A Sting in the State-Funding Tail
Bettina Krause July/August 2025In the mid-1970s my parents sold their house and business, uprooted themselves from their community and family ties, and bought a caravan. They then towed it more than 1,000 dusty miles from the south coast of Australia to a small town in the far northern reaches of New South Wales to start over. They did all this because they had their sights set on a particular private school that could offer my older sister and me the type of K-12 Christian education they wanted for us.
Many parents, whether Australian or American, go to extraordinary lengths to educate their children in a way that’s in keeping—or at least, not at odds—with their family’s deep moral and religious commitments. They’ll go into debt to pay for private school; they’ll step off their career path to homeschool; they’ll engage in unhinged behavior at local school board meetings to be immortalized in countless shaky phone recordings uploaded to YouTube.
They do all this because there are unique factors at play. Their impressionable children are now learning from authority figures outside their immediate family circle and being taught set curriculums that, at times, touch on some divisive topics.
Of course, for the vast majority of cash-strapped American families, there’s no real choice. Many can’t afford the luxury of homeschooling or paying private school fees. So it’s no wonder that America’s public schools have become a perfect Petri dish for culture-war mayhem. Or as U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson put it more elegantly in the 1943 case West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette: “Probably no deeper division of our people could proceed from any provocation than from finding it necessary to choose what doctrine and whose program public educational officials shall compel youth to unite in embracing.”
“No Deeper Division”
Case in point: Mahmoud v. Taylor, recently decided by the Supreme Court. Given its facts, the Court’s 6-3 opinion isn’t surprising. How could school officials in Maryland not see the irony in introducing an LGBTQ curriculum for elementary school kids designed to teach respect for others within a diverse society while simultaneously killing a long-running opt-out program for children whose parents hold conflicting religious beliefs on human sexuality? (And besides, there are less-divisive ways to teach kindness and respect to 4-year-olds than instructing teachers to suggest that “when babies are born, doctors are only guessing whether they’re a boy or girl.”)
But blindness and hypocrisy don’t belong to just one side in these battles. As voices from the left and right become more extreme—more committed to the idea that “it’s my way or the highway”—they start to sound uncannily alike in their desire to wield coercive power. State lawmakers in Texas apparently saw no irony recently in decrying “state-sponsored atheism” in public schools, while passing laws mandating state-sponsored Christian window dressing. Is posting a state-approved Protestant version of the Ten Commandments in a certain size and font to make them “clearly visible” to all students in every classroom simply exposing young people to principles of common human civility, as many argued? I’m pretty sure that idol worship and keeping the seventh day of the week holy have more to do with religious observance than social niceties.
Perhaps the answer to all this angst is simply for states to expand school voucher programs, allowing more parents to send their kids to the religious school of their choice. Or maybe it’s time to embrace an idea that was put on ice by the Supreme Court this term but is sure to return soon. That is, allowing states to offer charters to religious schools and thus create a new breed of American school: the fully state-funded religious school.
Beware the Unexpected Twist
Let me share a “religious freedom morality tale” from my home country, Australia.
It often surprises people when they learn that Australia doesn’t have a bill or charter of rights that protects individual freedoms, including religious freedom. Twice in Australia’s history—in 1944 and in 1988—the government put this issue to a national referendum. It asked, “Should Australian law provide more explicit religious freedom protection?” And each time a majority answered no.
Perhaps what’s even more surprising, though, is that many Christian leaders actively campaigned against strengthening religious freedom protection. Why? They didn’t need it! At that time Christian churches were unchallenged custodians of community religion and morality. And moreover, as Protestant and Catholic leaders pointed out in the debate on the 1988 referendum, messing around with religious freedom laws could potentially disrupt the flow of government money to Christian schools.
And right there was the rub.
Australia’s religious schools were—and still are—entirely reliant on federal and state largesse. Back in the 1960s there was little controversy when the Australian federal government decided that developing a rich and varied educational landscape meant funding Catholic, Anglican, and other Christian schools. That school my parents moved across country for me to attend? Public records show that 77 percent of its annual income comes from directly from the state and federal governments.
Fast-forward to today, and Australia’s Christian majority is no more. Christian schools, still dependent on government funding, are operating within a society that’s frankly hostile toward their views on many issues. And without a strong legal culture of protecting religious freedom rights and preventing religion-state entanglements to draw on, Christian schools are on the back foot and losing ground rapidly. How long will they be able to hire only staff who share their faith commitments? How long will they be free to shape their school’s identity in ways that reflect their religious beliefs?
The Bigger Question
Is forcing open the faucet of state funding for religious schools the best solution to today’s toxic battles over public education?
Let’s turn that question around and ask instead: When political and cultural majorities change over time (and they do), and when popular thought shifts on various issues (and it will), what will happen when state funding for religious schools eventually comes with unacceptable conditions attached? Will school administrators have the courage and the constituent support, at that point—with teachers on the payroll and families invested in the school’s continued existence—to cut the umbilical cord of state funding?
For the past 120 years Liberty magazine has been making the case that expanding public funding for religious schools is a slippery slope of unintended consequences—constitutionally and more broadly for American culture. But for me, one of the most compelling concerns remains the sting in the tail for the religious schools themselves: the corrosive dangers of dependence on state money to their religious mission and identity.
Article Author: Bettina Krause
Bettina Krause is the editor of Liberty magazine.