The Crusade to Christianize Public Schools Might Be Working
Religion is creeping into public schools and it’s a hell of a time to try to educate kids without participating in the culture war.
Let me set the scene: A first-grader sits in class while the teacher reads a picture book about a prince and a knight falling in love. The child isn’t asked to participate or say anything. They’re just listening to a story. Yet the U.S. Supreme Court has now ruled that merely hearing this inclusive fairy tale violates the child’s religious freedom. (No ban on any Disney fairytales, though.)
Welcome to life under the Trump regime.
In a 6–3 decision, the Supreme Court sided with a group of Maryland parents who claimed their children’s religious rights were infringed simply by being in the room during story time featuring LGBTQIA+ characters. The case, Mahmoud v. Taylor, involved elementary schools in Montgomery County, MD, where teachers had incorporated a few “LGBTQIA+ inclusive” storybooks into the English curriculum.
Originally, the school district allowed religious opt-outs from these readings, but it scrapped that policy in 2023 after too many parents began pulling their kids out. Three families (Muslim, Catholic, and Orthodox Christian) sued, arguing that just exposing their children to stories about same-sex marriage or transgender kids “burdened” their ability to raise the kids in their faith.
Lower courts didn’t buy that.
They found no evidence that the parents or their kids were being forced to violate their religion just by hearing the occasional inclusive book read aloud as they sat in the same room. But the Supreme Court’s conservative majority gobbled it up.
Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the court, proclaimed that requiring students to attend these storybook sessions “substantially interferes with the religious development of their children.” The books, he wrote, “unmistakably convey a particular viewpoint about same-sex marriage and gender” and celebrate values that are “hostile” to the families’ religious beliefs. In his view, just mere exposure to these ideas “exert[s] psychological pressure to conform” to a pro-LGBTQIA+ “viewpoint.”
The Court issued a preliminary injunction ordering the school district to notify the parents in advance any time one of the offending books will be read and to allow the parents to opt their kids out of those lessons.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by the two other liberals, was so alarmed that she took the rare step of reading her dissent aloud from the bench. “Simply being exposed to beliefs contrary to your own does not amount to prohibiting the free exercise of religion,” she wrote, calling the majority’s reasoning a gross distortion of religious liberty.
She warned that the ruling will invite chaos in public education. And I have to agree - this is a slippery slope. Schools might now have to give advance notice and unlimited opt-outs for “every lesson plan or story time that might implicate a parent's religious beliefs,” an “impossible” administrative burden.
In a pointed reality-check, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asked during oral arguments whether this is “really just about books… or is this about being exposed to people who are different?”
Her skepticism was well-founded. At argument, she posed a hypothetical: If a child’s teacher is gay and has a photo of her wife on the desk, could a parent demand their child not be placed in that classroom? According to the logic of this case, the disturbing answer might be “Yes.”
Sotomayor cautioned that the decision sets a “chilling” precedent. It revives a concept from the 1972 Wisconsin v. Yoder case (where the Court allowed Amish parents to pull their kids from school after 8th grade) but vastly expands it.
Yoder was about shielding a small, insular religious community from mainstream high school, on the theory that forced attendance would “substantially interfere” with Amish children's faith development. Now, Alito and Co. apply that reasoning to first graders hearing a picture book read aloud.
For much of the 20th century, the Supreme Court took the Establishment Clause (the part of the First Amendment barring an official religion) very seriously in public schools. In Engel v. Vitale (1962), the Court struck down even a brief, voluntary school-sponsored prayer, ruling that government has no business composing prayers for students to recite. The next year, it banned mandatory Bible readings in classrooms as unconstitutional religious exercises.
Over the following decades, the Court repeatedly upheld this separation between church and state – invalidating things like state-mandated Ten Commandments displays in classrooms (Stone v. Graham, 1980), scripted prayer at graduation ceremonies (Lee v. Weisman, 1992), and student-led prayers over the loudspeaker at football games (Santa Fe v. Doe, 2000).
The consistent principle was that while students are free to pray or express their faith individually, public schools (as government institutions) cannot sponsor or endorse religious practices or teachings.
This secular posture in public schools was rooted in America’s pluralism. When Steven Engel, a Jewish parent, challenged school prayer in 1962, he argued the state shouldn’t impose a one-size-fits-all devotional exercise on children of diverse faiths (or no faith!)
The Supreme Court agreed. And that approach held for decades. But by the 1990s and 2000s, religious conservatives were pushing against these restrictions.
Congress passed the Equal Access Act (allowing student Bible clubs to meet on campus) and the Court upheld it. Again, student-initiated religious activity was okay, but school-sponsored activity was not.
I’m sure y’all have heard this one before: according to the right, everything from school shootings to falling test scores can be blamed on the lack of school prayer. And now, we’re living through the biggest religious power grab in public education in 50 years.
They’re not mounting their fight by pushing through a constitutional amendment (those have flopped every time). Instead, they’re using a two-fronted sneak attack.
While state legislatures churn out Christian nationalist-friendly bills like it’s their full-time job, a conservative Supreme Court slowly bulldozes the wall between church and state.
A powerful coalition of evangelical Protestants, traditionalist Catholics, and a merry band of political BFFs are going all in on inserting religion back into the public school system.
Let’s dive into the battlegrounds in this “holy war,” and how the Christian right plans to win.