America’s First Taxpayer-Funded Religious School Should Worry Everyone | Column

Opinion. A taxpayer-funded religious school just cleared its biggest legal hurdle yet. On Thursday, US District Judge David L. Russell ruled that Oklahoma’s Statewide Charter School Board broke the First Amendment by rejecting Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School over its religious character. The school, proposed by former congressman Peter Deutsch, would teach Jewish religious tenets inside a publicly funded, tuition-free online charter.

Russell’s reasoning is the part that should trouble anyone who cares about secular governance. He held that Oklahoma’s requirement that charter schools stay nonsectarian “expressly discriminates” against religious applicants. Charter schools, he wrote, behave more like private contractors than government bodies. So the state, on his logic, cannot fence public money off from religious instruction.

That is a quiet but total inversion of what “nonsectarian” was meant to protect. Charter laws barred religious content because taxpayers of every faith and none fund these schools. Removing that bar does not expand freedom. It conscripts dissenting taxpayers into subsidising catechism, whichever faith wins the next application.

The taxpayer-funded religious school problem is not really about Ben Gamla

It is about precedent. Oklahoma already tried this with St. Isidore, a Catholic virtual charter school, and the Supreme Court deadlocked 4-4 last year, leaving the state’s approval standing without a national ruling. Board attorney Hiram Sasser told reporters this case is headed to the Tenth Circuit and likely back to the justices, hoping a full bench breaks the tie. Once one religious charter opens with public money, the “nonsectarian” firewall is functionally gone, and every state charter board becomes a battleground over whose scripture gets funded next.

Defenders call this pluralism: let a thousand faiths bid for the same pot. But pluralism inside a shared, compulsory tax base is not neutral, it is a lottery. The family whose sect gets chartered wins a subsidised curriculum. Everyone else pays for religious formation they never chose and may actively reject. That is establishment by administrative approval, dressed up as free exercise.

Secularists have spent decades arguing that separating school funding from religious teaching protects believers and nonbelievers alike. This ruling treats that separation as the discrimination, and religious inclusion in public budgets as the remedy. Once that framing wins, there is no principled place to stop it.

The Tenth Circuit and, eventually, the Supreme Court will decide whether that firewall gets rebuilt or torn down for good. Freethinkers should be watching closely, because whichever way it falls will set the template for church-state separation in American public education for a generation.

Fact-basis: Oklahoma Voice, September 24, 2026; KGOU/NPR, September 24, 2026.