White Christian Louisiana is celebrating the freedom to let its public schools return to what they were before the federal government intervened — and the Trump administration’s Justice Department, which spent decades fighting such cases before reversing course, has cleared the path.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday ended more than sixty years of federal oversight of the Concordia Parish School Board, lifting a desegregation mandate that had been in place since 1965. Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill called it a victory for democracy — “The good people of Concordia Parish elected their school board to govern their schools — not unelected federal judges.”
This is the same language the Christian nationalist movement has been using for the better part of a decade to hollow out every federal protection the Civil Rights era produced. It is the same “states’ rights” and “local control” theology that has sent Southern activists back to court to defend what was once settled law. And in Concordia Parish, it wears a specific history.
The case was brought in 1965 by Black families in Ferriday, a town on the central-eastern border of Louisiana, who sued for access to all-white schools in a county where a violent offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan operated openly. The federal government intervened, and the schools began to integrate. Then the white families left.
Ferriday today is mostly Black and low-income. The neighboring town of Vidalia is mostly white and collects tax revenue from a hydroelectric plant. The school populations track the towns — not by law, not by explicit racial assignment, but by the accumulated weight of the decisions white Christian families made in the 1960s and 1970s when they decided that integrated schools were not worth staying for. The desegregation order that the Fifth Circuit just ended was the only legal mechanism left that forced a mostly white charter school in the district to prioritize Black students. That mechanism is now gone.
And the churches of Concordia Parish — the same churches whose members fled Ferriday when the schools opened to Black children — are, predictably, the ones who will benefit most from the ruling. The celebration is predictable — the Attorney General’s language maps precisely onto the “local control” theology white churches have preached since integration.
Let me show you what the Bible’s plain language says about this kind of celebration.
Amos 5:21–24: “I hate, I despise your religious festivals; your assemblies are a stench to me. Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them… Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream.”
The Lord speaking through Amos is not rejecting worship. He is rejecting worship that coexists with the trampling of the needy. The festivals were not wrong. The songs were not wrong. What was wrong was that the same people who sang them were also “skimping on the measure, boosting the price and cheating with dishonest scales, buying the poor with silver and the needy for a pair of sandals” (Amos 8:5–6). The gap between the worship and the practice was the chasm the prophet named.
That is the same chasm in Concordia Parish. The celebrations are the predictable response of a power structure that has spent decades treating “local control” as a religious mandate. But the local control being celebrated is the same local control that produced a school district where the children of Ferriday attend one set of schools and the children of Vidalia attend another, with the line between them drawn not by any current rezoning but by the decades-old pattern of white flight the churches facilitated and never repented of.
The Evangelical legalism that reads “local control” as a biblical mandate has no category for what happens to the children left behind in the local that the powerful control. It reads Romans 13 as a command to submit to governing authorities when those authorities are local and white and Evangelical, and it reads the same chapter as an obstacle when the authority is federal and enforcing integration. The text has not changed. The operation has changed, depending on who the text serves.
Micah 6:8 does not say “celebrate when your team wins a court case.” It says to act justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly. And justice, in the biblical sense, has a structural dimension — it is what the orphans and widows need, not what the comfortable need to hear to feel free.
I was inside the Evangelical apparatus long enough to know how the victory in Concordia Parish will be preached this Sunday. The sermon will use the language of deliverance — freedom from federal overreach, God’s people set free to govern their own. The pastor will not mention Ferriday. The pastor will not mention that the school board being celebrated is the same institutional structure that, left to its own devices for the sixty years before 1965, produced a fully segregated district in a county where the Klan operated in plain sight.
The freedom the Christian nationalist movement is celebrating in Concordia Parish is specifically the freedom to maintain the outcomes of segregation without having to call it that. The order was the last barrier between the local power structure and the natural gravitational pull of resegregation. The barrier is gone.
Jeremiah 22:13–16 pronounces a woe on the king who builds his palace by unrighteousness and his upper rooms by injustice, making his own people work for nothing. In Concordia Parish, the school board is the local king — the body that decides which schools get resources, which programs survive, and which children’s futures are invested in. Then comes the indictment: “He defended the cause of the poor and needy, and so all went well. Is that not what it means to know me?”
The worship songs will still be sung in Concordia Parish on Sunday. But the justice that Amos called for — the river, the never-failing stream — will have to find another channel.