The Church and Public Schools

The story of LifeWise Academy

In this week’s episode of The Suburban Women Problem podcast, the hosts chat with NPR reporter Sarah McCammon about the connection between evangelicalism and right-wing politics. And there’s no greater evidence of that than what’s happening in public education.

Enter LifeWise Academy. 

LifeWise Academy is an Ohio-based religious instruction program that teaches the Bible. It was founded in 2018 and launched in two Ohio school districts in 2019. Today LifeWise enrolls nearly 30,000 students across more than 12 states. The program will be in more than 170 Ohio school districts by next school year — more than a quarter of the state’s school districts.

Its founder, Joel Penton, describes it as “giving parents the freedom to choose character-based religious instruction for their children during the school day”. 

But, the rest of us want to know — what happened to separation of church and state? 

(Image credit: Americans United for Separation of Church and State)

Rebecca Markert, vice president and legal director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, describes public schools as the last bastion of separation of church and state. She said, “The Supreme Court has done a lot of work in the last couple of years to tear down the wall of separation in many other contexts. But they’ve left public schools intact.”

But that changed in 2022 with the decision of Kennedy v. Bremerton. This was the case where Joseph Kennedy, a high school football coach, engaged in prayer with a number of students during and after school games. His employer, the Bremerton School District, asked that he discontinue the practice in order to protect the school from a lawsuit based on violation of the Establishment Clause which prohibits the government from "establishing" a religion. 

That led Kennedy to sue the school district for what he said violated his rights under the First Amendment and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

This case made it all the way up to the Supreme Court and in a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court held that Bremerton School District’s discipline of Kennedy for praying after football games violated his rights to free exercise and free speech under the First Amendment. 

After that decision, a lot of public school officials and ministries like LifeWise Academy felt emboldened to inject even more religion into public schools. 

Students, mostly in elementary school, leave school once a week for around 55 minutes in the middle of the day to study the Bible and gain lessons LifeWise says are meant to grow their character. Parents have said that the program can make children feel pressure to attend, for fear of missing out on the fun or for fear of not fitting in if left behind at school. Kids get to leave school and oftentimes there are pizza parties or ice cream parties during that time. What kid wouldn’t want that? 

The program is free to students and their families and it’s perfectly legal under Ohio law.

Currently, Ohio law states that local school boards are permitted to adopt policies that allow for released-time religious instruction. But now, Ohio lawmakers are considering changing the law to increase LifeWise programs and others similar to it through Ohio House Bill 445. This bill would require all school districts to adopt released-time policies. And you guessed it - make it easier for programs to get established and interested students to attend them. 

Organizations like LifeWise aren’t even trying to hide their agenda. They even wrote a book about it called ‘DURING SCHOOL HOURS: Why and How LifeWise Academy is Reinstalling Religious Education into the Public School Day’.

Republicans in Ohio are helping them with their agenda and that is exactly why we need to vote up and down the ballot. Local elections matter.