The case comes from two congregations that run preschools in the Denver area, one in Lakewood and one in Littleton. Colorado launched its universal preschool program in 2022, promising families funding of more than $6,000 per eligible child to spend at a public, private, or faith-based school of their choice. The two churches say the state then turned them away from the program because they would not agree to rules that bar them from admitting children and hiring staff in line with their religious convictions about sexual orientation and gender identity.
The Court agreed to take the case on April 20, 2026. The churches' lawyers first asked the justices to step in in November 2025. The U.S. Solicitor General has urged the Court to stop Colorado's exclusion of the preschools.
Colorado defends its position in its own filing. The state says the churches "seek an exemption from this law to allow them to receive public funding while turning away preschoolers because of their, or their parents', gender identity or sexual orientation." The churches answer that the program is open to every family and that the state is punishing them for who they are and what they teach.
The case sits beside other religious liberty disputes on the docket this term, including a Cleveland-area homeowner who was told that praying with fifteen friends in his own living room required a special-use permit as a "synagogue" under local zoning.
Who gets to raise the children?
Behind the legal briefs is a plain question that Americans have wrestled with since the first schoolhouse: whose children are these? The state's answer, in Colorado, comes with a condition. Take the money, and you take the state's creed along with it. A church that will not sign the creed is told to keep its doors open on its own dime, while its neighbors' tax dollars fund the school down the road.
Think of the families. A young mother in Lakewood chooses a preschool because the teachers pray with her three-year-old and teach him that God made him and loves him. She pays the same taxes as everyone else. She is told the benefit is for every family but hers. That is not neutrality. It is a penalty laid on faith.
The Bible does not leave this matter vague. God gave children to fathers and mothers first, not to the state, and He charged them with the training of the child's heart.
"Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it." (Proverbs 22:6)
Notice the word "train." It means more than letters and numbers. It means a way of life, handed from one generation to the next. Parents who want that training to rest on the Word of God are not asking for a favor. They are doing what the Lord told them to do. And the churches that come alongside them are doing the same work.
My friend, the Christian has never needed the government's permission to believe the gospel. When the rulers of Jerusalem commanded the apostles to stop speaking in the name of Jesus, the answer was short and settled.
"We ought to obey God rather than men." (Acts 5:29)
That is not rebellion. The apostles honored the authorities as far as conscience allowed, and no further. Believers today should pray for the justices, respect the office they hold, and speak with grace to those who disagree, including officials in Colorado. A policy can be wrong without the man who wrote it being our enemy. But a state that sets a price on the faith of little children's teachers has overreached, and it ought to be told so plainly.
Whatever the Court decides, the deeper work does not wait on a ruling. A child needs to hear that he was made by a loving God, that sin is real, and that Jesus Christ died and rose again to save sinners. No program, funded or unfunded, can take that message out of a believing home or a faithful church. Keep teaching it, at the kitchen table and in the preschool classroom, until the day those little ones can believe it for themselves.