Stanley Carlson-Thies

In November 2015, the Philanthropy Roundtable published a donor’s guide, Catholic School Renaissance, available online and from various book distributors. The many varieties of Catholic, and Catholic-inspired, schooling it showcases demonstrate both the expanse and the limits of religious freedom in the US.

The expansiveness of American religious freedom is evident in those many varieties: we do have “public school” systems—schools funded and administered by government and thus non-religious—and yet our governments also permit a wide variety of non-governmental religious (and secular) schools. About a century ago, the state of Oregon, in an anti-Catholic mood, sought to make (Catholic) nonpublic schools illegal in the state. But the US Supreme Court spoke up sharplyand unanimously (Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 1925) to remind Oregon that children belong to their parents and not the state, and that it is up to the parents, not the state, to decide whether their children should receive a religious education.

But the new guide also shows the limits of American religious freedom. In one section, it profiles “faith-inspired charter schools,” some of them schools converted from Catholic schools to charter schools. Charter schools are a variety of public—governmental—school and, as such, cannot be specifically religious, although they may teach about religion and seek to develop in the students commonly acknowledged virtues that are also espoused by one or more religions. By being created as, or converted to, charter schools, these institutions gain the financial strength of public schools—often regarded as underfunded but much more strongly supported than most inner-city Catholic schools in our era. But they lose the freedom to teach Catholic values, Catholic beliefs, and a Catholic worldview.

And yet Catholics, and non-Catholic parents who admire Catholic schooling, are a part of the “public” that public schools are meant to serve. Charter schools have been, in the main, a significant positive reform of big city public school systems. But better would the conversion of government education funding to vouchers—with strong religious freedom safeguards against overregulation—so that all parents could find for their children “public schools” that are suitable, whether those schools be Catholic or secular, Jewish or Protestant, Muslim or Montessori.