During an oral argument on Wednesday, the Supreme Court appeared all but certain to divide along party lines in a case that seeks to fundamentally expand the role religion plays in American public schools.

This isn’t surprising: Almost immediately after Republicans gained a supermajority on the Supreme Court, they started rewriting the Court’s religion decisions to make them more favorable to the religious right. One month after Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation gave the GOP their sixth vote on the Court, Roman Catholic Diocese v. Cuomo (2020) revolutionized the Court’s approach to religious objectors who seek exemptions from obeying the law — overruling a decision that was only a few months old in the process.

Since then, the Court has handed down case after case overruling previous religion decisions, usually to the benefit of the Christian right. The Court’s new decisions give religious conservatives far more ability both to ignore laws they do not like, and to demand that the government fund their religious institutions. After less than five years in power, the Court’s new majority has rendered the country’s religion jurisprudence unrecognizable, even to a lawyer who would have been considered an expert in the Constitution’s approach to religion less than a decade ago.

On the surface, Wednesday’s argument in Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond merely signaled that the Court’s Republican majority will very likely take the next incremental step in its seemingly inexorable march toward integration of church and state.

Upon closer inspection, however, the Oklahoma argument was unlike some of this Court’s early forays into religion because some of the Republicans explicitly acknowledged that they are rewriting the Constitution’s approach to religion, and a few of them even appeared to signal where they want this revolution to end.

As Justice Brett Kavanaugh said late in the Oklahoma argument, the Court now has a “different constitutional understanding” of whether separation of church and state is even permitted. That new understanding, Kavanaugh suggested, is this: So long as an American can choose not to participate in a state-backed religious operation, church and state do not need to be separate — indeed, separation........

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