Advocates of school choice and religious education are largely cheering on a lawsuit seeking to overturn an Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling that the state’s charter school board violated state law when it conferred charter school status on St. Isidore’s Catholic School. If the U.S. Supreme Court overturns the ruling, it will be the first time a religious school in the U.S. has been granted status as a public charter school with full public funding.
To proponents of charter status for religious schools, the potential benefits of public funding are numerous, including giving parents a greater choice in selecting schools for their children that are more closely aligned with their faith.
But this may also be a case of “be careful what you wish for,” because as the Trump administration has so vividly illustrated in the higher ed sector, dependence on government funding can be devastating to the independence of private educational institutions.
While charter school status, vouchers and other forms of public subsidy for private education may come with few strings up front, experience tells us that a different political context is bound to bring with it demands for accountability. In many cases, the standards for educational excellence set by state lawmakers or government officials do not align with the priorities of those dedicated to private religious education. Subsidies can easily morph into a stalking horse for state control of private education.
The question might then be: why take the money if the state imposes onerous conditions on the provision of funds? Some may say: just refuse them.
This grossly underestimates the way that public subsidies disrupt the market for private education. One of the strongest arguments for vouchers and charter schools is that they allow families without the economic means of pursuing private education to make choices about the education of their own children. This is the essence of the broad appeal of school choice policies — a good thing, taken by itself.
However, the increasing share of state tax revenue and financial investment in education going to non-public schools will bring with it pressure to ensure that conditions are met. Almost by definition, those seeking to educate their children outside the public schools on religious grounds are doing so because of a misalignment between their own worldview and that of a majority in the communities where they live. Becoming dependent on state tax revenue to fund private religious institutions is handing an enormous lever to the states’ political majority and its dominant political culture to influence and even dictate what is taught in subsidized private schools.
When that happens, institutions that have become dependent on the funds for their operations will have to choose between abandoning their convictions or closing their doors.
The reasonable thing for such institutions would be to stay out of programs of this kind and continue to pay their own bills. But public subsidies will make that difficult as well. When it comes time for parents to choose between the school that’s sticking to its guns and charging tuition to avoid reliance on the public versus the school down the street that has accepted status as a public charter or a registered program to accept their vouchers, parents will be much more likely to prioritize the short-term savings. By disrupting the market, subsidies leave religious institutions with no choice but to join the ranks of quasi-public schools.
Charter school status for religious schools is potentially a Trojan horse that could undermine the integrity and vibrance of private religious education in this country in the long run. For that reason, the Court should be leery of interpreting the First Amendment to require states to extend public charter status to religious institutions. A more prudent course would be to leave such an arrangement in the category of constitutionally permissible but not constitutionally compelled. This is assuming that the Court declines to adopt the position of Oklahoma’s attorney general that the conferral of charter status converts sectarian schools into full-fledged public schools, in which case they would be prohibited by the Establishment Clause.
For those committed to independent religious education, it’s worth revisiting the words of Puritan radical and founder of the Rhode Island colony, Roger Williams, on this topic. Williams’ most famous tract, “Bloudy Tenant of Persecution for Cause of Conscience‚” urged the British Parliament and the Puritans who then controlled it in the wake of their successful civil war to adopt total religious toleration in England and do away with the state’s religious establishment. Williams wanted this not because he was a secularist, but because he was so radically devout that he thought any political interference in religion would corrupt it. Politics for Williams was beset by human sin. It would always be so because society would always consist of many people who do not follow Christ.
It was therefore essential in Williams’ estimation to maintain a “hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world,” not to shield politics from religion, as Thomas Jefferson would later suggest, but to preserve the church from the corrupting influence of politics. Getting the government involved in the church and matters of doctrine was certain to lead to error and hypocrisy, a point that James Madison would later echo in his Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments. The best outcome politics could offer was to protect everyone’s freedom, allowing believers to practice their faith alongside others without public interference.
This version of American religious liberty, championed especially by religious minorities like Baptists and Quakers at the time of the Founding, certainly limits religious communities’ access to public funding. But that is arguably the cost of avoiding the corrupting influence of politics in the church. If the church’s doctrines are to be pure and its teachings in church schools are to be faithful to its true convictions, then it must be free of the corrupting influence of political pressure and state supervision.