Alito’s implication was that if the other side could set up charter schools, why couldn’t his side do it? He even offered a rambling, homophobic hypothetical. “Could a school say we’re going to be a LGBTQ+ friendly school, so that the books that elementary schoolchildren are going to read are going to have lots of LGBTQ+ characters [and] same-sex couples, and they are going to send the message that this is a perfectly legitimate lifestyle?” he asked. “They’re going to tell the little kids, if your parents may say you’re a boy or a girl, that doesn’t mean you really are a boy or a girl. Could they do that?” (No, replied Garre, because state law forbids those teachings.)

While none of Alito’s conservative colleagues echoed his ugly sentiments, they all appeared driven by the same sense of cultural and social alienation that shapes Christianity’s conservative believers in modern society. One of Alito’s questions asked whether a charter school in Oklahoma could “seek to inculcate a secular viewpoint—not just a secular viewpoint, but a particular secular viewpoint?” Garre was momentarily nonplussed. “With respect, I don’t know what you mean by that.”

For the high court, secularism and nonsectarianism are no longer important principles of American religious freedom, but an enemy of religion itself that must be torn down to ensure its survival. I have no doubt that this is a strong, sincerely held belief by the conservative justices, and that they fervently hope that it will help them regain some kind of lost perceived social and cultural hegemony. The only problem is that it is leading them to an understanding of the Religion Clauses—and the Establishment Clause in particular—that is antithetical to their spirit, letter, and purpose of the constitutional text.