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The religious conservative view is not that parents have a right to propagate their worldview. It is that we are right and you are wrong, and children are highly impressionable and need paternalist guidance.
I mean, sure. But there are, in my experience, religious conservatives who, to the extent that they tolerate other faiths, think it is in order for children of those faiths to be educated as their parents see fit, even if those parents are wrong - while it is in some deeper sense not in order for the state to indoctrinate them into anything. They regard it as much more degenerate for the state to teach e.g. Jewish children to be woke communists than for their Jewish parents to teach them to be Jewish, even if they think Judaism is a profoundly blasphemous heresy. Part of this may be strategic thinking about what equilibrium most favors their own religion, but I've always gotten the sense that there's a deeper instinct at play, a sincere belief about the natural law and disgust at the state muscling in on what should be the prerogative of the family. Maybe that doesn't apply to you, but it's a thing, and I suspect it's a fairly widely-shared gut-instinct.
Yeah, as a religious and relatively conservative person, I would say that the natural role of a parent is to take care of their child and a child to be instructed by their parent. Thus, while the parent (or rarely the child) can do something bad enough to warrant severing that bond, severing the parental bond is itself an act of violence and should only be done in extreme circumstances.
Thus I wouldn't want to take kids from "woke communist parents" or whatever - even if I was absolutely convinced that they were wrong, taking kids away from their parents is a good way to convince them you are wrong. Whereas I think that a good parent-child relationship and familial relationship serves as a model and a stepping-off point for other relations in society. Turning someone towards religious truth (or social or political truth, to the extent that there is such a thing) is, I think, more difficult if their first relationship (with their parents) is disordered. Thus, while a sufficiently disordered relationship may be cause for separation, disordering a sufficiently ordered relationship may itself make a person's relationship with society (and God) more difficult.
Hopefully that makes some sense.
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But what do you think they think of woke communist parents indoctrinating their children to be woke communists?
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