Constitutional Republic” and the “Biblical principles that cause” the United States “to thrive.”
The Patriot Academy’s classes were tapping into a growing fear among some evangelical Christians that their faith and its rightful place at the center of American culture and government were under siege. It’s a message sounded in recent years from church pulpits, conservative think tanks, right-leaning colleges and the 1776 Commission report, released in the final, chaotic days of Donald Trump’s presidency. This sense of loss has become a central part of Trump’s 2024 campaign and his outreach to conservative Christians. Like the former president’s “Make America Great Again” movement, the Patriot Academy was calling for a restoration.
The Patriot Academy classes urged participants to run for local office, especially school board, and to fight back against the “secular leftists” and “Marxists” in their country and their communities. In November, Wenhold won a seat on the Palisades School Board. The position was unpaid, but it gave her a little bit of power. She wanted to use it to make sure students in her school district were taught America’s “true history” as a Christian nation, as she had come to understand it.
Wenhold led the class through a lesson that discussed how the country was abandoning the Founding Fathers’ egalitarian vision — initially limited to White males — of a government that existed to protect Americans’ “inalienable rights” as individuals. Instead, the government was providing special rights and benefits to groups based on their race, class, sexual orientation and countless other categories.
“As soon as you start to give privileges to one group, you are taking away from or neglecting others,” Wenhold said. “So, I do think that the solution is going back to teaching our kids that we are all equal in the eyes of God.”
Some students scribbled notes. The people who had come out on a cold Monday night for Wenhold’s class were mostly White, middle-aged and middle-class. They included a retired schoolteacher, a mechanical draftsman, a laid-off software engineer, a lawyer and the owner of a small construction company. Most were devout evangelical Christians.
They talked about the country’s ever-expanding federal deficit, the shortcomings of its public schools and all the ways their influence as Christians seemed to be waning as other groups, long shunted to the country’s margins, gained new voice and power.
The class ended around 9 p.m. Wenhold headed home, where piles of school board documents — spreadsheets, contracts, policy papers — covered her dining room table. She guessed it was going to take at least 10 hours to get through all the material before the next meeting, a week away. One item on the agenda caught her eye. The school district was going to be receiving a “diversity award,” commending its Advanced Placement computer science program for enrolling a high percentage of girls.
Wenhold worried that the focus on boosting girls’ enrollment might cause deserving boys to be overlooked or turned away from the classes. She saw the award as another example of the government deviating from the Founders’ vision — singling out one group at the possible expense of another. She planned to speak out against it.
CONTESTED HISTORY
The first time Wenhold took a version of the Patriot Academy’s course, in 2017, she said she was “blown away” by all that she didn’t know.
In the years that followed she signed up for more Patriot Academy classes and then started teaching them at her church, in her community and to her grandchildren. For the first time in her life she read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in their entirety. She dug into the Federalist and anti-federalist papers. She bought an 1828 edition of Noah Webster’s first comprehensive dictionary so that she could better understand the Founders’ words and their original intent.
Wenhold had always seen herself as a good citizen. She and her husband had married when Wenhold was just 19. They had raised and homeschooled three children who now had families of their own. Together, they built a small, but thriving, construction business. They were lifelong Republicans who paid their taxes and voted each Election Day.
The Patriot Academy videos convinced Wenholdthat she hadn’t been doing nearly enough. As her interest grew, demand for Patriot Academy books and videos was surging. Some of the increase in 2021 and 2022 was driven by Americans’ anger over the government response to the coronavirus pandemic. “Everybody was asking all of a sudden, ‘Can the government do this to us?’” said Rick Green, who founded the nonprofit after serving two terms as a Republicanin the Texas House of Representatives. “Can they shut down our church? Can they shut down our business?”
In the years since the pandemic began, the Patriot Academy’s annual revenue has grown sixfold to more than $4.5 million, according to Green and the group’s financial statements.he said about 1 million people across the country have taken a version of his course. Green also speaks at about 100 events a year, including one in Colorado Springs in February in which he appeared alongside Mike Lindell, the Mypillow founder who has pushed baseless election-related conspiracy theories.
A crowd of about 1,000 filled a large church sanctuary where they waved American flags and chanted “USA! USA!” A Christian rock band played and pyrotechnical devices shot plumes of smoke into the air. Green called for the church to once again become “The epicenter of the community … and permeate the culture.” The event’s moderator then led Green, the other panelists and the crowd in something called the “Watchman Decree,” which includes vows to “take back our God-given freedoms” and “stand against wokeness, the occult and every evil attempt against our nation.”
Many of Green’s videos were shot before Trump entered politics, but they all aligned with a core message of his presidential campaigns, that “radical leftists” were spreading lies about the country’s history to cast it as irredeemably racist, erase its Christian roots and undermine the Constitution.
To make his case, Green relies heavily on the work of David Barton, an amateur historian and influential figure inside today’s GOP. Barton offers a largely de-racialized history of American slavery, maintaining that it wasn’t rooted in white supremacy.he supports his thesis by asserting that some free Black people and Native Americans enslaved people during Colonial times. He also argues that some Black patriots held positions of influence in early America.
His narrative doesn’t account for the fact that the vast majority of the half-million enslaved people at the time of the American Revolution were Black. Nor does it acknowledge that the country’s slave market was created and sustained by Whites who “bought their independence with [African] slave labor,” in the words of Edmund S. Morgan, a renowned professor of Colonial American history at Yale University who died in 2013. Morgan called this the “American paradox of slavery and freedom … the rights of Englishmen supported on the wrongs of Africans.”
Barton has also drawn harsh criticism for claiming that the Founding Fathers intended to create a Christian nation — a view he summed up in a book thatwas pulled from circulation in 2012 after its publisher, Thomas Nelson, said there were “historical details — matters of fact, not matters of opinion — that were not supported at all.”
Professional historians have accused Barton of selectively quoting the Founding Fathers in a way that distorts their views on faith and government. Barton has countered that his critics have purposely ignored the Founders’ writings on religion in an effort to downplay the influence of the Bible and Christianity on the nation’s formation. Barton didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story.