Paul Harvey
I’m pleased to host a guest post today from Steven Green, author of the brand new and very important book The Bible, The School, and the Constitution: The Clash that Shaped Modern Church-State Doctrine. (Oxford, 2012). This post actually will kick off a mini-forum on the book; I’ll be posting on the book this week, and Chris Beneke will be posting on it soon as well. A brief take from Religion Review gives a very nice short summary, and I would also recommend Green’s short piece “The Battle Over School Prayer and Why It Matters.”:
From 1863 to 1876, education reformers, religious leaders, ordinary people, and legal experts grappled with “the School Question”: whether Bible reading belonged in public education, and if religious schools could receive public funds. Green, a professor of law and history at Willamette University, has provided an extremely dense but rigorous assessment of this tumultuous period that witnessed the Civil War, the emergence of a public system of education, and an influx of immigration. Catholics accused the ostensibly secular public schools of promoting Protestantism because some influential education reformers equated Republicanism with Protestantism. While it was inconceivable to some that students could learn moral virtue without reading the Bible, other states like Ohio banned unmediated reading of the Bible in public schools during “the Cincinnati Bible War.” Meanwhile, anti-Catholic animus suffused the debate over public funding of parochial schools, with prominent ministers like Lyman Beecher stoking nativist fears that Catholics would dominate the Midwest. Deftly guiding the reader through this cacophony, Green reveals how a factious American public engaged with constitutional principles that still resonate in today’s controversies over school prayer and creationism. (Feb.)
by Steven K. Green
The subjects that compose the study of Americanreligious history have frequently involved issues that were controversial intheir day (admittedly, that is one reason we are attracted to this area). The rise of Mormonism and the church’sconflicts with the
United States government during the nineteenthcentury offer one notable example. Another significant episode in American religious history has been thecontroversy over religion and education. Unlike many subjects of religious history, however, this issue hasremained controversial since the inception of public schooling in the earlynineteenth century, perhaps due to its legal implications. Recently, at lease three Republicanpresidential candidates – Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann, and Newt Gingrich –have made remarks critical of the Supreme Court’s decisions banning schoolreligious exercises, with the
Texasgovernor announcing his support for a constitutional amendment to reverse theCourt decisions.
That the Supreme Court’s Bible reading decisionshave been a political punching-bag is nothing new. Like other “culture war” issues, religion inthe schools – both the Bible reading and funding sides of the issue – hasongoing symbolic significance for people who are interested in defining thenation’s moral character. What fewerpeople realize is that the history informing this legal issue has beencontroversial as well. Ever since theCourt’s first decision in 1947, critics have charged that the justices eithermisinterpreted the history or (mis)used it selectively to arrive at theirconclusions. This criticism has grown inrecent years. According to this critique – one endorsed by Justice ClarenceThomas – the notion of church-state separation endorsed by the modern Courtrests on a decidedly illiberal history that supported a Protestant hegemony atthe expense of Catholics and other religious minorities. In particular, critics charge, the nineteenthcentury regime of “nonsectarian” schooling perpetuated Protestant control ofpublic schooling while it legitimized discrimination against Catholics byprohibiting public funding of parochial schools. As a result, the high court’s rulings, andpotentially its entire church-state jurisprudence, may rest on a discreditedprinciple.
My new book, TheBible, the School, and the Constitution: The Clash that Shaped ModernChurch-State Doctrine (Oxford University Press, 2012), examines theconnection between this history and the holdings of the modern SupremeCourt. The book has two relatedtheses. First, the understanding (andpractice) of nonsectarian public education during the nineteenth century wasnot static but was dynamic and evolving. Although nonsectarianism began as a means to instill morality and religiousfealty in schoolchildren, the practice evolved over time as a result of effortsto professionalize education and pressure by not only Catholics and Jews, butalso by liberal Protestants and secularists who viewed religious exercises asinconsistent with notions of religious equality. By the close of the nineteenth century, aclear trend was underway toward abolishing religious exercises or making themchiefly symbolic. It was upon thisfoundation that the modern Supreme Court built its early school prayerdecisions.
The book’s second thesis is that the related ruleagainst funding religious education – based on the notion that public fundscould pay only for nonsectarian public education and not for private schoolingin which sectarian doctrines were taught – arose not as a means to discriminateagainst Catholic schooling. The ruledeveloped in the 1820s in response to competition for school funds betweenProtestant schools and the nascent common schools. Educator Horace Mann, who led the above driveto make nonsectarian instruction less devotional (albeit still religious), alsoendorsed the no-funding rule as a way to diffuse religious dissention amongProtestant groups. Mann, like others,also identified the no-funding rule with constitutional principles. This rulewas already developing by the time that Catholic immigration exploded in the1840s.
Alienated by the Protestantcharacter of public schooling, Catholic officials created a system of parochialschools and sought financial support from the state. It was at this time that nativists and“muscular Protestants” took up the mantel of church-state separation, in largepart to secure the favored position of Protestant schooling while counteringthe “threat” of Catholic schooling. Eventhough nativists tried to limit the developing concept of separationism tofunding issue – as they supported robust religious exercises that even Manndisdained – they were unsuccessful in preventing its application to the Biblereading issue. By making separation partof the conversation about public education, it had the unintended consequenceof accelerating the secularization of
America’s public schools. But more important, the book demonstratesthat the controversy over the religious complexion of the public schools andthe funding of religious schools was not a simple Catholic-Protestant conflict,that perspectives fractured along several lines.
The book argues that the Supreme Court built on thismixed history when it entered the fray in the 1940s. The Court agreed that evennonsectarian religious exercises violated the Constitution, while it embracedthe larger heritage of the no-funding rule. Despite criticism at the time thatthe Court was making new law and going against our religious traditions, thelegal basis for its decisions was well established by that time.
Steven K. Green is the Fred H. Paulus Professor of Law and History at
Willamette
University, where he directs the Center for Religion, Law and Democracy. He is the author of The Second Disestablishment: Church and State in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 2010).
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