God in the Public Schools

WOULD that it were possible for me to write of religion in education with that singleness of conviction which shines through Father Johnson’s admirable article in the April Atlantic on ‘The Catholic Schools in America.’ Such certainty, alas, is not for me, nor for thousands like me. Our beliefs are tentative, our search for God still perilous, our habits in religion neither obvious nor very regular. Toward those to whom religion is the truth revealed, the creed a reasoned explanation of the meaning and the end of life, the church a universal and commanding institution, we can only look across a great gulf fixed. No subterfuge can give us faith; and if the comfort of acceptance into any church means giving up our personal responsibility for what we think and what we do, we must remain outside and ‘gnaw the file forever.’ Yet we are not irreligious, nor against religion, nor against the churches. And our point of view finds room for religion in the educative process.

The out-and-out materialist may now dismiss my words. He thinks there is no reality to which our senses cannot penetrate, whereas the least convinced religionist believes there is a ‘more,’ a world beyond: he is a critic of pure reason and wants to keep alive the sense of mystery. But if the religionist is of the stripe of those I represent, he cannot accept a creed as more than a formulation of possibilities attained by speculation; wherefore his Catholic friends, and many of his Protestant and Jewish friends, must weep for him. They too will dismiss what he has to say and think of him, perhaps, as simply an agnostic, or at best a mugwump in religion — and therefore a lost soul. I might claim, on the contrary, that holding to the spirit and its undisclosed and unpredictable adventure in the ordering of life takes deeper faith than holding to a given creed; but in the present premises I need assert only that an utterly non-credal point of view about religious education has at least this claim to attention — that it rests upon a minimum of affirmation and hence allows the greatest latitude for differences, adjustment, compromise, and toleration.

I

From such a point of view, however, what becomes of morals? Can children grow up to be good in an atmosphere of religious uncertainty? This is a crucial question for the present discussion; for if religious uncertainty leads to wickedness, there is a stain upon it at the start. To put it sharply, let me repeat what a Catholic friend whom I warmly admire and respect remarked to me in answer to an inquiry of mine upon the nature of his faith: ‘If I did not believe literally in the virgin birth, the resurrection, and the other miraculous elements in Catholic dogma, I should go off to the South Sea Islands and have a good time.’ His is a life of active goodness which finds its necessary basis in the oldest Christian creed, including the acceptance as historic fact of happenings which thousands of persons who still call themselves Christian now reject. Can such an undefined conviction as my own provide for many persons a like foundation for living steadily and strongly toward good ends?

I think it can. The fact seems to he that there is a whole range of possible bases for the good life and that no one can prove that any specified faith leads to goodness more surely or more often than another or than none at all.

So far as keeping the peace is concerned, and being generally decent according to the mores of our western culture, one may assume that respect for the major elements in our common JewishChristian tradition has a genuine and pervasive effect. It seems clear enough that very large numbers of people lead passively good lives at least in part because they vaguely apprehend that goodness is religiously imposed. For human beings not to bo wicked is somehow to their minds a part of a divine plan for the universe — and the churches are good interpreters of the divine will. There is also the law, and there is the customary code of the various groups they belong to: many things help, but there is a basic, ill-defined but potent, generally religious feeling in it all. That it is there, and often seeking for a more complete expression, is witnessed by the rise of sects and ‘substitute religions’ and by conversions to the older faiths.

Yet all the facts together do not show t hat goodness cannot flourish if it has no formulated creed behind it. Even active goodness, a life of service in an occupation somehow seen to be a calling, whether humble or exalted, can proceed upon the vaguest of religious terms. Indeed, the radical individualist in religion, to whom nothing was settled by the Council of Nice or any other legislative body and to whom no surface definition of Divinity, arrived at by agreement, is a binding concept — such a man may find religious motives for a life of moral purpose which are seldom potent in collectivist religions. For him the nature and the will of God are yet to be revealed; and in that great adventure he may have some share. This is close to a Rabbinic concept, as I learn from one of Boston’s brilliant Hebrew leaders in religion: the Talmud speaks of Ol Malkut Shamayim, ‘the yoke of the kingdom of heaven,’ which implies a Divine nature yet to be realized, and not without the help of human effort.

One can come to no conclusion but that many grades of goodness are compatible with many stages of religious faith.

II

If what I have written makes religion seem important only because of its possible effect on morals, I ought to hasten to correct that impression of my meaning. To test the truth of religion by its practical results in human conduct is to use a measure entirely inadequate to the object. The nature of God, or His existence, depends presumably not at all on the relative goodness, health, or prosperity of those who hold differing views of the matter. If a religion yet unknown were some day to conquer the world and impose its views on every human being born thereafter, and to their perfect benefit, some mind would surely see that even so there might be fundamental error in its creed. The pragmatic test of the value of any creed we know is a poor measure of its truth; and meanwhile none persuades all men to accept it by its own inherent logic.

One may ask, therefore, whether a universal religion is even possible, in the nature of things. If no religion can prove itself, as it were, politically, by producing so many good and prosperous and healthy people that its truth is thereby evident; and if none can win command of all our minds by reasoning; if, further, victory by force and propaganda is subversive of the very nature of religion — what remains except diversity and all the variat ions of religious outlook, from denial, through uncertainty, to fully formulated creeds?

Diversity, no doubt, is too much with us. At least the minor elements of difference among creeds have led to far too many rifts among the people who uphold the creeds. But who can think that men will come in any time within our vision into ultimate agreement on religious truth? So far as I can see, the nature of our minds, our means of getting at the truth, our means of testing it, the limits even of our powers of communication, all unite to render final unity of view on God, the soul, and human fate, impossible. It seems to me one consequence of our finitude that no one church shall ever hold us in its all-embracing arms.

Yet we may live together in friendship, work together in great causes, suffer together for great ends, even if some of us are ushered into the beyond without the benefit of clergy. And religion may remain — it does remain — a realm of interest for the mind, a region into which we cannot fail to move in thought, and out of which flow influences to which we naturally respond in feeling. The human situation makes it utterly impractical to ignore religion, either in our lives or in our education. In the face of what is happening in the world, there is in fact no refuge for the human spirit but religion.

And to the deepening of this commonness of interest, diversity of view is not a hindrance, but a help. Uncertainty, indeed, and the consequent diversity of faiths, are to some extent an outgrowth of that perennial interest in religion to which all history bears witness; and they in turn produce it. Religious wars, the persecution of the heretic, the degradation of religion into tyranny and worldly domination, the stunting of inquiry, the exclusion of the nonconformist from his civil rights and social recognition — these sins committed in the name of religion sprang not from uncertainty and living interest in religious truth but from fixity of creed and the desire for uniformity in religious observance. Tolerance, brotherhood in the spirit of religion, and unity of good works in the name of religion rest therefore on the recognition that faith may live without conformity to dogma, that those who happily have found a creed their reason can confirm must not exact lip service from their fellows, that there is in the nature of life a mystery we shall not soon dispel and to which there are many modes of personal approach. This means, I think, that the task of education in and for religion is essentially and to its own good a task for differing groups.

III

The separation of church and state in America goes back to experience and thinking not wholly unrelated to what I have been saying. Freedom of worship was established among us along with other freedoms, and in the main, no doubt, simply as a defense against tyrannical invasion of individual rights; for theocratic tyranny, no less than political tyranny, had held the colonists or their forbears under an intolerable yoke. Perhaps no one argued against a state church in the hope that religious diversity would lead to more religion or to worship on the part of larger numbers ‘in spirit and in truth’; and yet I should hardly be surprised to learn that some of our first statesmen urged religious freedom on the ground that free religion is the only true religion. That argument was not, to be sure, the common argument. The common argument was for freedom of conscience. Diversity of faith was none the less a dear and certain consequence of those provisions of our Constitution which forbid the enactment of laws requiring a religious test for any public office (Article 6, Clause 3 of the Constitution), or the establishment of a national church, or the prohibition of the ‘free exercise’ of religion (First Amendment). Such provisions, repeated in our state constitutions in terms often stronger and more detailed, put religion forever outside the limits of political obligation or political influence.

By implication too clear to be denied, religion becomes in America every man’s own business; no legal coercion or use of any sort of force or pressure to join a church or profess a creed or participate in a religious act is consonant with the spirit of American life. As the Supreme Court declared in a well-known case, ‘The law knows no heresy.’¹ Consequently the public schools of the country arc essentially secular, and religion is generally a matter left to the family and the churches.² And in further consequence there are many churches and a general competition for the adherence of members and the religious instruction of the young. And there are sectarian schools maintained by many denominations in the effort to propagate their own faiths, while they educate children in other ways acceptably to the state and to the public conscience. All this is an outgrowth of religious liberty viewed not as a concession to minor sects from a dominant church but conceived as a final, fundamental, and native right of the individual.

Out of these principles an educat ional situation has arisen which is unquestionably confusing. Some states require Bible reading in the public schools, some permit it, some prohibit it. There have been efforts (Oregon, 1922; Michigan, 1924) to prevent the development of private sectarian schools (Catholic parochial schools were actually in view); but the Supreme Court of the United States has declared that legislation requiring all pupils to attend public schools is unconstitutional. Consequently, denomi-

national schools and school systems may and do flourish unimpeded, subject only to state regulation with respect to standards and procedures in the secular subjects and activities required by law. In 1930 the Supreme Court of the United States, in Cochran v. Louisiana State Board of Education, held that public money might be spent for providing children with free textbooks, whether for use in public schools or private schools. Transportation of pupils to private schools at public expense has been the subject of conflicting legislation and court decisions, but the recent trend has been toward approval of the practice. Other questions have arisen, such as the employment of sectarian teachers in the public schools. Finally, there are many plans and proposals for excusing pupils from public-school attendance at specified hours for religious instruction in their churches or at home, either with school credit and some use of the time of teachers in facilitating and evaluating the religious instruction, or with no such cooperation. Such conflicts of opinion and practice in the external provisions for religious instruction can hardly be viewed as anything but the natural and inevitable result of freedom in religion, whereby parents are left to decide where, when, and how their children shall receive religious education, if they are to have any at all.

Reading the laws and court decisions on these issues and listening to the arguments advanced by various religious groups, bot h those advanced à parti pris by sectarians and those advanced by groups of a more general character, I am impressed by their emphasis on learning in religious growth and life. I find but little evidence that they look upon religion as first of all an individual experience — an orientation and a happening, the ‘blank misgivings of a creature Moving about in worlds not realized.’

If religious education is primarily a matter of knowledge, and particularly of knowledge of the history of a sect (even though broadly based upon the history of other sects and of non-Christian religions and of nonreligious philosophies), the course of it may be long and intellectually exciting; but there may be little reverence imparted anywhere along the line. If it is primarily a matter of habit, the essential mystery may never be disclosed. I can agree that occasions must be regularly provided wherein children as they grow up shall see and share their parents’ reverence and find themselves, together with other children of their several ages, guided in attitudes and acts of reverence of their own; but this means only taking part in worship, at home, in church, in Sunday school. I can agree that study of the problems of theology and of the polity and mission of a church becomes appropriate in time and that it may rightly lead to reception into the church in question. It is inevitable that all this should be largely a a matter of family background, without much likelihood that persons brought up in one denomination will often shift by conviction to another, or at least to one of very different temper. But if religious education is to lead to religion, it will not concern itself with knowledge only, nor with habit; it will use symbols, atmosphere, music, art, stories, ritual, history, and argument, all honestly and openly toward one end — to let the soul sense God behind the panorama of the world.

This is a task too delicate, as I conceive it, for elaborate instructional procedure. I may be wrong; but it seems to me that all Christian Sunday schools are wasting their time and defeating their own ends when they imitate the ways of teaching that are most effective in arithmetic. Some organization is required; much care, thought, and effort are necessary; and for my part I would develop a profession of religious education in Protestant churches that could stand some comparison with the great Catholic teaching orders. But the pedagogy of religion is not a mere adaptation of the pedagogy of secular instruction.

Hence in the name of religion itself I can come to no conclusion favorable to the teaching of religion in the public schools. They are no fit place for it — and this is not in the remotest wray to their discredit. If every school had a chapel, the case might be somewhat different; and I do not deny that a reverent teacher may make a classroom holy. But in practice, with many denominations present in the class, without vocation on the part of most teachers, with legal restrictions and unsolved problems of public policy shadowing the whole undertaking, it seems to me unlikely that religion is going to profit by bringing religious instruction into the publicschool curriculum. God would go out, I fear, if religion were entered on the daily schedule.

Yet in the same breath I would say something which may seem to contradict so radical a statement: I believe teachers should take thought, individually and collectively, to make the total effect of schooling favorable to reverence. So to conduct a school — its class exercises, its general meetings in the auditorium, its out-of-class activities — that the high seriousness of life and learning is not cheapened or denied, is the beginning of making the school a reverent place — and it docs not mean everlasting solemnity. Beyond that, any school and any teacher may find occasion to reveal to growing minds the limitations of human understanding and to show forth to the pupils that awe which Kant confessed before ‘the starry heavens and the moral law.’ Teachers who are atheists or agnostics have their rights, I am compelled to say; but neither religionist nor antireligionist has a right to indoctrinate, and I think I would risk a child of mine to a sad, sincere materialism rather than to burning zeal for some particular communion. But most of our teachers are religious. What they lack is far more often the art or powder to let their sense of ultimate and spiritual values shine through their teaching or their lives.

Because it is hard to do so deliberately, and often leads only to embarrassment and self-consciousness, they never do it naturally. Better, I agree, to avoid sentimentality at any risk; yet I believe a school can become a place in which reverence is fostered even though religious teaching has no place in it at all. To think of our schools as ’Godless’ is at any rate to deny their possibilities, and I believe also their actual practice.

But those who desire to see religious instruction made more effective — if only as a matter of knowledge of the Bible and church history—turn naturally to the public schools. They say the family, the churches, and the Sunday schools are not enough. I fear the answer is that then the public schools can never really save the cause. Of course it is possible that some really useful scheme may be devised whereby the public schools may help the churches by adjustments of the schedule to permit instruction in religion on school time, but under church direction and at church expense. There are many such schemes, some of them of long standing, some very recent. A plan now used in Pittsburgh is reported to be satisfactory. If I were a parent in Pittsburgh I should be concerned to sec to it that my child learned the Bible, religious history, and church history in a secular spirit, with secular thoroughness, and under competent teachers, and that he got his opportunity to sense the mystery that is religion not in the school hours devoted to religious teaching but in worship at home and in the church: but perhaps all that is possible under the Pittsburgh plan. Secular knowledge of the literature and history of religion has its own importance; but neither such knowledge nor denominational conformity is itself religion.

IV

If putting religious patches on the public-school curriculum seems to be of problematic value, what about public support for religious schools? So far as I know, the Catholic position, so ably expounded by Father Johnson, is the only one that has behind it the full weight of external achievement which he records. Other denominations conduct schools, but they have not in the same sense made education in their own faith systematic, comprehensive, and in fair measure a competitor of public education.

Catholic action in education is in accord with Catholic theory. Founded, as it claims, upon the rock of Saint Peter, the Church of Rome offers to its children a life and a culture, into which they are born, in which many of them may be schooled and all of them reared, and out of which they may go with the final blessing of their Church; there is nothing uncertain or casual anywhere in the theory, and thousands of men and women have taken vows which make them Catholic teachers in utter loyalty to Catholic ideals and Catholic doctrine. ‘Catholic schools,’ writes Father Martindale in his charming African Angelas, ‘are meant to educate Catholic boys to be Catholic citizens. They are meant, thus, to educate the whole man for the whole of life; if they fail in the secular part of their program, they fail partially: but if they fail in the Catholic part of their work, which is not departmental merely but pervasive and sublimating and regenerative, they fail wholly.’ From the Catholic standpoint it can hardly seem just that Catholic citizens should be taxed for the education of children of other denominations, while they pay for the Catholic education of their own children.

The trouble lies, first of all, in the difference between Catholic theory and Protestant theory (to say nothing of the theory of non-Christian groups) concerning religion itself and the church. Non-Catholics cannot admit that there is but one true religion, but one true church, or that not to be a Catholic is not to be a ‘whole man.’ The certainty, unity, and authority of Catholicism may be matched in other religions; but they come into conflict with the essential pluralism of many Protestant sects, and they are difficult to assimilate to the individualism and love of religious liberty which have grown up with Protestantism in the New World. Non-Catholics find themselves thinking, inevitably, that the completeness of Catholic education is something special and extra, which Catholics want because they want their children to be Catholics; and that it is not something required by citizenship or by ‘the whole of life.’

Then comes the history of religious liberty and of the separation of church and state; and with it the theory of education at public expense for the duties of citizenship and the ordinary activities of social living. Social competence becomes in our present educational theory an end for which it is justifiable to spend public funds and compel attendance at school; and if parents want for their own children more than public schools can provide — more of art, or learning, or religion than social competence seems to call for within the possible compass of public education — then the public funds cannot be used to procure it for a special group. Nor can the state favor one group without favoring every other. And if the public funds are spent for the facilitation of education in the schools of a single church, or even of several churches with equal claims, then church and state are no longer separate: the state has become party to the propagation of faiths.

But perhaps it is not merely theory that makes it seem impossible to support sectarian schools out of public funds: it is a vision of what might happen if the practice became common. The end might well be complete sectarianism in education. There is no denomination so small or obscure or foreign to prevailing Christian culture that it would not have a claim on public money for the support of its schools. What we should have to do in the name of justice we could never approve in the name of education. Although, as Father Johnson says, ‘Other nations as zealous for democracy and religious freedom as ours are supporting religious schools out of the public funds,’ it is by no means clear that we could work out the problem here or be content with the results in education which are held to be satisfactory elsewhere.

The history of education offers little evidence on which to base belief that schools conducted by religious sects will solve the problem. If we could distinguish what belongs to children as children and not as pupils in a school, then perhaps some way could be found to lift a part of the burden of providing education from those of any sect who wish to give their children a sectarian schooling. But the distinction would be hard to make; it would involve us once more in the puzzle over what is charity and what is education; and public supervision and control would have to follow where the public funds are spent for uses that are at all important in the schools. If textbooks, transportation, medical inspection, why not teachers’ salaries? To turn over the cost of educating all children to religious denominations is not to put God into the public schools. It is to give up the idea of education as a public function.

I cannot conclude, however, on a negative or pessimistic note. Public education may yet prove to be a background for religious teaching and for worship which will satisfy the most ardent religionist — dare I Pope even the Catholics?— and yet not suffer division into sectarian groupings. We can, we must, forget, the letter of our different faiths, so far as they divide us. Free peoples everywhere may yet turn to the deep, uniting spirit of religion as the world’s one sure defense against the madness of barbaric power seeking to command our lives. And the churches, the Sunday schools, and religious homes may yet discover how to do well what they now seek to do with varying success—to make reverence a climate for the soul.