This talk describes the rise of private academies in two Cold War capitalist societies, showing how religion informed competing conceptions of the public good in both places. In the United States, people disappointed with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) developed private “segregation academies” to preserve the segregationist social order. After the executive branch began rescinding tax exemption for these private institutions because of their discriminatory admissions policies, the academies used affiliations with Christian churches to benefit from the legal cover provided by the First Amendment. The resulting “school choice” movement linked free enterprise with free exercise, treating education not as a public good, but as a private product. During the same period, Japanese government officials who aimed to double Japan’s GDP turned to religion in a different way, seeing it as the best way to preserve the public good. They regarded Max Weber’s notion of the “Protestant Ethic” as a reproducible program that could be emulated in Japanese public schools. Specifically, they thought that making students more “religious” would instill a sense of “vocation" (tenshokukan) or “mission" (shimeikan) and therefore build collective prosperity. Constitutional prohibitions against confessional instruction interfered with this project, but private academies called juku were ultimately able to do what public schools legally could not. Although few juku were explicitly religious, they did instill a sense of “mission” by encouraging students to practice self-abnegation in pursuit of arbitrarily determined goals. This vocational training prepared students for life in the Japanese corporate world, where leading theories of professional diligence and public service derived explicitly from idealized notions of religious practice.