Oklahoma voted this week to establish the first publicly funded religious charter school in the history of the United States. This government support for St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School opens up a world of disturbing — and fascinating — political possibilities. Permit me to draw just one of them to your attention.
Starting in 2024, public monies in the Sooner State will fund a parochial school in which Catholic precepts will saturate every aspect of the curriculum from math, to science, to gym. The rub is that Oklahoma is nearly 70 percent Protestant. This leads me to wonder how a member of an Evangelical church in Norman, Okla., might feel about subsidizing religious teachings with which he might strenuously disagree. His kids (presently) don’t have their own taxpayer-funded K-12 theological seminary at their disposal. His kids are thus not being granted what liberals like to call “equality of opportunity.”
As a scholar of American secularism, I’m neither surprised nor shocked that conservative Christianity is, yet again, being entangled with the government. Across the country, right-wing legal activists have been skillfully and methodically fusing the two for decades. In so doing, they have absolutely pulverized the nation’s secular status quo.
That status quo was based on the “wall of separation” that Thomas Jefferson championed in his 1802 Danbury Letter and the Warren Court built and fortified in the mid-20th century. In red states, this wall has been razed to the ground. On the federal level today, I’d be hard pressed to identify a coherent judicial or legislative commitment to separationism. Even in the bluest of states, the core ideas of separationism are routinely undermined. Where the wall once stood in American public life, there are now just stray crucifixes and assorted MAGA flags planted amidst the rubble.
The Oklahoma case will, of course, be subjected to numerous court challenges and appeals. If it does end up in front of the Supreme Court — which is precisely where those who masterminded St. Isidore likely want it to end up — it stands a good chance of being deemed constitutional by the court’s “religion-friendly” supermajority. That being said, Oklahoma’s innovation may overreach in ways that could be exploited by secularists.
Secularists, I stress, are not a monolith. They can be believers or nonbelievers. A Catholic mom in Utah who doesn’t want her daughter being taught Mormon theology in public school is, functionally, a secularist. She wants the state to be neutral in its relation with religions. She wants the state to not endorse or promote any one faith.
Some secularists might be “separationists.” They want to resurrect “the wall.” Some might subscribe to a differing approach known as “non-preferential accommodationism.” They seek to have the state support all religions but without a preference for any one. Still others may advocate approaches that stress equality of all believers and nonbelievers.
Before getting to that, permit me to note that the Christian right is uncannily skilled at locating vulnerabilities in classic separationist ideas. St. Isidore is a charter school. Its charter status could let those who engineered this initiative argue that there is no breach of state neutrality because all religious groups are free to erect state-funded charter schools. Let’s leave aside the obvious fact that not all religious groups could afford (or want) to do so. The Christian right saw charter schools as a constitutionally compelling target of opportunity. And they struck. But did they strike wisely?
It’s ironic that St. Isidore is a Catholic institution. Throughout American history, Catholicism, Protestantism and separationism have triangulated in intriguing ways. Early American separationism was bound up with anti-Catholic prejudice. Xenophobic Protestant groups in the 19th century (like the Know Nothing party) championed separationist policies. Until the 1950s, separationism was often a strategy used by chauvinistic Protestants as a way of keeping Catholicism out of public life, especially public schools.
In the past half century, however, conservative forms of Catholicism and Protestantism realigned. Acting as “co-belligerents,” they linked arms in the 1970s in protest against much of what developed in the 1960s: feminism, the legal push for reproductive freedom, the sexual revolution, racial integration, lesbian and gay rights, cultural liberalism, and, yes, separation of church and state!
The rise of St. Isidore leads me to wonder if the religious right, legally cunning as it may be, might have overreached. Surely, the aforementioned Baptist in Norman will want his own school — and why shouldn’t he get it? Why shouldn’t Muslims and Jews and Hindus in Tulsa get their own as well? Let’s not forget the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Pastafarians, as these master holy trollers are known, have won the right to display their insignia in Florida and fought hard to get their icon, with its anatomically intriguing meatballs, situated next to a display of the Ten Commandments in Oklahoma.
The St. Isidore experiment opens up a lot of doors — doors that even conservative Republicans might not be interested in walking through. Consider that the Republican Attorney General of Oklahoma, Gentner Drummond, has claimed the school is unconstitutional.
His logic for opposing St. Isidore is revealing. Drummond acknowledges that “many Oklahomans undoubtedly support charter schools sponsored by various Christian faiths.” Yet he then frets that “even those [faiths] most Oklahomans would consider reprehensible and unworthy of public funding” could receive state funding for their own schools. Drummond does not tell us what those reprehensible faiths are.
As for secularists, some will undoubtedly respond to St. Isidore’s approval by doubling down on calling for a wall of separation. Regardless of its merits, the pro-separation argument has been on a multi-decade legal losing streak. Then-Justice William Rehnquist’s dissent in the 1985 Wallace v. Jaffree case marked the moment when separationism as a judicial north star started to flicker out of existence.
Instead of separation, secularists might base their opposition to St. Isidore on the principle of equality enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment. Smaller poorly funded religious groups will never be able to mount their charter schools and thus never be able to partner with the government. The state will therefore be subsidizing some religions (i.e., larger and/or wealthier ones) much more than others.
Inequality will also be evident in the classroom level. What will happen to a Mormon student in St. Isidore’s who refuses to engage in selected daily Bible readings? How might LGBTQ youth fare in an evangelical charter? Will the government be obliged to subsidize the Christopher Hitchens God Is Dead Academy, as well? And if not, why not?
St. Isidore, I have learned, is the patron saint of the internet. The Church Father might also, inadvertently, become the patron saint of innovation in secularism; the school that bears his name may help inspire secular alternatives to 20th-century separationism. Meanwhile, the message to the religious right is clear: Careful what you pray for.
Jacques Berlinerblau (jberlinerblau.com; @Berlinerblau) is a professor of Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University. He is the author of numerous scholarly books and articles on political secularism including “Secularism: The Basics,” “How to be Secular: A Call to Arms for Religious Freedom,” and “The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously.”