Among Protestants, only the Lutherans and the Christian Reformed set up parochial schools much like the Catholics did. These denominations were largely made up of immigrants, as were the Catholics. Protestant denominations with roots in the British Isles made a fatal error in the 19th Century when they willingly turned over the education of their young people to government through the public school system. They made a deal with the secularists who promoted the public schools: the local school boards, which with a few exceptions were dominated by British-descended Protestants, would control the public schools so that the local civic leaders, who usually belonged to these churches, often Episcopalians and Presbyterians in the Northeast and the Great Lakes region and Baptists and Methodists in the South and the Border states, would remain in charge.
The secularists reneged on their deal with the British descended Protestants. Centralization of decision making at the state and Federal levels and judicial rulings that forbade prayer and even the hint of religion in public schools undermined the autonomy of the locally run public school system. The rise of theological liberalism among Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, and even Baptists (several major Southern Baptist seminaries were moderate to liberal before the 1980s) left the clergy with little basis or inclination to denounce the new dominance of secular humanism.
What may thwart private school formation is that the middle class whites who are the main audience for such schools tend to flock to the newest suburb with the most attractive school facilities and with relatively few poor people and non-English speakers. Some of this may change as the suburbs age. For example, Plano, Texas, a suburb of Dallas that was built out in the 1990s, is the home of several large private schools, including the first Catholic high school (Pope John Paul II High School) to be built in the Dallas area in 30 years.
Your observations are very interesting; even captivating. I think also pretty accurate.
let me mention something about Baptist church polity. Several pastors that I worked under would also say that Baptist churches are Congregational in government.
Very large number of Independent Baptist churches, however, do not operate typically so. Many Ind. Baptist churches now conduct business with the consensus of the heads of households.
Our churches on the foreign field (each autonomous once a national pastor is in place, and some even before that), are trained to use the heads of the households as representative of their families. Women do not attend the church business meetings. (( I’ll now probably get some nasty responses from females. )) It is not congregational, it is “republican.” We believe a “republican” governed church to be more consistent with the Pauline church Epistles. Since we teach about marriage and home life directly from the very same Epistles, the teachings dovetail very nicely.
We are independent Baptists.
A very interesting analysis. I studied legal marriage for my master's thesis, and also came away with the impression that the entrenchment of Protestants in the U.S. establishment pre-1960 blurred the understanding of the Bible and conflated Christianity with political power among the Episcopalians and old-line Protestant denominations.
The Episcopal church in America is an offshoot of the Church of England that was born out of the desire of Henry 8th to get a divorce, which the Catholic Pope had forbidden. The Lutherans came out of open rebellion against the Catholic establishment, et cetera. These strains of "I can do what I want", coupled with the vast resources and opportunities of the American continent, ran deep and resulted in a Protestant political power often quite divorced from Biblical standards.