Publicly funded schooling in Georgia was born in a time of crisis. Inaugurated in 1871, the first official public school system in the state was created under the Republican government only one year before white Democrats "redeemed" Georgia politics through violence and threats of death. Everything about the new system was contested: from who it would serve, to who would pay for it, to what it would teach the students about themselves and their communities—their pasts and their potential futures. Though most Georgians agreed that schooling should include moral instruction, what that meant was far from decided. Whereas many white southerners viewed schooling as a way to preserve patriarchal and white supremacist tradition, Black Georgians often championed education as a chance to bring about social change. Theologies of liberation confronted theologies of white supremacy at the schoolhouse door, in the curriculum, and in the courthouse. The Georgia school system was thus entangled in a theological as well as a political battle from the start. Ultimately, this dissertation asks how religious practices and beliefs—particularly those that upheld a patriarchal and white supremacist order—shaped the public school system in Georgia and the narratives of history that its school children learned. By placing histories of public schooling and histories of Lost Cause ideology in conversation with southern religious history, this study offers a deeper understanding of the political and religious forces at work in southern public-school systems in the late nineteenth century and further illuminates how the Lost Cause narratives found such staying power well into the present political and educational arenas.