Public schools are supposed to belong to everyone. But in Arizona, a growing push from LifeWise Academy and a bill moving through the legislature threatens to blur the line between private faith and public education in ways that should concern everyone, no matter what they believe.
LifeWise Academy presents itself as a simple answer to a complicated problem: let students leave campus during the school day for Bible classes, and somehow everyone wins. On its website, LifeWise says it partners with parents and helps public school students grow in character with “Bible education during school hours.”
LifeWise is not a neutral enrichment program. It is an explicitly Christian ministry whose stated mission is to bring Bible instruction into the public-school day and “reach public school students with the gospel.” In Arizona, that matters now more than ever because lawmakers are considering a bill that would make it easier for programs like LifeWise to gain a foothold in public schools.
LifeWise’s own materials make its goals clear. Its website says it offers a “fully legal way” to bring “Bible-based character classes” into a child’s public-school routine. Its founder and CEO, Joel Penton, describes the organization’s protocol as explaining why and how LifeWise is “reinstalling religious education into the public-school day.” That is not a side note. It’s the point.
The organization’s history also shows how intentional this effort has been. LifeWise says two Ohio schools pioneered its model in 2019, and that it quickly expanded from there. Watch the Secular Education Association discuss exactly how that’s gone.
More recently, LifeWise has described itself as serving hundreds of schools and tens of thousands of students, with ambitions to grow much larger. This is not a local, spontaneous, community-by-community development. It is a national campaign with a model, a playbook, and legislative goals.
And LifeWise is not shy about the ideological message behind that growth. It has promoted the idea of bringing “God and the Bible” back during the school day. On one LifeWise page, the organization claims that anxiety, depression, and suicide are “at all-time highs” while church attendance, professions of faith, and Bible literacy are “at all-time lows,” and then concludes: “Now more than ever, students need the Bible.” That is not a neutral educational theory. It is a religious diagnosis of social problems paired with a religious solution, aimed directly at children during the school day.
LifeWise’s rhetoric suggests that declining church attendance explains rising youth distress and that Bible exposure is the answer. But the research does not establish that attending church reliably produces better mental-health outcomes for children, much less that inserting religious instruction into the public-school day is an evidence-based solution. Studies in this area are mixed, with findings ranging from protective associations to no significant relationship to more complex or adverse effects.
Arizona House Bill 2266 would amend Arizona law governing excuses from school attendance for religious purposes Under the current bill text, school districts and charter schools must adopt a policy on excuses for religious purposes, and the bill changes the operative language so that a policy allowing students to be excused for religious instruction becomes mandatory rather than discretionary. In plain English, the practical shift is from districts being able to decide whether to permit released-time religious instruction to districts being required to allow it. The bill passed the Arizona House, and has moved to the Senate, where its future remains uncertain.
Even beyond House Bill 2266’s shift from “may” to “shall,” Arizona lawmakers have also considered going further by treating released-time religious instruction as something public schools and charter schools should formally accommodate within the academic structure of the school day. While House Bill 2266 focuses on requiring schools to allow religious excusal policies, Senate Bill 1741 goes even further by expressly requiring schools and charters to accommodate released-time courses and award academic credit for them. Once the state begins folding private religious coursework into the machinery of public education, the line between accommodating religion and promoting it becomes dangerously thin. Public schools are not supposed to evaluate, validate, or reward religious instruction as though it were equivalent to ordinary secular coursework.
Supporters of Lifewise dismiss the language change as small or insignificant. It is not. When the law changes from “may” to “shall,” local school officials lose discretion. That means communities that do not want the disruption and constitutional risk that can come with released-time religious instruction could be forced to accommodate it anyway. House Bill 2266, and others like it, will take the decision away from districts and create a major opening for LifeWise.
Released-time religious instruction is not automatically unconstitutional. The constitutional line has long depended on schools not organizing, funding, transporting, facilitating, using government buildings or resources, or effectively endorsing religious instruction, especially by offering the program for school credit. LifeWise leans heavily on that legal opening. But the existence of a constitutional minimum does not mean every program is wise, neutral, or harmless. And it certainly does not mean the state should force every district to make room for one.
The Supreme Court recognized this long ago. In McCollum v. Board of Education (1948), the Court struck down a program that brought religious instruction into the public-school day through the public school system itself. The message was simple: public schools may not use publicly funded classrooms, compulsory attendance, and official school authority to advance religious teaching. LifeWise may try to operate through the narrower space left by later released-time cases, but McCollum remains an important reminder that the Constitution draws a firm line when public education begins to serve religious ends.
That is especially important because what happens in practice often looks much messier than the polished legal theory. One of the most common problems with religion during the school day is that it divides children into participants and nonparticipants in ways that are impossible to ignore. Students know who leaves. Students know who stays. Families know which children are being offered a religious activity as part of the school-day routine and which are not. Even if the program happens off campus, it is still embedded in the structure of the school day, and that creates pressure, stigma, increased bullying, and social sorting. Those are not abstract concerns. They are predictable consequences when a public-school schedule is used to facilitate religious instruction.
There is also a deeper problem with the way LifeWise markets itself. It often wraps its message in broad language about character, resilience, community, and student well-being. But it has a specifically theological purpose. LifeWise is not merely teaching kindness or respect in some generic sense. It is anchored to a doctrinal statement, a gospel-centered mission, and a belief that public-school students are a mission field.
Arizona is already seeing signs of that push. Reporting on Lifewise’s website claims LifeWise programs are active in Flagstaff and the Deer Valley Unified School District, with efforts underway in other places including Sierra Vista and Casa Grande. The site also described Marana Unified as moving through LifeWise’s launch process. All while district officials publicly insist they are not formally considering the program and that related activity is outside the district’s purview.
That disconnect is part of the concern. LifeWise and its supporters can portray momentum one way, while districts minimize or deny involvement, leaving parents and community members without a clear picture of what is actually happening and who is facilitating what.
Is YOUR school district working with Lifewise? Check the map
That is why the right response is not to make it easier for LifeWise to spread. It is to preserve the separation of church and state and keep public schools focused on their public mission. Families absolutely have the right to raise their children in faith, attend worship, join religious education programs, and teach their beliefs. Churches can do that. Parents can do that. Religious ministries can do that. But public schools should not be used as the delivery system for evangelism, and lawmakers should not be forcing districts to build school-day policies around an outside ministry’s religious agenda.
The best defense of religious freedom is not government partnership with religion. It is government neutrality. Public schools serve students of every faith and no faith. They belong to all of us. LifeWise may call that partnership. But in practice, it looks a lot more like a coordinated effort to put religion back where it does not belong.
Chloe Love
Secular AZ Legal Intern
