The School, the State, and the Church

by AGNES E. MEYER

1

ANYONE with what Henry James called “the imagination of disaster” can foresee that the dignity and freedom of organized religion will be imperiled in our country if the various sects continue to quarrel with each other and with the Supreme Court over the meaning of the first Amendment and the separation of Church and State.

On March 8 the Supreme Court ruled in the McCollum case that sectarian education in the public schools was unconstitutional use of the schools to help religions spread their faith. In reading the hostile reactions to the Supreme Court decision, the average American is apt to conclude that some of our Church leaders are engaging in unwise tactics. The tone and content of this clerical resentment arise from the conviction held by many a sect that it has a divine mission and an exclusive mission to indoctrinate other human beings. But to the American mind, which has questioned authoritarian religion as it has all other forms of absolutism, the accusations hurled at the Justices that they are encouraging atheism, are making the schools “Godless,” and are in league with a newly invented devil called “secularism” sound like antisocial propaganda of a dangerous nature. Every citizen has the right to criticize the government, but in these attacks upon our highest court, religious leaders should bear in mind that contempt for our higher civil authority leads to contempt for authority in general, and that disrespect for the law is the road to anarchy.

Fortunately, not all the Churches have joined in this attack upon the character and purposes of the Supreme Court. Many of them, notably the Baptists, have long been ardent upholders of the separation of Church and State. Other Protestant groups have also defended the High Court’s decision in the McCollum case. But their rational tones have been drowned out by the emotionalism of the fanatical clergy who declare that our courts, legislators, and teachers are working with “communists, materialists, agnostics, and secularists bent on the frustration of freedom in education.”

What was the issue in the McCollum case? Simply stated it was this: the Supreme Court was asked to decide the constitutionality of a released-time program for sectarian religious instruction within the public schools. In short, pupils were to be released from the regular curriculum in order to receive religious instruction of a sectarian nature in our public schools.

It was Protestant leadership which first suggested and developed the released-time program whereby public school children could be excused for an hour to receive religious instruction in the schools themselves, or in churches of the parents’ selection. Until the end of the First World War the program made slight progress. The movement gained headway in the early twenties but it slowed down again during the thirties. Now we are going through another post-war religious revival and a new impetus has spread the released-time program throughout the nation.

The program was initiated with the best of intentions. Religious leaders were quite properly alarmed when the United States Office of Education found that only a small proportion of the nation’s children had even brief contact with Church influence. To remedy the situation, which certainly needs correction, a number of religious denominations united to get in touch with the children where they can most easily be reached: within the public schools. In 1947 approximately 1,500,000 public school children in 1500 communities participated in released-time programs of varying types.

At the outset the leaders of the Catholic Church were opposed. But they soon changed their minds. Where they now participate in the program, from 80 to 100 per cent of the Catholic public school children are enrolled in the released-time program, whereas the percentage of Protestant and Jewish children is much smaller. In New York City only 14 per cent of the Protestant and 5 per cent of the Jewish children participate.

At this point many of the Protestant leaders decided that they had made a mistake. They decided that it would be well to organize a combined Protestant service, agreeable to all sectarian tastes and offensive to none, which would be held right in the public school. Unconsciously, perhaps, they looked upon the public school system as a Protestant institution.

Many good Americans take the position: “Why not teach religion in the schools? What harm can it do?” They do not realize that this is the gambling attitude toward religion — “There may be something in it.” Too often the people who talk in this fashion are serious neither about religion nor about the American principle of separation of Church and State. There are others who feel that the prevalence of delinquency and crime among children constitutes a moral crisis which justifies a temporary invasion of the public schools by the clergy, even though it may be illegal. But this marks the degradation of religion to the level of a policeman or a bogeyman. It destroys the idea of worship without creating an ethical basis for behavior.

The social effects of the released-time program are not happy. In many communities it has resulted in a new form of religious intolerance. The erstwhile friendly relations of our school children are destroyed and their parents are confused. Even in New York City, where the program is managed as efficiently as possible, the lining up of the different denominations makes for divisiveness. It is well to remember that the public school is the one place where the child is not primarily a Protestant, Catholic, or Jew, but an American among Americans.

There are practical difficulties in the way. Pupils leave school ostensibly bound for a religious center. But many of them do not arrive. Truancy is encouraged by this break in the regular curriculum and teachers are apprehensive that the trend may grow. Discipline is impossible when the Churches cannot enforce attendance and the teachers are forbidden to do so.

The teachers, moreover, are obliged to participate in a program which the law forbids to the school itself: in other words, it forces them to be dishonest. Some teachers become proselytizers for one sect or the other; others write me confidentially of the tragic effects upon the children, yet they dare not say these things publicly lest they lose their jobs. Unpleasant experiences of this kind made the released-time program a short-lived experiment in many a community where the principals had the courage to speak their minds. They declared that it disrupted the regular work and school discipline for results that did not justify the endeavor. They foresaw that if it was legal for the Churches to take one hour a week, political pressure from powerful religious leaders could increase this invasion of the school session to a greater degree.

2

THE issue came before the Supreme Court when Mrs. Vashti McCollum, a citizen of Champaign, Illinois, a small community of 25,000 inhabitants, challenged the legality of a program which permitted Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish teachers to give sectarian religious instructions within the local public schools for one period a week. The pupils were marshaled into separate rooms according to the faith indicated by their parents, while children who did not participate pursued the regular school curriculum. The Court decided in favor of the plaintiff by a majority of eight to one.

Two quotations give the gist of the Court’s opinion. Said Mr. Justice Black, speaking for the majority: —

The facts show the use of tax-support or property for religious instructions and the close coperation between the school authorities and the religious council in promoting religious education. The operation of the State’s compulsory education system thus assists and is integrated with the program of religious instruction carried on by separate religious sects. Pupils compelled by law to go to school for secular education are released in part from their legal duty upon the condition that they attend the religious classes. This is beyond all question a utilization of the tax-established and tax-supported public school system to aid religious groups to spread their faith. And it falls squarely under the ban of the First Amendment (made applicable to the States by the Fourteenth).

And again: —

Here not only are the State’s tax-supported school buildings used for the dissemination of religious doctrines. The State also affords sectarian groups an invaluable aid in that it helps to provide pupils for their religious classes through use of the State’s compulsory public school machinery. This is not separation of Church and State.

Mr. Justice Black’s opinion makes it clear, and Mr. Justice Frankfurter states explicitly, that the decision invalidates “the commingling of sectarian with secular instruction in the public schools.” In other words, what is invalidated is the close cooperation or contractual relationship between the public school authorities and those of sectarian religious groups. The Court forbids the use of the State’s tax-supported public school buildings for the dissemination of religious doctrines, and the aid to sectarian groups of the State’s compulsory public school machinery.

Supporting this decision, Mr. Justice Frankfurter demonstrates historically that if represents the law and the spirit of our American traditions; —

Long before the Fourteenth Amendment subjected the States to new limitations, the prohibition of furtherance by the State of religious instruction became the guiding principle, in law and feeling, of the American people. Separation in the field of education. then, was not imposed upon unwilling States by force of superior law.

By 1875 the separation of public education from Church entanglements, of the State from the teaching of religion, was firmly established in the consciousness of the nation. In that year President Grant made his famous remarks to the Convention of the Army of Tennessee: “Encourage free schools and resolve that not one dollar appropriated for their support shall be appropriated for the support of any sectarian school. Resolve that neither the State nor the nation, nor both combined, shall support institutions of learning other than those sufficient to afford every child ... a good common school education, unmixed with sectarian, pagan or atheistical dogmas. Keep Church and State forever separated.”

The extent to which this principle was deemed a presupposition of our constitutional system is strikingly illustrated by the fact that every State admitted into the Union since 1876 was compelled by Congress to write into its constitution a requirement that it maintain a school system free from sectarian control.

What constitutes sectarian teaching? One court answered this question by saying: “The term sectarian instruction refers exclusively to religious doctrines and the [constitutional] prohibition is only aimed at such instruction as is sectarian - i.e. those doctrines which are believed by some religious sects and rejected by others.” However, as our population became more varied in its religious complexion, the principle led to the piogre»sive exclusion of forms of worship not previousK excluded. During our period of Protestant domination, many religious school ceremonies were acceptable that were later abandoned out of consideration for a growing Catholic population. This process of elimination led to the inevitable conclusion that the school should center upon the induction of its pupils into the moral and cultural values of our society and avoid entanglements with specific religious doctrines.

The recent Supreme Court decision in no way interferes with broad religious exercises such as are still customary in many of our schools where such practice has not been banned by State court decision. Mrs. McCollum sought to eliminate all forms of religious instruction, including the Bible. But the Supreme Court completely ignored these extreme and more detailed aspects of her complaint. It confined its decision to the fact that sectarian instruction was given within the school buildings, with the support of the momentum, authority, and discipline of the public schools. This still leaves the local communities free to decide whether they can agree upon nonsectarian religious exercises. Though legally still permissible under the Supreme Court decree, we know from experience that it is the eternal battle of the sects which has banned such exercises in most of our public school systems.

3

LET us glance for a moment at some of the more famous State Supreme Court decisions which give us an insight into the progressive secularization of our public schools. Until Horace Mann about one hundred years ago undertook his courageous campaign to exclude the religious sects from the public schools, most of the schools were dominated by one or another form of Protestantism. It was to keep the schools from being rent by these Protestant denominational conflicts that Horace Mann began a movement to exclude them. Yet the ethos of our nation was so dominantly Protestant that Protestant religious services continued to be the customary way of beginning the school day.

As Catholicism grew in strength, its leaders invoked the First Amendment, as reflected in the State constitutions, to protect Catholic children from enforced participation in religious exercises repugnant to their own faith. At the request of Catholic parents, the courts of Wisconsin, Nebraska, Illinois, Louisiana, to name but a few of the innumerable legal battles, went so far as to ban all Bible reading, prayers, and the singing of sacred hymns. Thus Mrs. McCollum, the atheist, found herself in a religious company when she made the same demands in the Champaign case.

A famous case took place in Illinois in 1910 (245 III. 334). A group of Catholic parents sued successfully to eliminate “reading the King James version of the Bible, offering up the Lord’s Prayer as it is found in said version and the singing of sacred hymns in the public schools during school hours.” Asserted the Court: —

Said exercises are devotional exercises and constitute religious worship. As such they do not come within the province of the public school. . . . Religion does not need an alliance with the State to encourage its growth. Where Christianity has depended upon the sword of the State, it has been weakest.

The severest sermon was read the clergy in the Ohio Supreme Court (as Ohio 211) as early as 1872, in a case which also eliminated Bible reading from the public schools of that State. The Court said:

When Christianity asks the aid of government beyond mere impartial protection, it denies itself. Its essentia] interests lie beyond the reach and range of human governments. United with government, religion never rises above the merest despotism, and all history shows us that the more widely and completely they are separated, the better it is for both.

The American tradition concerning the relationship of Church and State, which was until recently accepted throughout our country without question, received admirable statement in the following extract from a decision of the Supreme Court of Iowa: —

If there is any one thing which is well settled in the policies and purposes of the American people as a whole, it is the fixed and unalterable determination that there shall be an absolute and unequivocal separation of church and state, and that our public school system, supported by the taxation of all alike — Catholic, Protestant, Jew, Gentile, believer and infidel — shall not be used, directly or indirectly, for religious instruction, and above all, that it shall not be made an instrumentality of proselyting influence in favor of any religious organization, sect, creed, or belief. (Knowlton v. Baumhover, 182 Ia. 691.)

But today the various religious groups seem to have forgotten that they themselves brought about the growing secularization of our public schools in the interests of their own freedom of worship.

4

IN HIS dissent in the McCollum case, Mr. Justice Reed states that “the decisions of the court forbid pupils of the public schools electing . . . courses in religious education.”This is inaccurate. They forbid not education about religion, but sectarian indoctrination and instruction in religion.

Next he quotes a paragraph from Thomas Jefferson’s Regulations of the University of Virginia, to the effect that “the students of the University, will be free and expected to attend religious worship at the establishment of their respective sects, in the morning and in time to meet their school in the University at its stated hour.” The word “expected” indicates that it was a commonplace in Jefferson’s day to control the out-of-school actions of the students, as well as their school life. Far from proving, as Mr. Justice Reed assumes, that Mr. Jefferson “did not exclude religious education from that school,” it proves that he refused to let it intrude upon the regular school hours of secular instruction.

What is significant in Jefferson’s point of view for our day is what he stresses: namely, that the commingling of secular and religious instruction and the use of the school time for sectarian worship should be prevented. This is exactly the purpose of the majority opinion in the McCollum case.

Mr. Justice Reed’s argument that churches are tax-exempt, that the Congress of the United States has a chaplain, and that chaplains are assigned to the armed forces, are used by all people who are opposed to the separation of Church and State. But these arguments, too, are irrelevant. The fact that Church property is tax-exempt creates no relationship between Church and State. As to military chaplains, when the government removes a young man from his home and community and places him in an environment which it selects — above all, if a man is asked to risk his life for his country—it is in duty bound to meet his spiritual and physical needs as he interprets them. This is an exception to the rule to which most people do not object.

If the Church leaders find sufficient mutual tolerance in their hearts to agree upon nonsectarian religious exercises, these can still be introduced in our public school system with the consent of the parents. But even if such programs could be devised, it will not answer the problem of religious education for American youth. Religious lessons learned at school or after school are useless unless they have the sanction of the home. Moreover, if many children receive religious instruction only through the school, indifference to the Church will increase since its role in our society would be minimized.

Because religion was free in America, it became a more dynamic force in our country than in many lands having an established Church. “Religion seems in the United States to stand all the firmer because, standing alone, she is seen to stand by her own strength,” said James Bryce in his American Commonwealth. The American Churches have abundant resources— material, spiritual, and intellectual which should now be set in motion to meet in a constitutional way the noble purposes of the released-time programs. Instead of attacking the Supreme Court decision, religious leaders should accept it as a God-sent stimulus toward renewed endeavor by methods that will be all the more effective because they are consistent with the spirit of democracy.

But there are no signs as yet that the medievalminded groups among our clergy have any respect for the function of the Supreme Court or for the unifying mission of our public schools in American society. What does it mean when the Catholic Bishops and several of the most influential Protestant theologians and clergy denounce the influence of secularism as the “exclusion of God from human living and thinking”? Secularism, these adversaries maintain, has wrought havoc in family relations and explains our economic disorder and the causes of international friction. But “in no field of activity has secularism done more harm than in education” say the Catholic Bishops specifically.

Now surely these attacks upon secularism by many Church dignitaries and clergy can only mean that they wish the American people to accept religious control of our secular activities and institutions, especially religious control of our public school system. Since neither the Protestants nor the Catholis would ever yield control of the secularc realm to the other, their joint attacks upon secularism open the way to a prolonged battle between these rival claimants to the complete domination of our society.

As this ominous contemporary development is the real reason for the attacks upon the Supreme Court;s reassertion of our American tradition on the separation of C hurch and State, we must ask ourselves: “What are the chances that the country would ever renounce its democratic faith in freedom of thought and in the values of free, creative, human relationships on the assumption that these moral values lack substance without the sanction of organized religion?”

Secularism, after all, was not invented recently by a “materialistic America.” Secularism began when Duns Scot us in the late Middle Ages asserted that reason can operate in the realm of verifiable experience. This sharp distinction between the sphere of knowledge accessible to human reason and the sphere of faith posited on ecclesiastical authority left the way open for the progressive development of modern science. It made possible our Western civilization based upon free inquiry, the free use of reason, and belief in unlimited social progress, all of which are now under attack, since history and philosophy have lately come under the influence of reactionary minds, and all sorts of superstitions are once more raising their heads.

A development similar to the rise of modern science took place in our social, legal, and political institutions. This had its roots in St. Thomas Aquinas’s insistence that the State had positive functions of perpetuating orderly social conditions in this world necessary for the attainment of salvation in the next. This belief gave the State its first pretext for interfering with Church autonomy.

The seventeenth century saw the firm establishment of secular government as a result of the elaboration by Grotius of natural law as the basis of social control. Thirty years of unprecedented atrocities committed in the name of religion brought home to Grotius the need for laws which Catholic and Protestant, Christian or Infidel, could accept as restraint upon barbarity. Out of the compromise of the fanatical antagonists arose the first legal and social provisions of the secular realm.

Few books have more powerfully affected the conduct of human affairs than his De jure belli et pacis (1625), in which Grotius declared that the law of nature, instead of being the law ol God, was the product of reason and a principle of international morality. Thus emerged the conception of an independent sovereign state whose functions are determined by its own aims and characteristics. The spread of nationalism, the rise of the middle classes, and a new economic order brought about the replacement of theological values by values conceived wholly in terms of earthly objectives.

Locke and numerous followers expanded this agreement upon a universally operative law of nature which made for genuine toleration between antagonistic religions and helped them to live together peaceably in the common body politic. It was Locke who laid the foundation for the completion of the secular State, especially through his influence upon our Constitution and our Bill of Rights.

Jefferson borrowed from him the essential thesis of liberalism that no government can be justified unless it draws its strength from the free consent of the governed, that all sovereignty resides in the will of the people, and that government is merely the trustee of the ends they wish to achieve. Locke also inspired the concept which has always been taken for granted in our nation: that a Church is merely a voluntary body with no power except over its own members. His work, which has been called the “Gospel of Protestantism,” destroyed the dependence of the State upon the Church and created a secular ethic with which alone it seemed legitimate for the State to concern itself. It remained for our Founding Fathers, under the influence of this long European development, to make absolute the separation of Church and State as a by-product of the First Amendment.

Thus the recent Supreme Court decision banning sectarian groups from our public schools simply adds another chapter to the historical evolution of secularism which made possible the freedom of religion and laid the foundations of our modern democratic civilization.

5

OUR secular institutions are no mere accident but the finest product of five centuries of thoughtful statesmanship. They emerged out of the necessity to create harmony among diverse economic, philosophic, social, and religious beliefs. Freedom in each one of these areas is only possible because the secular world creates an equilibrium of complementary forces. Its outstanding characteristic is its humane attitude of the happy mean. The secular ethic asks itself how conflict can be solved with the least damage to all concerned. The ethic of religious organizations asks itself who is right or wrong according to their various forms of absolutes. Since these absolutes are not subject to analysis, the Churches create an impasse when they try to force their absolutes on our secular society. They become intransigent propagandists in a democratic world that can function successfully only when all the clashing elements are willing and able to compromise.

It is the secular tolerance of religious diversity which alone makes brotherhood possible in our country. This spiritual unity is the saving grace of democracy and its real defense against totalitarianism or against the divisive influence of sectarianism. Therefore, what can justly be called the unifying mission of secularism has a sanctity all its own. Rightly understood and valued, secularism will accelerate its Christian democratic mission to make us all brothers of one another. When we realize, moreover, that the public school is the chief vehicle for mutual love, forgiveness, and tolerance between all races, classes, and creeds, it becomes an act of vandalism to attack it and an act of piety to work toward its improvement. To be sure, our secular world has defects. So have the Churches. It behooves both, therefore, to work together with becoming humility toward mutual improvement.

Secularism in America, shaped as it was by a Protestant ethic, has never been as anticlerical and antireligious as it became in Catholic countries. Ecclesiastical government in Protestant churches is determined by the people. But the Catholic layman was denied an active role in the shaping of Church dogma, and therefore revenged himself by keeping all theological influences out of politics and other secular affairs. The Protestant layman, who believes that every man is his own priest, found no difficulty in carrying his religious beliefs into the sociopolitical field in a form that could not offend the other sects. That is why our American secular institutions, including the public schools, are by no means as “Godless” as contemporary ecclesiastical critics would have us believe.

The American Constitution preserves and carries over into the secular realm much of the idealism which had been identified with religion. There is a strong tendency among our people and our schools to do likewise. The positive views on the subject of religion which are reflected in our Constitution are ignored by sectarian leaders who call our secular world “Godless” and strive to force upon it the acceptance of their particular doctrines and their organized authority.

Repellent to these leaders is the clear implication in our Constitution that religious truth is an individual quest, that authoritarianism and religion are contradictory terms, and that one man’s faith is just as sacred as that of organized millions. Thus the Constitution is anything but irreligious. A specifically Christian philosophy that can never be lost is closely interwoven with its principles, and with our democratic thought and action. And amongst their noblest manifestations is that unique institution, our American public school.

The Catholic attacks on secularism have at least the merit of consistency. It is understandable that Catholics who cling to the medieval doctrine of the antithetical nature of the two spheres, the material and the spiritual, should envisage the secular world as a “Godless” domain to be conquered by the one true Church. That is why they encounter difficulty in resolving the problem of the relationship of Church and State in the American way. But the Protestant clergy who take the Catholic position that the First Amendment does not imply the absolute separation of Church and Stale, but merely forbids the preferential treatment of any one Church, have forgotten the history of secularism, its contribution to civic and religious freedom, and the important role of Protestantism in its development.

Both groups should recognize that the civil liberties of the secular realm grew out of compromise between irreconcilable religious beliefs and established an area of resolution for their competitive zeal and for their accommodation to one another in a broader American unity. Civil liberty, in other words, is the sine qua non of religious liberty. The attempts of religious organizations to dominate our secular world at this late date are futile. Five hundred years of European and American history cannot be uprooted.