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away from ethical conversation altogether. When “right” and “wrong” are discussed, participants rarely have the opportunity to consider the deep ethical sources (religious or otherwise) that inform those convictions. When they do, controversy often follows. Simply put, American society is deeply ambivalent about the role of religion in public schools. This chapter seeks to explain how we got here, from a landscape of ethical monism to evasion and ambivalence. TRACING THE PATH TO AMBIVALENCE A system of government that makes itself felt as pervasively as ours could hardly be expected never to cross paths with the church. In fact, our State and Federal Governments impose certain burdens upon, and impart certain benefits to, virtually all our activities, and religious activity is not an exception. The Court has enforced a scrupulous neutrality by the State, as among religions, and also as between religions and other activities, but a hermetic separation of the two is an impossibility it has never required.1 So observed the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976, and the distinction between neutrality and separation remains a constant negotiation in our national life, nowhere more powerfully and importantly than in our schools. What also seems clear is our continued ambivalence about the role of ethics and religion in public schools. Consider a few examples that have appeared in newspapers over the past several years: • When Vancouver, Washington, area high schools made a 2002 field trip to a “youth summit” to hear the Dalai Lama speak about compassion and nonviolence, several state legislators formally protested the event as being religious in nature and thus improper. In particular, they complained that a double standard existed whereby non-Christian religious perspectives were given far greater leeway for expression in public schools.2 • A federal district court partially upheld a 1999 parental lawsuit against the Bedford Central School District (NY), which charged that the school promoted religion through an Earth Day ceremony, constructing the likeness of a Hindu god, and the sale of “worry dolls.” The latter two claims were eventually dismissed on technicalities, and ultimately a federal appeals court deemed the Earth Day ceremony legally acceptable. A spokesman for the People for the American Way Foundation, who defended the district, characterized the suit as “yet another attempt by 12 Grappling with the Good the right-wing folks to use legal challenges to substantially interfere with school district curriculum.”3 • A federal judge in Detroit ruled in 2004 that the Ann Arbor school district was responsible for a Roman Catholic student’s legal fees after unjustly censoring her views on homosexuality during a “Diversity Week” program organized by the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance. Elizabeth Hansen sought to express her religiously-informed perspective that she was unable to “accept religious and sexual ideas or actions that are wrong,” but the school insisted that this and references to shifting sexual orientations be excised from her speech.4 • And finally, when first-grader Zachary Hood and his classmates were invited to bring their favorite books to school, he brought his Beginner’s Bible. His teacher, however, refused to let him read his selection entitled “A Big Family,” which recounted Jacob’s reunion with his brother Esau. Zachary’s mother filed suit, and a series of courts ruled in favor of the school’s decision. Columnist George Will remarked, “Reread ‘A Big Family,’ substituting the names, say Kevin and Bruce for Jacob and Esau. If that makes a constitutional difference, courts have built a wall of separation between the Constitution and common sense.”5 A regular scan of almost any newspaper, in fact, will reveal ongoing disputes over the role of religion in public schools and in particular their approaches to ethical education. Such ambivalence and disagreement are not only expressed in the legal system, of course. Evidence suggests that the bulk of citizen complaints to local school boards involves religious issues as well. These controversies are not likely to subside, either, given our increasing ethical diversity. “At the dawn of the new millennium,” historian James Fraser observes, “the peoples of the United States are more secular, especially in their public culture, more religious, in many different private forms, and more diverse than ever before in the nation’s history.”6 How did this relationship between ethics, religion, and the public schools develop through our national history? To tell the comprehensive story of ethical education in U.S. history would take a full book by itself, if not a series of volumes. A narrowing of focus...

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