By: Natan Ehrenreich – nationalreview.com – August 2, 2023

“Something deeply un-American is underway in the state of Oklahoma,” writes Rachel Laser, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, in the New York Times. Mourning — and suing to prevent — the opening of a religious charter school in Tulsa, she decries that “Christian nationalist groups see charter schools as fertile ground for their full-on assault on the separation of church and state in public education.”

But despite Laser’s assertions to the contrary, there is nothing sinister, ahistoric, unconstitutional, or un-American about religious communities educating their children about something other than secularism. 

The opening of our nation’s first religious charter school has predictably proven controversial, but that’s not because its proponents are adopting a relatively new, distorted understanding of the American view of religion’s place in the public square. Rather, it’s folks like Laser who are doing just that.

Laser’s legal error is the same one made often by ardent secularists: importing a phrase coined by Thomas Jefferson in 1802, the “wall of separation between church and state,” and first referenced in a Supreme Court decision no earlier than 1879, into the original meaning of the First Amendment. Laser writes:

The establishment of a school that claims to be simultaneously public and religious — what has been a legal oxymoron in the United States since its founding — violates one of the foundational principles of American constitutional tradition: the separation of church and state.

But simply declaring a legal principle “foundational” does not make it so. As Tal Fortgang notes in City Journal: “Jeffersonian separationism became fully authoritative in Establishment Clause decisions in 1947, when the Court announced that ‘[t]he First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state’ a century and a half after its ratification.” And as the great First Amendment scholar Michael McConnell, alongside Marci A. Hamilton, explains, the period in which the Supreme Court held that the Establishment Clause prohibits public funding of religious education was distinct from both earlier and later jurisprudential periods:

Scholars have long debated between two opposing interpretations of the Establishment Clause as it applies to government funding: (1) that the government must be neutral between religious and non-religious institutions that provide education or other social services; or (2) that no taxpayer funds should be given to religious institutions if they might be used to communicate religious doctrine. Initially, the Court tended toward the first interpretation, in the 1970s and 1980s the Court shifted to the second interpretation, and more recently the Court has decisively moved back to the first idea.

Because it’s difficult to read the First Amendment — “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . .” —  and conclude that the State of Oklahoma is forbidden from placing religious and secular education on the same level, one wonders if Laser is driven not by an authentic desire to uphold the original demands of the Constitution, but by an animus toward the religious communities that simply want to raise their children in a religious environment. Her repeated insistence that these communities are “Christian nationalists” furthers that hunch.

Apparently, Laser’s distaste for religion extends so far that she criticizes Oklahoma’s former attorney general for the entirely unremarkable and thoroughly American claim that “there’s a God who has values and endows us or imbues us with those values that are not granted to us by the government.” Those who place such a statement outside the pale of publicly accepted opinions to be transmitted to the next generation — and sue religious Americans who disagree — are neither defenders of the pluralism or authentic Americanism they are so keen to invoke. They are just secularists who wish to impose their secularism on religious communities. Something deeply un-American is under way in the state of Oklahoma, indeed.

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Source: Religious Charter Schools Not Christian Nationalism | National Review