I’ve run a couple of funny stories lately about the Ivy League-crazed parents of students at Sidwell Friends, the Quaker private school in DC that is the favorite of the most ambitious (and apparently horrible) parents in America.

In The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan, who was the college counselor at Harvard-Westlake, the Sidwell Friends of Los Angeles, explains the paradox:

But the problem isn’t simply one of supply and demand. It’s also the result of parents who seem to have a great deal in common—the Volvo XC40, Costa Rican vacations, Hillbilly Elegy—but whose only truly shared value is the desire for their children to attend elite colleges. This wasn’t always the case. Most of the famous private schools began with a specific religious affiliation, and while they gradually began to extend admission to people of other faiths, they maintained certain expectations for how those students would conform to the institutional creed. …

While most of the top schools have retained a nominal connection to their original faiths, these creeds need not trouble any families who do not share them. Today, it is mostly the second-rate institutions (the Catholic schools, of course; Jewish day schools) that still expect religious observance.

While the chaplain of an Episcopal school was once a formidable figure on campus, a man with a great deal of moral authority over the parents, that has changed. Now, if the school still has an Episcopal priest on staff, the poor gal is stashed in a windowless office with a coexist bumper sticker on her laptop case, and a list of phone numbers of local imams willing to speak at chapel services. Indeed, the extent to which an independent school still hews to its religious roots is often the extent to which it is hampered in its ability to deal with monstrous parents. Sidwell Friends, like most Quaker schools, has been able to retain many of its faith traditions despite welcoming a diverse student body; it’s the least oppressive religion on Earth. But the silent search for the inner spark of God is not much help when rabid parents are underfoot. Quakers are pacifists, for God’s sake. Conscientious objectors. If they weren’t going to take on Adolf Hitler, they sure as hell aren’t going to take on a Kalorama mom with blood in her eyes and Duke on her mind.

The elite schools have exchanged religion for a shared code of social justice, multiculturalism, and global citizenship. These are high-minded ideals, and certainly preferable to a strictly Christian code inflexibly forced upon nonbelievers in search of only a fine education and not religious intolerance. But they are ideals that hamper senior administrators from putting dreadful parents in their place. The real god of these schools is the god of money: cash on the barrelhead, or—if need be—a healthy pledge from Grandpa’s eventual estate. (Ever notice who sponsors Grandparents’ Day at these places? The development office. They lured Grandpa Joe into their lair using your 10-year-old as bait. It’s not shameless; it’s vile.)