Oklahoma Is Asking the Supreme Court to Ignore History

The Atlantic

25-04-2025

Oklahoma is forcing the Supreme Court to choose: Either the justices can allow more religious control of public schools, or they can respect the wishes of the Founding Fathers. They can't do both.
The Founding Fathers didn't see eye to eye on all the details, but people in the founding era did agree that it would be the death of public schooling if schools came under the authority of any specific religious denomination, or even if a school appeared to favor one denomination over another. Many believed that public schools had a duty to encourage religion as a general idea and could even offer some generic religious instruction, but a line was drawn at direct control.
The reason was that public schooling was not just an educational offering but also a project of building a national identity and citizenry. No public school could ever be run by a church, because no public school should teach any religious idea that divided Americans. In the centuries since, that fundamental principle has remained intact. By the 1960s, the idea of any devotional practice in school had come to seem divisive, so the Supreme Court prohibited teacher-led prayers and school-sponsored religious devotions of any kind. The wholesale exclusions of religious practices were new, but the guiding principle was as old as the United States itself.
Oklahoma's plan for a public school run by the Catholic Church would upend that principle. It would fly in the face of the Founding Fathers' intentions and go against two centuries of American tradition. And it puts the six members of the Supreme Court's conservative majority in a bind. In previous decisions, they have insisted that they will be guided by history, using that rationale to allow for more religion in public schools. In this case, however, if they want to follow their own rules, they must decide in the other direction.
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In 2023, the Oklahoma government approved an application from the Catholic Church to create a virtual charter school. Like other charter schools, this one would be funded by taxpayers. But unlike other charter schools, this one would be explicitly religious, teaching students Catholic doctrine. Oklahoma's state attorney general objected, pointing out the obvious: Such a school would be a flagrant violation of the state constitution, to say nothing of the U.S. Constitution. The Supreme Court will hear the case next week.
Many on the religious right are hopeful. This Court has given their movement some significant victories in recent years—each time justifying the decision by pointing to history. In 2020, in a case about a Maine school-payment program, Chief Justice John Roberts argued that all private schools, secular and religious alike, had to be included in the program in rural areas where public options were not available. He justified his decision by claiming that sending public funds to religious schools was the 'early American tradition.' In 2022, Justice Neil Gorsuch ruled that a football coach at a public school must be allowed to pray with his players at the 50-yard line of the football field. Why? Quoting two older opinions about religion and public schools, Gorsuch said that this had long been the rule: Decisions about religion in public schools must be guided by 'history' and faithfully reflect 'the understanding of the Founding Fathers.'
But the case from Oklahoma makes claiming history as a justification harder for the conservative justices. In this case, the history is unambiguous: The Founding Fathers would never have approved of a public school that taught the religious doctrines of one specific kind of Christianity.
The Founders were obsessed with the idea of public education. They worried that their fragile new republic would not long survive if children—by which they meant white children—did not learn to be proper American citizens.
Some—particularly Thomas Jefferson—took a starkly secular approach. He envisioned an elaborate public-school system that carefully excised any mention of God or the Bible. Jefferson dreamed of a system of free schools for all white children in Virginia, with advanced opportunities available for the more talented white boys. Jefferson hoped for a classical education, free of Christian teaching: He argued against 'putting the Bible and Testament into the hands of the children.' Instead, Jefferson wanted them to learn 'the most useful facts from Grecian, Roman, European and American history.'
Other Founders disagreed, seeing more of a central role for Christian education in public schools. Benjamin Rush thought that the new nation desperately needed 'one general and uniform system of education' but insisted that religion was absolutely essential, and that the proper religion for American public schools was, in his words, 'the religion of JESUS CHRIST.'
Rush's evangelical approach was just as much of a nonstarter as Jefferson's Bible-free one. The people who created the first generations of American public schools were guided by a different principle: These schools—if they were going to be truly American—should teach a generic, religion-based morality, but they could not be run by any single church or inculcate any specific religious beliefs.
In Massachusetts, for example, a new law in 1789 attempted to clarify the structure of the state's public-education system. The state was not averse to religion. At the time, the Congregational Church was the official state church, even receiving funding from public taxes until 1833. Ministers were given power to inspect the state's public schools and authorized to report any religious teaching that seemed divisive. Children in public schools would pray and read the Bible. But even so, lawmakers limited the role of the Church, specifying that 'no settled minister shall be deemed, held, or accepted to be a School-Master' in the new system.
A few years later, Connecticut, another state with Puritan roots, passed a similar law, similarly clarifying the role and funding of public schools. The state's taxpayers certainly considered it vitally important that children learn to be moral, upstanding citizens. Like most Americans at the time, they thought that teaching children vague prayers in public schools was one good way to do that. But they also agreed that any specific religious group, in the words of Connecticut's 1795 law, 'shall have no power to Act on the Subject of Schooling.' In order to be 'public,' in other words, schools could include religion, but they could not be run by any single religious group; they could not teach any religious idea that wasn't generally agreed upon.
There were outliers. In Pennsylvania, for instance, unlike Massachusetts and Connecticut, the 1776 constitution confirmed any existing right held by 'religious societies' to conduct public schools, and a revised 1790 constitution left those rights untouched. By 1818, however, the state had passed a law mandating new public schools that taught only generic Christian ideas, scrupulously avoiding teaching any specific denominational religion.
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Yet the tendency—the 'early American tradition'—was undeniable. When the American Philosophical Society, a scholarly group founded by Benjamin Franklin, ran an essay contest about public education in the 1790s, the most serious entries offered many different visions but agreed that churches should not be in charge. One winning writer, the Reverend Samuel Knox, later explained his vision to the Maryland legislature. In freedom-loving America, Knox wrote, 'every particular religious denomination' had every right to set up its own 'particular, private seminaries.' But any truly American system of public schools must be scrupulously guarded from 'that narrow restriction and contracted influence of peculiar religious opinions.'
Another essayist wrote anonymously, but historians believe him to be the Reverend William Smith. Smith had plenty of experience with the challenges of creating public schools, having collaborated with Benjamin Franklin to set them up in Philadelphia. Like Knox, Smith considered it simply obvious that the new nation's public schools must be free from the domination of any single religious body. Schools run by 'sects,' Smith wrote, directly oppose the goals of public schools. Instead of bringing the citizens of a new nation together, Smith argued, a public school run by any one specific church would only lead to 'divisions amongst mankind.'
Today's conservative politicians might not see a problem with creating divisions among Americans, but the leaders of the founding generation definitely did. The purpose of early public schools was to bring young America together, and those schools carefully excluded any religious idea that might drive it apart.
The justices can now either score a short-term win for today's religious conservatives, or respect centuries of history and precedent. Let's hope they follow their own guidelines and strengthen one of the best traditions of America's past.