An Oklahoma state education board could vote as early as Tuesday on whether to approve the nation’s first religious charter school, potentially setting up a high-profile national legal battle over whether taxpayer money can be used to directly fund religious schools.

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa are seeking approval for the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, an online program intended to serve students in mainly rural areas across the state who otherwise have little choice beyond their local public schools.

The school’s organizers are seeking authorization as a charter school, a type of public school that is paid for with taxpayer dollars but is independently run and managed. Though a small number of charter schools may be affiliated with religious organizations, St. Isidore would be the first to be explicitly religious in its curriculum and operations.

The St. Isidore application has the support of Oklahoma’s governor, Kevin Stitt, a Republican, who has argued that excluding religious charter schools is a violation of the First Amendment’s prohibition on religious discrimination.

With conservative justices now dominating the Supreme Court, St. Isidore’s organizers hope the charter school could be the next step in a broader movement to allow government money to be spent on religious schools. About 7 percent of public school students in the United States attend charter schools.

“We are trying to motivate the courts to take up this question and give us a final answer,” said Brett Farley, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, which represents the Catholic Church on policy issues and is behind the proposal.

Many Republican-led states are increasingly pushing for families to have the option to use taxpayer money for private education, including the use of universal school vouchers, which have been approved in five states in the past year. And in a series of recent rulings, the Supreme Court, which now has a 6-to-3 conservative majority, has signaled its support for the directing of taxpayer money to religious schools amid its broader embrace of the role of religion in public life.

In key cases in 2020 and 2022, the Supreme Court ruled that Montana and Maine, respectively, could not exclude religious schools from state programs that allowed parents to use government-financed scholarship or tuition programs to send their children to private schools. In both cases, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that the rulings did not require states to support religious education, but if a state chooses to subsidize any private schools, it may not discriminate against religious ones.

The proposal in Oklahoma could open a new line of litigation, moving the question from whether parents can choose to use state money to pay for private religious schools to whether the government can directly finance a religious charter school.

Lori Allen Walke, the senior minister of Mayflower Congregational UCC Church, a Protestant community in Oklahoma City, described the idea of religious charter schools as a violation of religious freedom, which “protects our right to practice the religion of our choice and to not practice a religion of anyone else’s choice.”

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Ms. Walke, who works with Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a legal advocacy group, was alarmed by the St. Isidore’s application, which describes Catholic schools as participating in “the evangelizing mission of the Church.”

“They’re being very transparent about what they’re trying to do there,” she said.

Charter schools represent a hybrid — and growing — model of education. Like regular public schools, they are funded with taxpayer money and do not charge tuition. But unlike traditional schools, they are not zoned to particular neighborhoods, are independently managed and are often designed for innovation and flexibility. For example, they may have longer school days, or center on an academic theme.

The number of students enrolled in charter schools in the United States more than doubled between 2009 and 2019, according to federal data. Oklahoma has about 60 charter schools, including several virtual schools.

The national expansion of charter schools has at times been highly contentious, as schools pulled students — and their funding — away from neighborhood public schools. At the same time, charter schools have often been popular among Black and Latino parents seeking an alternative to failing public schools, and have been embraced by some Democrats as an alternative to taxpayer-funded vouchers supported by Republicans.

Nicole Stelle Garnett, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame who has argued for religious charter schools and has advised the St. Isidore organizers, said that the “underlying question” was whether charter schools were “state actors” or “private actors,” despite being publicly funded.

“Are they really government agents, or are they more like a government contractor?” she asked, using the example of Lockheed Martin, a private company that contracts for the U.S. military.

If they are private actors, there is room for them to be expressly religious, Ms. Garnett said.

But the charter school movement sees itself as squarely in the sphere of public education, said Nina Rees, president and chief executive of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. She noted that charter schools must follow the same requirements as regular public schools, such as hiring staff members and accepting students regardless of religious background or sexual identity — protections she fears would go away if religious charters were to be approved.

The legal question — whether charter schools are “state actors” or “private actors” — is central to another case, from North Carolina, which the Supreme Court is weighing whether to take up.

Should the question make its way to the Supreme Court, Preston Green, a professor at the University of Connecticut who studies educational law, believes that the court’s conservative majority would be likely to embrace charter schools as “private actors,” opening the door to religious charters.

“I just can’t see them saying no to this if they get a chance,” he said.

In its application, St. Isidore said that it would be open to students of all faiths or no faith. If approved, the school, named for the patron saint of the internet, would accept an initial batch of 500 students in kindergarten through 12th grade, starting no sooner than the fall of 2024.

“We are taking what we have been doing in Catholic schools for over a century in Oklahoma and putting that online, so that we can bring this content to the folks out in the rural areas,” said Mr. Farley, of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, who argued that while the proposal represented an “innovation,” it was “not at all exceptional.”

“We do this in many walks of life,” he said. “We’ve got Medicaid going to Catholic hospitals. We’ve got FEMA relief funds going to Catholic Charities.”

When asked about admitting L.G.B.T.Q. students or staff members, Mr. Farley said that he could not comment on hypotheticals. He said the school intended to abide by state regulations, while also maintaining its right to operate according to its religious beliefs.

Though approval of religious charter schools would open the door to religions of all kinds — Jewish and Muslim charter schools, for example — Rachel Laser, president and chief executive of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said she worried that the Oklahoma case “clears a path for the government to favor the majority religion.”

The country as a whole has grown more secular in recent decades.

There are now more people in the United States who identify as religiously unaffiliated than identify as Catholic. In Oklahoma, Catholics make up just 8 percent of the population, less than half the national figure, according to a 2014 survey by the Pew Research Center.

The proposed Catholic charter school has led to debate among top Oklahoma Republicans. The state’s new attorney general this year disagreed with his predecessor that there was enough legal precedent to support a religious charter school — and Governor Stitt ended up weighing in with a strongly worded letter in support of religious charter schools and the St. Isidore application.

The Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board, which is considering the application, includes members appointed by the governor and leaders of the Republican-controlled State Legislature.

Charlie Savage contributed reporting

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