On May 22, the Supreme Court let stand, by a divided vote and without opinion, a decision of the Oklahoma Supreme Court blocking what would have been the nation’s first religious charter school. The school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, is a joint project of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa. It sought to participate in Oklahoma’s charter school program in order to deliver a high-quality virtual Catholic education across the large rural state, where many children lack access to brick-and-mortar Catholic schools. The Court’s decision has no precedential weight, and the question presented in the case—whether laws prohibiting religious charter schools violate the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause—will undoubtedly be relitigated in the months and years ahead.
Much ink has been spilled about the St. Isidore case, including by me. In 2023, the state’s charter school board entered into a contract with St. Isidore after concluding that provisions of Oklahoma law prohibiting charter schools from being religiously affiliated and requiring them to be secular violate the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause. The board was right to do so. In a series of recent decisions, the Supreme Court has made clear that, when the government creates public programs that invite private organizations to advance public goals like education, the First Amendment requires it to extend the invitation to secular and religious organizations alike. Despite the overheated rhetoric suggesting that reversing the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s decision would remove the last brick in the proverbial wall separating church and state, the question before the Supreme Court involved a straightforward application of that nondiscrimination principle.
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Nicole Stelle Garnett is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who also writes regularly for City Journal.
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