Religion, Education and the State

I will summarise the podcast here for readers. A Catholic diocese in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma has been trying to build a religious charter school for a couple of years now using taxpayer funds. Not vouchers, as someone would suspect at first. The church wants to build a new school from scratch using the same taxpayer finds that would ordinarily be used for a new government public school.

This went all the way to the state supreme court, who rejected this plan because it violates the constitution statute that maintains the separation of church and state. The defendants appealed all the way to the federal supreme court, hoping that there are enough Catholic justices on the court to rule in their favour. One justice, Amy Coney Barrett, has recused herself as she is friends of someone close to the case.

So, eight justices are going to render opinions on this at some point soon. Three justices will vote for the constitution, three will likely vote in favour of the church, leaving one wildcard that no one is making predictions for right now.

In the podcast I lay out a lot of reasons why this is a bad idea all around. What this means for other states who are looking at this, especially Texas, is the possibility of a lot more religious charter schools cropping up around the country using taxpayer funds.

The worst problem, as someone who I solicited research information from for this episode told me, this idea of charter schools being built and supported using public funds takes money away from the public secular schools. These charter schools by design, are set up for specific demographics as a rule. A Catholic school, by definition, is a church run school. There is no doubt that they will have a Catholic curriculum, alongside their state mandated curriculum standards.

Because these institutions want to use public money to build schools in their image, other institutions will now be eligible if the federal supreme court overrules the Oklahoma state supreme court. As I lay out in the podcast, what if the states start seeing a bunch of religious charter schools vying for these public funds?

Could we see a return to church owned schools phasing out underfunded secular public schools someday? Could the United States president declare a national protestant religion someday? Trump has intimated that he might do that.

That would set off a whole lot of intrastate fighting over which brand of protestant Christianity would end up being the national religion.

I also talk about the governor of the state of Texas signing into law the largest school voucher program for the state. Once again, taking money away from the public school systems.

I urge anyone reading this to check out the podcast as I have a lot more to say about all of this plus the actual news articles are linked on my Substack page using the link on the podcast web page within this web site. Just click the link at the top of this blog to jump to it.

I will add the news articles here for everyone as well. I appreciate everyone who visits with me here and reads these little blog notes. I'm going on vacation next week so my blog posts will be more of a travel blog for the next month as we head across the country. I might even throw in some pictures if I can.

Thank you for joining me here and I'll talk to everyone in a few days. Sláinte