This spring, the Supreme Court split 4 to 4 in a case deciding whether St. Isidore of Seville, a Catholic virtual school in Oklahoma, is eligible for public funding given its status as a religious organization. In doing so, the Court maintained a 2024 ruling from the Oklahoma Supreme Court, which said that a religious charter school—that is to say, a religious public school—could not receive state funding because such an institution would be, by definition, unconstitutional. But because Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s decision to recuse herself resulted in an even split among the other justices, the ruling does not set an official precedent, leaving open the possibility that the Court could entertain a similar case in the future.
A case like this, which effectively undermined the First Amendment’s clause prohibiting the government from financing religious institutions, would have been unthinkable decades ago. Yet here we are, thanks in part to years of lobbying, defunding of public schools, and wild exaggerations about the benefits of covering private school tuition through government vouchers. The Court’s split means it did not set a precedent on the issue, leaving the dispute far from settled. Conservatives continue to look for ways to divert billions of taxpayer dollars to religious organizations, including avenues such as state legislation as well as provisions in President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”
One can certainly find positive anecdotes about the relatively small number of students who are able to attend better schools thanks to vouchers. But nowhere will you find a clear answer to the question of whether vouchers improve the overall success of an educational system. Studies on educational outcomes for students using vouchers will always be skewed by the fact that school choice more frequently benefits students from privileged backgrounds, who already have a leg up in test scores, extracurricular activities, and college admissions. As education policy professor Joshua Cowen wrote, “Vouchers fail to deliver for the kids who are often most in need.” But improving the system was never the point. Vouchers are, and always have been, a way for private institutions to tap into public money, while often remaining self-segregating, elitist, and beyond the reach of government oversight.
Outlets like ProPublica and The Conversation have made a strong argument that public funding for religious organizations is unconstitutional, and would sabotage public schools. Yet that coverage fails to elicit enough debate on the issue. After all, voucher proponents already assume that they are entitled to taxpayer money, and that the separation of church and state is far more flexible than the Court has typically ruled.
Mainstream media outlets have mostly shied away from highlighting the corruption and greed at the heart of the voucher effort. What they offer instead is a false sense of balance between the perspectives of wary Democrats and the voucher proponents who merrily dismiss their concerns about the future of public schools. A perfect case in point is an April article from The New York Times about a school choice initiative in Texas, which extensively quotes an Americans for Prosperity spokesperson. According to them, the acceleration of the school voucher movement is a “forty-year hand-to-hand fight” that is “genuinely transformative, not just for Texas, but for the rest of the country.” Such rhetoric aligns with the Project 2025 initiative, which advocates for public funding of religious organizations with the clear goal of benefitting Christian institutions specifically.
Too often, a crucial question goes unasked in the media: What will these organizations do with the public funds? The failure to ask that question is a missed opportunity to point out corruption and self-dealing—issues that anger even the least engaged citizens. Most Americans already know that religious institutions don’t pay income taxes. But many are not aware—or need to be reminded—that religious organizations don’t have to report their income or their expenses to justify their tax exemption. While secular nonprofits fill out a Form 990 every year, religious organizations get to skip all that.
Those in favor of maintaining the exemption for religious institutions argue that the tax code helps to prevent the state from interfering with a religion. But when it comes to education, why would we dump taxpayer dollars into financially murky organizations that have no obligation to open their books? Isn’t that a form of interference? And how would the public know they were using that money properly?
What we do know is that lobbying for voucher programs, especially from Catholic groups, accelerated in the 1990s, when parishes across the country began to experience population decline. That was also when the legal settlements for sex abuse victims began climbing toward their apex, which helped to bankrupt dozens of Catholic dioceses. Since then, the Catholic Church has spent millions lobbying state legislatures to keep them from expanding the statute of limitations for victims of abuse. The dioceses of Tulsa and Oklahoma City, which jointly run St. Isidore, have issued apologies for their role in the scandal. But, like virtually every other diocese, they have not disclosed the amount of money spent to settle claims.
It is in this context that voucher programs have often become Catholic churches’ “dominant source of funding” not just for schools, but for their affiliated parishes. Not surprisingly, beyond just religious schools, many private schools are already raising tuition in anticipation of getting more money. Meanwhile, many churches are looking to add voucher-funded “start-up” schools to their properties. This means that churches would be able to use taxpayer dollars to launch their own Christian schools, free of the same safety regulations, disability accommodations, teacher qualifications, and curriculum standards that public schools are obligated to follow.
That sense of entitlement has only grown bolder since the first Trump Administration. In 2020, at the start of the pandemic, religious organizations collected somewhere between $6 billion and $10 billion through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). Thanks to a rapid (and, arguably, unconstitutional) expansion of the policy under Trump, PPP loans paid the salaries of clergy, regardless of whether their institution was hurting for money. Thus the Catholic Church received at least $1.4 billion, while many megachurches received multi-million dollar payouts. So many of these loans were forgiven that it became newsworthy when a church in Michigan actually paid the money back in 2021.
Clearly, many religious organizations want the benefit of subsidies without the burden of oversight, much like the banks during the 2008 recession. If the American people must endure a rogue government agency claiming to scrutinize every instance of waste, fraud, and abuse, then it’s only fair that we apply that same level of skepticism to religious organizations grasping for cash.
Proponents of school choice and other forms of public funding for religious entities are notoriously bad at addressing these points. If you doubt that, then look no further than the confirmation hearings for Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. Her testimony could have rebutted concerns about school choice, but McMahon had no interest in making that case. She offered no data on how public schools would be affected, and couldn’t even say whether vouchered schools would be barred from discriminating against students because of race or religion. McMahon went on to suggest that vouchered private schools would be trusted to implement the guidelines of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, with little to no oversight.
While McMahon could simply ignore difficult questions, other Christian nationalists have resorted to playing the victim. Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s voucher-supporting superintendent of schools, has dismissed criticism of school choice as “hatred for the Catholic Church,” while the National Catholic Register has accused opponents of “blatant anti-Catholicism.”
In the National Catholic Reporter, Church lobbyists dispute the argument that vouchers are a cash cow. “People want to see [school choice] as a bailout for institutions,” one spokesperson said, “and that’s really not the point.” But without full transparency, similar to a secular non-profit or a public school, there is no way to know if such a claim is true. Across other responses, the same cynical theme emerges: If you don’t blindly trust us with your money, you’re a bigot.
As the Times article from April points out, the Republican-controlled Texas House of Representatives voted down an amendment to put vouchers on the ballot for a referendum, a clear admission that they cannot defend their own policy. Strategically, it was the right move. In the 2024 election, when Republicans won big, school choice nevertheless lost the popular vote in deep red Kentucky and Nebraska, as well as in Colorado. The only way to show that vouchers are effective would be to track how the money is spent, something that conservative Christians will fight to the last hill.
Public funding for religious institutions may soon become the most pernicious way that Project 2025 inserts itself into our lives and our wallets. The opportunity to expose this fraud is right there in front of us. Given the history of grift, coverups, and hush money associated with churches and other religious institutions, it is safe to assume that any religious organization that refuses to open its books has something to hide, something that would embarrass its leaders. Rather than getting entangled in Constitutional arguments, journalists could instead focus on financial transparency until even the calmest defenders of school choice are sputtering about anti-religious bigotry, and even the most checked-out voters are asking, “What happened to my money?” Our current predicament may be dire, but it might be a chance to blunt the tip of the Christian nationalist spear, and maybe turn it back on itself.