Could This Tiny School Break Down the Wall Between Church and State?

If the U.S. Supreme Court is ultimately where Oklahoma’s school fight is settled, it has also been an inspiration for the battle itself. The archdiocese found direction in three previous cases brought before the court when it was considering possible models for a new school, according to Brett Farley, the executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, a public-policy advocacy group. Farley rattled off the cases to me effortlessly.

In 2017, the court ruled in Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer that excluding church-run school playgrounds from a grant program for playground resurfacing was unconstitutional. In 2020, the court found in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue that Montana’s exclusion of religious schools from a state scholarship program was unconstitutional. “A State need not subsidize private education,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote. “But once a State decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.” Two years later, in Carson v. Makin, Roberts again wrote the majority opinion, which held that Maine’s prohibition against using publicly funded tuition assistance for religious schools violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment: “A neutral benefit program in which public funds flow to religious organizations through the independent choices of private benefit recipients does not offend the Establishment Clause.”

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