Tennessee Tells a Christian School It Need Not Apply. A Federal Judge Isn’t So Sure

Imagine a state that wants to run a public charter school program open to any qualified applicant, except one. Not because of the curriculum it teaches, not because of test scores or financial mismanagement, but because of what its founders believe. That is, in plain terms, what Tennessee law does to religious schools like the Wilberforce Academy of Knoxville, and a federal judge has now decided the question is serious enough to go to trial.

Tennessee has spent more than two decades building out its charter school program around a specific promise: close the achievement gap, give parents real options, and open a door out of schools that aren’t working for the kids zoned into them. Those are the state’s own stated purposes for the program, written into the law itself. Wilberforce Academy was built to walk through that same door. Instead, the state is telling a school founded to help fix that problem it may not even try, for no reason connected to whether it would actually work, only because of who its founders are.

A School Nobody Would Let Apply

Wilberforce wants to open a tuition-free, Christ-centered charter school in the Cedar Bluff area of Knoxville. It would be open to any student who enrolls, would be publicly funded like any other charter school, and would draw its civics and character education from a Christian worldview, without requiring students themselves to be Christian. That is not, on its face, a radical proposal. Charter schools already exist across the country, built around all kinds of educational philosophies, from classical curricula to STEM-focused academies to Montessori models. Tennessee’s problem with Wilberforce isn’t its academics. It is that state law categorically bars any “sectarian” school from the charter program at all, no matter how it’s structured, no matter who it serves.

Wilberforce’s founders decided that rule couldn’t survive a serious constitutional challenge, and they may be right. In November, days after Wilberforce filed its letter of intent with the Knox County school board, Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti published a legal opinion concluding that the state’s blanket ban on religious charter schools was likely unconstitutional. His reasoning was simple: the state has created a public benefit, the charter program, and is excluding an entire category of otherwise qualified applicants from it solely because of their religious character, with no compelling interest on the other side of the scale to justify that exclusion. An opinion from the attorney general doesn’t settle anything by itself. But when the state’s own top lawyer tells you your law probably violates the First Amendment, that is worth taking seriously, not dismissing as a talking point.

Wilberforce sued the Knox County Board of Education, not the state, which has drawn some criticism as a matter of legal strategy. But the practical reality is that Knox County is the entity actually standing between Wilberforce and its charter, bound to enforce a state law it didn’t write and, notably, hasn’t rushed to defend with much enthusiasm. In late May, U.S. District Judge Charles Atchley rejected the board’s bid to have the case thrown out on a technicality, ruling that Wilberforce did not need to file a completed charter application before challenging what it calls an unconstitutional barrier to even trying. That is the right call. Nobody should have to go through the motions of applying for a benefit the law says they are ineligible for before they’re allowed to challenge the law itself. The case now heads to trial in January 2027.

The State That Wrote the Ban Won’t Defend It

Here is the detail that tells you the most about where this is actually headed. Attorney General Skrmetti, whose opinion supplied much of the legal groundwork for Wilberforce’s lawsuit, has declined to intervene in the case to defend the very statute at issue. Knox County taxpayers are now paying to defend a law in federal court that the state’s own attorney general has already suggested is probably unconstitutional and that the state itself won’t step up to defend. Meanwhile, Skrmetti’s office is reportedly paying Wilberforce’s lead attorney several hundred dollars an hour on an unrelated matter. Whatever one makes of that arrangement, it is hard to escape the impression that Nashville has quietly decided which way it wants this fight to end, and is content to let a local school board absorb the cost and risk of getting there.

Critics, including a group of Knox County taxpayers who have intervened in the case represented by the ACLU and allied groups, argue that charter schools are public schools and must remain secular, and that public money should never underwrite religious instruction. It’s a real legal argument, resting on a genuine line of Establishment Clause precedent, and it will get its day in court. But it sits awkwardly next to Tennessee’s own recent embrace of religious education through its Education Freedom Scholarship program, which sends public dollars to private religious schools statewide with far less controversy. A state that has decided public money can follow a child into a religious classroom through one program is going to have a hard time explaining, in front of a federal judge, why it categorically cannot happen through another.

Some of the pushback has focused less on the legal theory and more on Wilberforce itself, a young nonprofit registered only last November, still without a campus, whose public footprint so far consists mostly of a mailing address and a proposed executive director, Zach Wishart, who currently works at a private Christian school in the area. That is a fair thing to keep an eye on as the case moves forward and, eventually, as an actual school takes shape. It is not, however, an argument against the constitutional question at the center of the case. Whether Wilberforce is ready to open a school next fall is a separate question from whether Tennessee may lawfully bar religious groups, as a class, from a program open to everyone else.

Part of a Larger Fight for Religious and Educational Liberty

Wilberforce’s case follows the path cut by a Catholic virtual charter school in Oklahoma, St. Isidore, whose bid to open ended in a 4 to 4 deadlock at the U.S. Supreme Court after Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself, leaving the underlying question unresolved nationally rather than settled. Wilberforce’s attorneys, from the firm Consovoy McCarthy, represented the Oklahoma school in that fight, and both sides in Knoxville seem to understand this case is likely to be one of the vehicles that finally forces a clear national answer.

For now, nothing has changed on the ground. There is no Wilberforce Academy admitting students this fall, no classrooms in Cedar Bluff. What exists is a lawsuit headed to trial in January 2027, a state attorney general who has already tipped his hand on the merits, and a school board in Knox County left to defend, largely alone, a law that Nashville itself seems to have lost confidence in.