Should Taxpayers Be Forced to Fund Radical Religious Indoctrination?
The Supreme Court is evaluating that question (and will probably say yes)
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I know it’s been All Abortion All The Time at this newsletter lately, but there’s another Supreme Court case that should be on your radar: Carson v. Makin, which threatens to radically undermine the separation of church and state.
The case hinges on the argument that taxpayer dollars should fund religious schools, even if a school adheres to few educational standards and is instead a breeding ground of extremism and indoctrination. The schools that could receive taxpayer funding if the conservatives win out are already teaching all manner of bigotry and discrimination — that LGBT people are sinners and that their relationships are like incest and bestiality; that women were created to be subservient to men; that anyone who believes anything other than the particular extremist views being promulgated is a sinner, or evil, or in desperate need of conversion (and if not, discrimination against them is merited).
Many religious schools are already exempt from standard anti-discrimination laws. They can refuse to hire LGBT teachers. They can fire teachers for being unmarried and pregnant. They can expel kids who come out as gay, lesbian, bi, or trans. They can ban interracial relationships. They can require that staff and students adhere to a rigid set of personal beliefs. They do not have to accommodate students with disabilities. And in fact, the schools at issue in this particular case engage in pervasive discrimination. One states that “God recognize[s] homosexuals and other deviants as perverted.” The other expels gay kids. One seeks to “refute the teachings” of other religions (they specifically name Islam as one religion that gets refuted in the ninth grade curriculum). Both teach students that men are the heads of households. “If the petitioners get their way,” Rachel Laser, the president of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, writes, “Muslim taxpayers in Maine are going to have to fund [the teaching that Islam is false].” Gay taxpayers are going to have to fund the teaching that they are perverts akin to child rapists. Female taxpayers are going to have to fund the teaching that we are second-class subservient citizens.
There are lots of good reasons, in other words, why taxpayer dollars shouldn’t be funding these places — not least of them the First Amendment.
As Mark Joseph Stern writes in Slate, until very recently, the Supreme Court consistently held that state funding of religious schools violates the Establishment Clause of the Constitution, declaring that the government may not make any law “respecting an establishment of religion.” Citizens were perfectly free to practice their religion as they saw fit, and to send their children to religious schools. But the state was not going to fund religious schools the way it funds public secular education for all.
That began to change in the early aughts, as the Court shifted right. A series of cases began to expand religion’s reach into the state, including requiring states to pay for religious education, but as Stern writes, “the justices feigned modesty by preserving a distinction between ‘status’ and ‘use’: States could not discriminate on the basis of religious ‘status,’ the court asserted, but they could withhold funding for religious ‘use.’”
That is: States can’t discriminate against schools simply for being religiously-affiliated — for their status as religious. But they can withhold taxpayer dollars from religious indoctrination — from schools that use taxpayer dollars for the purposes of promulgating religion.
This, obviously, was a thin distinction, but the state of Maine attempted to navigate it. Parts of Maine are so rural and sparsely populated that there are not nearby public schools for every student, and so the state created a program to allow parents to send their children to closer-by private schools instead. Those schools could be religious if the parents wanted them to be, but they had to provide an education that was “roughly equivalent” to the one on offer by the state’s public schools, which means a basic secular education, not an all-day sermon.
Christian schools have objected. And this is totally fascinating: They aren’t even pretending that they provide students with an education that is the rough equivalent to the one students would get in public schools. They are practically admitting to offering students a subpar education, one premised on faith over reason and adherence to religious authority over the values of evidence and the acquisition of knowledge. And this Supreme Court appears ready to cut them a state check.
This case is about Christian fundamentalists wanting taxpayer dollars to fund fundamentalist indoctrination. But as with all cases adjudicating the role of religion vis a vis the state, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander — what’s allowed for Christian fundamentalists is also on offer to Muslim fundamentalists, Jewish fundamentalists, and the like. I’m guessing if you’re reading this newsletter, you don’t want the state funding fundamentalism of any stripe. But if you stumbled over here by accident and you’re still reading, consider that decisions of the Supreme Court are generally applicable. Maybe you’re comfortable with taxpayer dollars funding your particular stripe of conservative religion. Are you comfortable with them funding all the other kinds of extremist religious instruction too?
There is a lot of hypocrisy and short-sightedness here. The right has long worked itself into a tizzy over fears of “Sharia courts” in the United States, and to be honest I think they have a point! Religious courts basing their decisions on religious documents should have no binding authority in the United States; allowing them to operate a parallel arbitration system is bananas, and liberals should oppose it. Liberals should also oppose, for the record, rabbinical courts that have covered up the serial sexual assault of children, and the Christian tribunals that have long served as coverers and enablers of for-profit child abuse networks. It’s all a mess, and it has no place in our system.
But if conservatives are worried about “Sharia courts,” one imagines they may also be concerned about states funding schools that teach a radical, conservative version of Islam — the kind of schools funded by Saudi Arabia the world over, that have become breeding grounds of extremism, misogyny, shifts toward theocracy, and hostility to democracy generally. A Supreme Court decision opening the door to state funding of fundamentalist Christian schools also opens the door to state funding of fundamentalist madrassas and far-right Yeshivas. Are conservatives ok with that, as long as they get their piece of the pie?
I’m personally horrified that religious schools that do more indoctrinating than teaching are allowed to operate as a parallel educational system no matter who pays for it, and that the state levels virtually no requirements on them. There are of course plenty of religiously-affiliated schools that offer students excellent instruction, and if states had sufficient rules in place to make sure every student was entitled to a good education no matter their parents’ preference, a lot of religious schools would make the cut. But a lot wouldn’t, from many of the conservative Yeshivas that serve the US Hasidic community to the many extremist Christian institutions the nation over (not to mention all the religious homeschoolers who aren’t required to learn anything at all). It’s bad enough that we’re already allowing so many children to be radically underserved, and that thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of American kids do not receive even a basic education and face pervasive mistreatment by adults who are supposed to keep them safe. But it’s truly intolerable that taxpayers in a secular democracy may be required to fund a combination of educational neglect and rampant discrimination.
Every person should have the right to practice their faith, right up until the point that their personal religious practice infringes on the fundamental rights of others — and right up to the point that they insist the rest of us pay for it.
xx Jill
Photo by David Beale on Unsplash