Montana Guarantees Kids Access to Religious Instruction

On May 12, Montana Republican governor Greg Gianforte signed legislation guaranteeing children in the Big Sky State access to religious education. Under the bill, kids across Montana are guaranteed one hour of “released time” to attend catechetical instruction. The bill takes effect July 1.

What’s distinctive about the bill? Two things. First, it provides a statewide assurance of released time. Many states allow local school districts to grant released time but do not mandate it. Second, it envisions the possibility of children being able to obtain academic credit for that instruction.

The devil’s in the details. The statute contains various norms for credit eligibility, which potentially could open the door to state interference: In the Oklahoma Catholic charter school case decided by the Supreme Court on May 22, for instance, its attorney general—an opponent of the school—used curricular control as his argument why the school was governmental and so could not be religious.  

But the precedent that religious education is education and children should be credited for learning regardless of where it occurs is a watershed change. It is a corrective to the caricature of religion being about “indoctrination,” not “education.” It also reflects a growing consensus in many states (for example, states mandating exposure to the Bible) that American culture and its origins are not fully comprehensible independently of their religious roots.  

Many states allow local school boards to grant kids an hour off during the school week to go to religious education off-campus, typically toward the end of a school day. But local school boards allowing the time off is often discretionary and, in an increasingly secularized society, sometimes overlooked. Montana’s law assures kids access to religious education statewide.  

In some ways, the marginalization of religious education is part of a broader problem: Many states promulgate “model policies” for schools but their traditions of “local rule” enable school boards to thwart them. Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin, for example, issued model state policies prohibiting hiding “gender transition” and “renaming” of kids in schools, but large and leftist school boards in northern Virginia thumb their nose at the rules.

“Released time” regimes do not mandate religious education. Kids who do not participate in it stay in their normal schools and continue their normal instruction. Kids who do are responsible for “making up” what they miss. But the dedicated time also makes clear to teachers not to schedule, for example, “makeup” tests in the time bloc.

And make no mistake: It’s about time. It’s about the de facto arrangement of schedules so kids can “go to catechism.” But it’s also about sending the signal that society acknowledges it must set aside time for the free exercise of religion. “Free exercise” does not mean something done exclusively on your time, when you can carve out the space after the larger society schedules its priorities while pretending yours do not exist (at least for public scheduling purposes). That is a sea change from the recently prevalent legal paradigm that treated religion worse than the old English adage treated children: better neither seen nor heard.

Montana’s law does not challenge some seventy-something-year-old Supreme Court precedents about “released time” that held they were constitutionally permissible away from the public school but banned if held in schools. (Some states subsequently experimented with such instruction in trailers on school property but independent of the school, models that might appeal in low population density areas or where Catholic bishops have closed parishes, expanding the distance to catechetical centers.)

Other countries have managed to cope with these questions without invoking the bogeyman of “excessive entanglement of Church and state.” Poland, for example, allows religious instruction on school premises, conducted not by the school but by representatives of different denominations. It is one way of fulfilling the “Religion or Ethics” instructional requirement, the latter a secular ethic provided by the school. (Poland’s current leftist government, which espouses a “naked public square” approach to religion in a “democratic” state, introduced regulations eliminating religious instruction from the cumulative grade point average in high schools. The Polish Constitutional Tribunal struck the change down on May 22 as a violation of the Constitution and Concordat.) Many European countries simply carve out Wednesday afternoons as “off-time” for alternate instruction. A child can go to religious education, clarinet, dance, or whatever other kind of schooling a parent wants.

In its advent, “released time” probably generated the controversies it did because America was a Protestant country with a “Sunday school” tradition. Catholics, on the other hand, separated worship from catechism (as a kid, for me it was Mondays at 3–4 p.m.), a model that clashed with the Protestant one. In any case, sociological change has decreased overall Sunday worship attendance (and, thus, “Sunday school”). Couple that with the ever-greater encroachment of demands for “enrichment” on kids’ schedules (including schools scheduling sports and other activities on Sunday mornings) and the need for dedicated time for religious instruction (and worship) becomes even more important.  

Christians are used to the image of “things of God and things of Caesar” when it comes to discussing Church/state relations. The problem is that, in recent times, while the religious side used that model, Caesar pretended as if he had no interlocutor (or at least one he had to reckon with). Montana’s law is a small step to recalibrating that balance.