Public Lecture: Religion and the New Consumer Choice Model of Public Education

In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of state voucher programs that allow parents to allocate public tax funds to tuition at private religious institutions. With this and other recent decisions of the Roberts Court as an impetus, emboldened activists have sought tax-funded charter status for religious schools, and education officials have begun testing the boundaries of religion-state separation. Just this year, state superintendents mandated that public schools teach the Bible (Oklahoma) or prominently display the Ten Commandments (Louisiana). At first glance, these recent trends merely reflect a slight tweak in the balance of the First Amendment principles of disestablishment (prohibiting expenditures of taxes on religion) and free exercise (guaranteeing individuals’ right to practice religion). But this minor tweak constitutes a major change, because the rise of neoliberal free market ideology has dramatically shifted legal conceptions about what counts as public duty and what constitutes private choice.

Although this talk focuses on the US case, it comes from a broader project investigating religion and schools in both the United States and Japan. The talk will show how the Japanese case reveals some of the inconsistencies lurking in American methods of separating church and state.

Manuscript Workshop (9/24): Publics and Privates: Education Sex in the United States, 1968–1996

This chapter is an excerpt from my book manuscript Difficult Subjects: Religion and the Politics of Public Education under the US-Japan Security Alliance. In it, I argue that political secularism enrolls public schools in the biopolitical project of regulating juvenile sexuality. Mine is not just an account of Christian conservatives’ negative reactions to sex education, but rather an investigation into how the public school inculcates normative values about sex, pleasure, and procreation. Debates over sex education are fraught not because “religious” people try to get into schools nor because “secularists” try to kick religious people out. Rather, conservatives and progressives alike rely on ambiguous terms like “morality,” “the occult,” and “personal responsibility” to regulate sex and sexuality. Although none is explicitly about religion, these terms nevertheless perform normative theological work. They therefore deserve careful scrutiny in considerations about the promises of the public school and the pitfalls of political secularism.