In its recent session, the Supreme Court issued two decisions hailed widely by religious-liberty advocates: one upholds parents’ rights to use school vouchers to send their children to religious schools; the other limits the government’s ability to interfere with religious schools’ hiring and firing decisions. In the view of some liberal commentators, there is an inherent contradiction between protecting religious institutions from government interference and requiring that they be eligible for public funds. Not so, argues Dan McLaughlin:
It is not enough simply to tell religious believers that they can participate in the government-funded sector in a non-religious way, and then just practice their faith on their own time. That’s just not how faith works. To the believer, the free exercise of religion is a pervasive thing—an identity, not just an idea. Being a follower of Christ, or a Muslim, is not something you can take on and off like a hat. Being put to the choice will frequently compel believers to turn down benefits available to everyone else. It is no answer to tell religious schools that they can be religious, but not too religious.
As the government has grown and grown, it has become ever more difficult to maintain the fiction that the public, government-funded sector is the exception rather than the rule. The law has never actually required a “wall of separation” between church and state, and it has always been implicitly recognized that even if such a wall existed in theory, it could not be maintained in practice. Families can still pray together while walking on public streets. The fire department still comes when a church is on fire. A true wall of separation would divorce the state from its own citizens. . . . [I]f religious believers are cut out of government-funded programs in a country where the government is ubiquitous, they are effectively placed at a disadvantage compared to the non-religious.
There is, in short, no contradiction between allowing religious institutions to participate in generally applicable government programs while still being religious institutions that control how they teach and practice their own faith. Any other outcome would offend one or both of the two values protected by the religion clauses: the equal rights of religious believers to exercise their faith, or the prohibition on the government controlling how churches are taught and led.
Read more on National Review: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/supreme-court-religious-school-decisions-not-inconsistent/