Supreme Court Religion and Schools Cases 2026: The November 3 Hearing at the Center of the Term
On Tuesday, November 3, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy. The Colorado case asks whether a state that offers public preschool money may require all providers, including religious preschools, to follow the same nondiscrimination rules. The hearing falls on midterm election day, leading a longer line of appeals awaiting review. Nothing in the Colorado case has been decided yet. An argument is not a ruling. The outcome could still go either way. Yet the questions agreed to be considered show how much of the church-and-state debate now runs through classrooms.
Colorado voters approved a universal preschool program in 2020. The state launched it in 2023. Eligible four-year-olds receive up to 15 hours of free preschool each week. The benefit is worth more than 6,000 dollars per child per year. Each provider had to sign an agreement promising equal enrollment opportunity. The promise covered race, ethnicity, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, and gender identity. State officials call that condition the price of public money. Catholic preschools in the Denver archdiocese, including St. Mary Catholic School in Littleton, declined to sign. Church officials said their faith required them to admit families who support Catholic teaching on marriage, sex, and gender. The state kept those schools out of the program. The schools and parents then sued, citing free exercise of religion.
Two lower courts sided with Colorado. A district court and the Tenth Circuit called the rule neutral and generally applicable. It applied to all providers on the same terms, they said. That reasoning draws on Employment Division v. Smith (1990), which held that a neutral law applying to everyone does not generally violate free exercise rights. The plaintiffs, represented by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, point to later cases. In Trinity Lutheran in 2017, Espinoza in 2020, and Carson v. Makin in 2022, the court barred states from denying public benefits to religious schools merely for being religious. Colorado answers that it did not bar religious schools as such. Faith-based providers are welcome, it says, if they follow the same rules as others. In April 2026, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, limited to two questions about Smith and Carson; it did not agree to reconsider Smith itself here. A ruling, expected later in the term, will shape preschool and voucher programs in other states.
Texas Ten Commandments Displays: A 1980 Precedent Under Pressure
The appeal most expected to join the docket concerns Texas. Senate Bill 10, enacted in 2025, requires every public elementary and secondary classroom to display the Ten Commandments in a conspicuous place. More than two dozen Texas families, of several faiths, challenged the law at once. In April 2026, however, the Fifth Circuit, sitting en banc, upheld the law by 9 to 8. That ruling cleared the way for displays statewide. In August 2026, the families petitioned the Supreme Court for review. Their cases are Nathan v. Alamo Heights Independent School District and Cribbs Ringer v. Comal Independent School District. They are represented by the ACLU and allied groups. As of October 31, the Supreme Court had not said whether it will hear them. The Texas law is therefore upheld by an appeals court, not by the Supreme Court. Review remains pending.
The Texas fight turns on Stone v. Graham, from 1980. That decision struck down a nearly identical Kentucky law. It held that classroom posting had no secular purpose and violated the Establishment Clause. The Fifth Circuit majority said Stone no longer controls. It noted that the Supreme Court has abandoned the test Stone relied on. That test, from Lemon v. Kurtzman, asked about secular purpose, religious effect, and entanglement with religion. In Kennedy v. Bremerton in 2022, the court discarded Lemon for a history-and-tradition approach. The Fifth Circuit majority reasoned that a poster imposes no tax and requires no prayer. It dictates no church governance, the majority said. Dissenting judges disagreed. They said lower courts must follow Stone until the Supreme Court itself overrules it. Texas supporters call the display a passive acknowledgment of a foundational text. Students are free to ignore it, they argue.
Amish Schools, Vaccination Rules, and the 1990 Smith Precedent
A second pending appeal asks the court to reconsider Smith itself. Amish schools in New York challenge the state’s school vaccination rules. New York allowed religious exemptions from 1966 until 2019. Lawmakers repealed the exemption in June 2019. The repeal followed a measles outbreak in 2018 and 2019, the largest in nearly two decades, spread mainly through Orthodox Jewish communities in Brooklyn and Rockland County. Medical exemptions remained, but religious exemptions ended. In 2022, the state fined three private Amish schoolhouses a combined 118,000 dollars. The schools had enrolled unvaccinated students. The schools and parents sued in Miller v. McDonald. They argued that ending a long-standing religious exemption, while keeping a medical one, targeted religious people and violated free exercise rights.
Lower courts have sided with New York so far. A district court ruled in 2024 that the law was neutral on its face. The Second Circuit agreed. The Supreme Court then told the appeals court to reconsider the case after Mahmoud v. Taylor in 2025. That decision protected parents who opt children out of certain school instruction on religious grounds. In June 2026, the Second Circuit again sided with the state. It distinguished vaccination rules from instruction rules. Vaccination rules do not dictate what children are taught, it said. They do not require affirming any belief. The Amish plaintiffs have returned to the Supreme Court. They ask it to reconsider Smith. Their lawyers say New York has effectively barred Amish practice within its borders. New York responds that the rules protect children from preventable disease. They apply to religious and nonreligious families alike, except for medical reasons, the state says. The court has not yet decided whether to hear the renewed appeal.
Montgomery County, Ministerial Scholarships, and the Wider Queue
A third appeal comes from Maryland. Substitute teacher Kimberly Polk asks whether a district may require staff to use a student’s preferred pronouns. She also challenges limits on what teachers tell parents about a student’s gender identity at school. Polk sued Montgomery County Public Schools in 2024. She said the guidelines violated her religious and free speech rights. Her petition says the district required her to use pronouns matching a student’s asserted gender identity, even if they differed from biological sex. It also says she could not tell parents the school was helping their child transition genders without the child’s consent. Polk, a Christian, said her faith barred compliance. She offered to use students’ names instead of pronouns. The Fourth Circuit sided with the district. It held that pronoun use fell within her ordinary job duties. During the litigation, the Supreme Court said in March that California parents were likely to succeed against a similar policy, in Mirabelli v. Bonta. Montgomery County then revised its parental-notification policy, the district says, and let Polk use names instead of pronouns. Polk says the revised policy remains problematic. The court has not yet agreed to hear her case. No national rule on pronouns or parental notice has been set by this dispute.
What the 2025 Oklahoma Deadlock Did and Did Not Decide
The current wave cannot be understood without Oklahoma. In 2023, the state’s charter board approved St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. It would have been the first openly religious, publicly funded charter school in the nation. Attorney General Gentner Drummond sued. The Oklahoma Supreme Court held that charter schools are public schools under state law. They must therefore remain nonsectarian, it said. Public funding for a religious institution would violate the state and federal constitutions, it added. On May 22, 2025, the United States Supreme Court deadlocked 4-4. The cases were Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond and St. Isidore v. Drummond. Justice Amy Coney Barrett had recused herself. The court’s one-sentence, unsigned order affirmed the state court without explaining individual votes. A tie leaves the lower ruling in place for that state and those parties. It sets no national precedent. It binds no other state. The religious charter school question therefore remains open nationally. Claims that the court has already approved or banned religious charter schools nationwide are wrong. It deadlocked. The issue is unresolved.
Together, these cases test method as much as outcome. The court rejects most requests for hearings. It may decline several appeals even while deciding Colorado. Yet recent rulings favoring religious liberty have encouraged more suits of this kind. If it takes Texas, it must decide whether Stone survives the end of Lemon. If it takes the Amish case, it must confront Smith directly. If it takes Maryland, it must draw a line between job duties and compelled speech. The November 3 argument will give the first public signal of the justices’ thinking. The answers will not arrive on November 3. They will come, if at all, in later opinions and in orders granting or denying review. Until then, one major case is set for argument, several more are pending, one charter school question ended in a 4-4 tie in 2025, and lower-court rulings govern until the Supreme Court says otherwise. Readers following the midterm poll monitors debate will see the same point: a proposal is not a final decision.
Sources
USN reviewed reporting from multiple outlets for this story. Read more from USA Today, ABA Journal and National Women’s Law Center.