Christian Nationalists Are Closer Than Ever To Getting Church-Run Public Schools
From the Bucks County Beacon. Pay attention to what’s happening to the First Amendment as the Supreme Court has brought us closer to taxpayer-funded religious schools.
The First Amendment has always included a tension between the establishment clause (the government can’t endorse any particular religion) and the free exercise clause (the government can’t get in the way of you freely exercising your right to worship as you choose). SCOTUS has generally favored the establishment clause, but it’s always been a tricky balance. So, for instance, it has been the understanding that if a student leads a prayer at a school gathering, that’s probably okay, and if a school staff member leads students in a school mandated prayer, that probably isn’t.
What we’ve seen most recently is not just a favoring of the free exercise clause, but an expansion of what free exercise even means.
One might assume that free exercise means that the government shouldn’t interfere with your attempts to freely worship as you please. The government cannot, for instance, forbid the Catholic Church to open any religious schools at all.
But the reasoning behind Carson, the argument increasingly heard, is that a private religious school can’t exercise its religion freely if it isn’t given access to the same sort of funding as public schools receive. In Carson, the court ruled that if Maine gave vouchers for students to attend a secular school, they must also give vouchers to attend private religious schools.
The Manhattan Institute, the right-wing think tank that employs Christopher Rufo, has just cranked out a report that argues, based on Carson and Trinity Lutheran, that “Unconstitutional Religious Discrimination Runs Rampant in State Programs,” claiming that states are “persecuting religious schools and charities.”
It offers numerous examples of this persecution. None of the examples involve the state actively interfering with the operation of various religious businesses, but simply not allowing these private religious entities to be paid with public taxpayer dollars.
In other words, you may think that persecution and discrimination might mean that the state comes in and tells the Catholic Church that it can’t operate a school, but at the moment, it means that the state won’t use taxpayer monies to help fund that school. Discrimination in this view is not just active opposition, but a failure to financially support.
And that is not the end of the free exercise expansion. In Carson v. Makin, Chief Justice Roberts argued:
In particular, we have repeatedly held that a State violates the Free Exercise Clause when it excludes religious observers from otherwise available public benefits.
“Otherwise available public benefits” is doing a lot of work here, but so is “excludes.” There is a sequel to Carson wending its way through the courts right now. One of the schools from Carsons is arguing that they are still being excluded because the state of Maine will not let them collect voucher dollars if they insist on keeping certain discriminatory policies, such as hiring only teachers who profess the correct version of a Christian faith.
The other enlargement of the free exercise clause says that one can only freely exercise one’s religion if one is able to freely discriminate against people to whom one objects.
Read the full piece here (it’s free).
Peter - Arnie Anneson suggested we talk but I can't find a direct email for you. Can you help me? I'd like to chat about education and charter schools in NH.
I suppose one would have to pretend the modern, secular, naturalist worldview isn't religious to make your case. One would have to pretend there is such a thing as neutral education—that arithmetic or biology, for example, were not grounded in religious worldview. Indeed, no education exists that is not underpinned by some "religious" worldview. Even the positivists are making a moral claim when they claim one cannot be made objectively. Therefore, to be honest and admit this is the case, one would then have to acknowledge public education today is already religious, just a different religion, one that much of modern society has become comfortable with—naturalism.
Abraham Kuyper's work in education is a model worthy study in our present "school choice" debates. As a statesman, clergyman, and even Prime Minister of the Netherlands, he worked to effectually remove education from politics by getting legislation passed that allowed State educational funds to be "redirected" (no new money) toward establishing religious private schools whenever a district had enough practitioners to justify its establishment. Since, in a pluralistic culture, all affirm with conviction their worldview is closest to reality and want to education the population according to their conviction, and since there is no temporal, autonomous authority to determine which is actually true with the certainty each demands, public funds should be dispersed equally. Better still, perhaps public education as it currently exists should be dismantled at the federal level entirely, at the state level with some limited claim on its citizens' education, and left to counties and townships to levy taxes, locally, and oversee "public" education, locally. Additionally, you quoted Katherine Stewart's tweet—"America’s Christian right is taking direct aim at secular public education, but let’s not forget that it is also after the money." The money the "religious right" is after is their own money. Why should one people group be forced to pay for someone else's education then have to turn around and foot the bill for their own children's education. If secularists are so bent out of shape about it, let's just abolish the whole thing, let everyone keep their money and use it to educate their children their own way? For what it's worth, having said all that, I am highly opposed to microgrants—new money being levied to fund private religious education. I'm not a socialist for crying out loud; I just want parents to retain their agency in their own child's education without being robbed by the state first to pay for an education they don't affirm.