The idea of a separation between church and state has long been a central topic of debate throughout the nation's history and has increasingly been applied to the realm of publicly funded education and religious schools.

On Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to take up and settle a legal dispute in Oklahoma over what could be the nation's first publicly funded and overtly religious charter school, the New York Post reported.

The justices will review a ruling by the Oklahoma Supreme Court to strike down the approval granted by a state board to a Catholic church that applied for permission to open and operate a new charter school.

A question involving the separation of church and state

In an unexpected move on Friday, the Supreme Court announced in an unsigned order that it had agreed to hear two more cases in the current term, one of which is actually two cases concerning the planned Catholic charter school in Oklahoma that were consolidated together.

Those two cases are known as Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond and St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond, and they will have the justices address two unsettled issues, the first of which is "whether the academic and pedagogical choices of a privately owned and run school constitute state action simply because it contracts with the state to offer a free educational option for interested students."

The second question that will considered by the high court is "whether a state violates the First Amendment's free exercise clause by excluding privately run religious schools from the state’s charter-school program solely because the schools are religious, or instead a state can justify such an exclusion by invoking anti-establishment interests that go further than the First Amendment's establishment clause requires."

Friday's order set deadlines for briefs in March and a date for oral arguments in April, with a decision likely coming by late June or early July.

Notably, Justice Amy Coney Barrett "took no part in the consideration or decision of these petitions," and presumably will recuse herself from the arguments and final decision, though no explanation for her move was given.

Initial approval for school later denied by court

According to SCOTUSblog, Oklahoma's charter school board had granted its approval for the St. Isidore Catholic Virtual School to transform itself into a publicly funded charter school, a decision opposed by the state's Republican Attorney General Genter Drummond, who argued that the approval would violate key provisions of Oklahoma law, the state's constitution, and the U.S. Constitution.

The Oklahoma Supreme Court agreed with the attorney general and nixed the approval for the school in light of the fact that both constitutions "prohibit the State from using public money for the establishment of a religious institution" as well as that "St. Isidore’s educational philosophy is to establish and operate the school as a Catholic school."

The school has now argued that the state court "unconstitutionally punished the free exercise of religion by disqualifying the religious from government aid" and further violated its First Amendment rights by "transmuting St. Isidore into an arm of the government" or a "surrogate of the State."

Oklahoma, meanwhile, asked the justices to not take up the consolidated cases since it believes that the state Supreme Court's ruling on a state matter was correct and sufficient to settle the dispute over the school's questionable constitutionality.

How will the court rule?

It can be difficult to predict how the Supreme Court justices will rule on a given case, and this case about a possible religious charter school in Oklahoma is no exception.

That said, the Post noted that the Supreme Court and its current conservative-leaning majority has ruled multiple times in recent years in favor of religious entities receiving public funds, so it is certainly possible that the justices could overrule the state court and allow the nation's first religious charter school to be opened and funded by state taxpayers.