By Molly Claire Goddard
5:11am PDT, May 24, 2025
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The
Supreme Court is divided over funding for a religious charter school.
On Thursday, May 22, the highest court in the United States became deadlocked when voting on whether or not Oklahoma could provide money to a religiously based education establishment without violating the separation of church and state.
Keep reading to learn why the judges could not make a definitive decision on the matter…MORE:
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Due to her 15 years teaching at the University of Notre Dame's law school, Justice
Amy Coney Barrett excused herself from the vote. The college is also representing one of the parties in the case: St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School.
With the 4-4 split, the
Supreme Court did not issue a written decision acknowledging how each judge voted on whether or not taxpayers should be funding the religious school.
Now, previous court rulings that allowed taxpayer-funded voucher money to go to religious education establishments — but blocked public schools and charter schools from teaching religion — will continue to stand.
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The controversial case stems from the five-member Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approving St. Isidore's operation application in a 3–2 vote in June 2023.
In response, State Attorney General Gentner Drummond filed a lawsuit against the board, claiming the decision would "open the floodgates and force taxpayers to fund all manner of religious indoctrination, including radical Islam or even the Church of Satan."
The suit puts into question the First Amendment's Free Exercise Clause, forbidding religious discrimination and the Constitution's Establishment Clause, which restricts the government from helping one religion over another.
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The Supreme Court held oral arguments on the case in April. Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh stated during the hearing, "All the religious school is saying is, 'Don't exclude us on account of our religion.'"
"Our cases have made very clear — I think those are some of the most important cases we've had — of saying you can't treat religious people and religious institutions and religious speech as second-class," he added.
Chief Justice John Roberts questioned, "What do you do with Fulton [v. City of Philadelphia] — the state agency that refused to deal with the religious adoption services. We held they couldn't engage in that discrimination. How is that different from what we have here?"
Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor lamented how students at St. Isidore's would "have to accept the teachings of the church with respect to certain principles."
More left-leaning Justice Ketanji Brown added that "it's not being denied a benefit that everyone else gets" if the school was denied its charter school application.
"It's being denied a benefit that no one else gets, which is the ability to establish a religious public school," she claimed.
