Such schools can also retard the development of citizens by balkanizing our population, curtailing the free exchange of diverse ideas, limiting exposure to diversity, and creating ideological bubbles. Certainly, private schools already have wide latitude in this regard. But the question of whether the state should regulate private education (or homeschooling) is a different question than whether the state should encourage certain practices by investing public dollars to promote private agendas.

Whether or not charter schools are former sectarian schools with a makeover, the lack of public accountability for charter-school providers encourages fraud. The financial cases are many and disturbing, and reports of intellectually bogus curricula are common too, particularly as Christian fundamentalists make war on history and science. RES, the Texas-based charter-school organization, is a powerful example of the perils of charter-school curriculum, and the fallacy that “the marketplace” will police itself. RES charter-school curriculum materials include a biology text that presents creationism and evolution as equally valid theories, with the latter presented as being widely questioned and full of inconsistencies and contrary evidence (which is nonsense). Other examples of a desperately right-wing agenda include teaching that the feminist movement “created an entirely new class of females who lacked male financial support and who had to turn to the state as a surrogate husband;” that Democrat John Kerry’s war medals for bravery were “suspect at best;” and that the decline in Christian values caused World War I.

These are not good-faith differences of opinion. The extreme and unsubstantiated claims advanced in these materials lie well outside the ambit of public knowledge. They are designed to obfuscate and distort deliberation rather than to inform debate. As such, they are direct attacks on public reason and democratic life. George Orwell could not have imagined it better.

It is important to note that not all religious groups make war on science. There are clear differences among faiths and within them. While it still retains miraculous elements in its rituals and doctrinal teachings, for example, the Roman Catholic Church has reconciled itself to modern science, including Darwin’s theory of evolution. The Mormon Church insists that “man is the child of God, formed in the divine image” but hedges on the nature of that formation and resolves to “leave geology, biology, archaeology, and anthropology, no one of which has to do with the salvation of the soul of mankind, to scientific research.” In faiths where authority is more diffuse—mainstream Protestantism, Islam, and Judaism, for example—the question of evolution invites a multitude of answers.

But on the question of diversity—that is, the acceptance of differences not only of faith, but of race, culture, sexual orientation, and others—many faiths clash with democratic values in ways that raise serious concerns about their fitness to be school providers in choice programs. The most obvious example is when groups target other groups: Muslims preaching anti-Semitism, Jews condemning Islam, Protestants and Catholics exchanging barbs with each other and everyone else. The tensions among religions are many and deep, and raise obvious questions about how safe children would be in a school run by a faith-based group that believes they are the enemy, or how much our society benefits from publicly funded schools that preach religious bigotry.