The new Federal Tax Credit Scholarship law will strengthen families to direct their children’s education while affirming religious freedom.
As the nation soon celebrates its 250th birthday, it is worth recalling that religious freedom and practice were vital to the birth of our constitutional republic and are necessary to sustain it. The various school choice laws in states, along with the new Federal Scholarship Tax Credit law, are a growing confirmation that the government respects the free exercise of religion by allowing the choice of religious schools by parents for their children.
This federal law, effective in 2027, has the potential to transform K-12 schooling to a high-quality, more competitive system, and help sustain religious freedom and practice in America. It will financially empower parents with potentially billions of dollars in scholarship opportunities to direct their children’s education in any school setting, public, charter, private, religious, or homeschool.
By making more parents effective “customers” of K-12 education for their children, this law will expand options for how and where their children are educated. No longer will parents have to subject their children to baleful influences in an educational setting that undermines their faith, while parents also will be in a stronger position to influence schools to improve quality and respect their faith.
Scholarships will be funded by private contributions from individuals to scholarship granting organizations (SGOs) that serve students in K-12 education. Donors will receive a 100 percent credit against their federal income tax liability for a maximum $1,700 per year — a huge financial incentive that will accumulate billions of new scholarship dollars for use in elementary and secondary education.
This July 4th, represents another historic milestone as the 200th anniversary of the deaths of the second and third presidents, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson — providentially, each dying on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Both these founders of our nation had plenty to say about religious freedom.
President Adams understood that religious practice was integral to the success of constitutional government. In October 1798, he penned a letter to the Massachusetts Militia that contained this admonition:
We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.