Author: Andrew Copson The US Supreme Court will decide on whether religious schools can receive taxpayer funding, as in the UK The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that could change the course of American constitutional history: St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Oklahoma. If upheld, it would mark the most serious breach yet in the American wall between church and state by allowing a state-funded school to be directly run by the Catholic Church. That principle has long served as a global model for how diverse societies can protect freedom of belief and equality before the law.
The danger lies not just in what this case means for the United States, but in what it signals globally. Secularism is under pressure worldwide and this is not happening in isolation. In India, a secular constitution meant to unify a religiously diverse country is today being eroded by Hindu nationalist politics.
In Turkey, secular governance has been rolled back by President Erdoğan, with religion increasingly bound up in national identity. Secularism is often misunderstood as a kind of neutral indifference — something that will endure on its own if left alone. In truth, it is better seen as an active promise from a government to its people that no religion will dominate, and no one will be denied equal standing in society because of their beliefs.
But like all such promises, it must be vigilantly upheld. Without that effort, societies drift — gradually, then suddenly — away from pluralism and into majoritarian rule. The United States risks both joining and giving impetus to the global drift.
The current conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court has already weakened key legal protections. In Carson v. Makin (2022), it ruled that states must fund religious schools if they fund private ones. In Kennedy v. Bremerton, it backed a public school coach praying on the football field, reversing long-standing limits on religious activity in state settings.
That same Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending the federal right to abortion and unleashing new restrictions that disproportionately harm women and minorities. These decisions are not about protecting freedom. They represent a retreat from pluralism, dressed in religious language.
Meanwhile, in the executive branch of the American government, President Trump issued Executive Order 14202 in February, titled Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias, directing federal employees to identify, report, and eliminate projects opposed by Christian nationalists, with language that resonates with the pages of ‘Project 2025’ – the widely shared manifesto for the radical Christian right that was said to contain its agenda for a second Trump administration. The nearest the administration has come to defining ‘anti-Christian bias’ has been to cite LGBT adoption and abortion safe access zone laws as examples. Here in the UK, we have already seen this agenda spill over through US attempts to pressure our government over the same issue.
History shows us how easily secularism can be dismantled. In 1977, leaders in Bangladesh abandoned secularism in a bid for populist support. And in 1979, Iran’s secular constitution was torched when Ayatollah Khomeini installed a theocracy.
That moment partly inspired Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which imagines a United States where extreme Christian nationalists do the same. The effects of the St. Isidore case will be felt well beyond the United States. If the world’s most powerful democracy shifts course so dramatically, it will undoubtedly embolden authoritarians elsewhere, accelerating the global retreat from liberal values.
Secularism is not automatic. It is not guaranteed. It must be chosen.
It must be defended. Without that commitment, it will disappear.
