Tax money for some religions

On May 22, the Supreme Court handed down a single page judgement revealing a 4-4 deadlock (Justice Barrett recused herself) on the case of St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. The Oklahoma-based Catholic school pursued status as a state-funded charter school, prompting counterarguments centered on the U.S. Constitution’s ban on government-established religion. The respondent to St. Isidore’s petition, Oklahoma Attorney General Genter Drummond, also cited the Oklahoma Constitution, which declares that “[n]o public money ... shall ever be appropriated ... or used, directly or indirectly, for the use, benefit, or support of any sect, church, denomination, or system of religion ... or sectarian institution.”

Allow me to describe briefly a cluster of dogmas, and you tell me when they start sounding like a “system of religion.” Ru Paul stated in an interview with Time, “Drag has always served a purpose. We mock identity. We’re shape-shifters. We are God in drag. And that’s our role to remind people of that.” As I unpack in depth elsewhere, the autonomous “I”—the self-creating self—has taken the sovereign mantle of identity-making that God held in traditional theology.

How many state-funded schools shape impressionable minds with the doctrine that human nature is not defined by God but by the sovereign individual? How many tax dollars fund schools that faithfully catechize young people with the doctrines of Karl Marx and his ideological descendants, such as critical theorist Herbert Marcuse and Derrick Bell, the father of critical race theory? How many are forced to learn the orthodox soteriology by which we must save ourselves from the sins of capitalism and whiteness through the penance of social justice activism to set up an egalitarian heaven-on-earth?

Then there is Harvard’s Chris Hinkle who argued in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, “Homosexuality must make its moral case, not merely its civil-social rights case. It must show the deep spirituality of homosexual love.” Gender ideologues Monica Sjoo and Barbara Moor contend that “Creative women and men in all ages have found rigid heterosexuality in conflict with being fully alive and aware on all levels—sexual, psychic, and spiritual” (emphasis added). Women’s Studies professor Emily Culpepper identifies gays and lesbians as “shamans for a future age.” Christian de la Huerta of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force advocates for “pressing back cultural boundaries by a people uniquely qualified for spiritual exploration … modern day shamans.” In his “Articles of Faith: In the Spirit of Pride” de la Huerta celebrates the sexual boundary pushing of such shamans as “a gift, a blessing … and a sacred privilege” (emphasis added). Should such self-described spirituality and faith continue to be inculcated into young minds on the taxpayer’s dime?

Let’s be realists. As Frederic Baue observes, we have entered “a phase of Western/world civilization that is innately religious but hostile to Christianity … or worse [we have] a dominant but false church that brings all of its forces to bear against the truth of God’s word.”

J. Budziszewski expounds:

Liberals ... came to insist that the laws of the state must be justified in a way that is independent not only of theology and ontology, but of ‘one’s conception of the good’. Because this is impossible, what happens in practice is that their own views of the good prevail without challenge, just by pretending that they aren’t really views of the good.

We may press Budziszewski’s point farther. Often those pushing the hardest against legislating religious beliefs are those who seek to enshrine their own faiths in law just by pretending they aren’t really religious dogmas.

Thankfully, more thinkers are waking to this strategy. Anthropologist Paul Hiebert notes , “A new Western religion emerged to offer us meaning based on self-realization, not forgiveness of personal sins and reconciliation with God and others. Self had become god and self-fulfillment our salvation.” Feminist author, social critic, and atheist professor Camille Paglia acknowledges, “Human beings need religion, they need a religious perspective, a cosmic perspective. And getting rid of the orthodox religions because they were too conservative has simply led to [a] new religion.” Paglia identifies this new religion being pushed in our education systems as a form of “fanaticism,” citing her experience with second-wave feminists, whom she likens to “the Spanish Inquisition” seeking to “destroy” her for committing “heresy.” Andrew Sullivan notes that “once-esoteric neo-Marxist ideologies—such as critical race and gender theory and postmodernism, the bastard children of Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault—have become the premises of higher education, the orthodoxy of a new and mandatory religion.” 

Fears of theocracy have long run rampant in left-wing imaginations. We were warned in February of this year that “Trump, Musk are Moving America Toward a Theocracy.” The American Humanist Association stoked such fears, launching its Democracy Not Theocracy campaign. Such self-appointed minutemen—ever warning America that “the theocrats are coming!”—do not realize that to spot the theocrats they need only check the nearest mirror.

Make no mistake; what has been unfolding in Western cultures at least since the 1960s and the rise of the “New Left” is nothing less than a play at theocratic conquest, a faith working to enshrine itself as the only legal religion of the land. It is a religion striving to usher in a new heavens and a new earth, centered not on Christ but on Self, guided not by Saint Paul but Saint Ru Paul, not Saint Mark but Saint Marx, not Saint John but Saint John Money.

So, we are left with the fundamental question: If the U.S. government should not advance the Roman Catholic mission of St. Isidore school, then why on earth should it promote schools that evangelize the false gods of self, sex, or social justice—the expressive individualism, LGBTQ ideology, and Marxism—currently enjoying a generous flow of American tax dollars from government’s coffers?