Noah Feldman, Columnist

Oklahoma Tries to Tear Down the Church-State Wall

A new government-funded religious charter school tests the Supreme Court's willingness to abandon the establishment clause of the Constitution.

June 6, 2023 at 3:00 PM UTC

By Noah Feldman

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

State-funded?
Photographer: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

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Oklahoma has approved a public Catholic charter school, which would be the first overtly religious school in the US to be fully funded by government. The arrangement violates the establishment clause of the Constitution as it has been interpreted from its adoption in 1791 until today. Nevertheless, it is possible that the Supreme Court could allow it as part of its ongoing revolutionary transformation of the law of church and state.

That would put us in a brave new world where states come under legal pressure to fund all religious education equally — an outcome that seems sure to increase strife over government-funded religious beliefs, not to mention public education.