Attorney General Gentner Drummond, also a Republican, sued to stop the school. He called the 4-4 vote “a resounding victory for religious liberty” that also will ensure that “Oklahoma taxpayers will not be forced to fund radical Islamic schools, while protecting the religious rights of families to choose any school they wish for their children.”

A split Supreme Court ruling upholds a lower court decision that prohibited Oklahoma from establishing the nation's first Christian charter school.

Oklahoma will not be able to launch the nation's first-ever religious public charter school after the Supreme Court deadlocked 4-4 in a major case on the separation of church and state on Thursday. A key factor in the outcome was that conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett,