-
THE GRADUAL SHIFT TOWARD CIVIL RELIGION
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
reasons. First, Justice focuses specifically on New York State history; it is quite conceivable that other regions of the country—such as the South, with its more fluid boundaries between school and church—encouraged significantly more Bible reading. Second, an absence of local conflict does not necessarily indicate a peaceful environment in which various constituencies felt heard and respected; even today, for example, many nonChristian minorities quietly endure the Christmas “season” in schools rather than suffer the wrath of a local community that feels its cultural traditions are being spoiled. Finally, it seems the historian may have to settle for a certain degree of agnosticism about actual religious practices in schools. Teachers often avoided publicizing the presence of religion in their classrooms in order to avoid controversy. Even today, most teachers will acknowledge that what they do behind their classroom doors is rarely observed or documented; but if the NTA and NEA excerpts cited earlier are any indication, many teachers in that era saw their role as moral educator in religious terms.24 While the nature and emphasis of Protestant-based moral education almost certainly varied according to locality, common schools did serve as battlegrounds for citizens seeking to include, impose, or preserve their own ethical frameworks in the civic realm. Reformers such as Mann recognized that the colonial models of ethical education directed by singular ethical sources (highly sectarian Protestant frameworks) would not nurture or sustain a broader civic commitment in a diverse society. Their advocacy of a more widely acceptable religious framework met with resistance , however, both from orthodox Protestants who decried the diluted ethical vision and from those who perceived such “nonsectarianism” as still very Protestant biased indeed. The essential question of how to foster an effective and just civic realm amidst growing ethical diversity remained; as the century turned, signs of a gradual shift away from religious sources for ethical education began to emerge. THE GRADUAL SHIFT TOWARD CIVIL RELIGION The first U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Bible reading didn’t occur until 1963, but twenty-one states heard cases prior to that, and most ruled the practice constitutional. In the first such case, fifteen-year-old Bridget Donahoe was expelled from her Maine public school for refusing to read the Protestant version of the Bible, and she took her case to court in 1854. 21 Evading the Ethical Her legal claim was based on an argument against the tyranny of majority rule, in this case (and across the country) of Protestantism. The court, however, sided with the school, discounting the religious argument by maintaining that the Bible was used as a reading text, not for purposes of religious instruction.25 Two decades later, however, in The Board of Education v. Minor, the Ohio Supreme Court reversed a lower court decision and ruled that religious education was unconstitutional in Ohio public schools. The court charged Bible reading advocates with equating religion with Christianity, effectively designating Christianity as the religion of the state. Judge Welch advocated a “hands-off” doctrine: “Let the state not only keep its own hands off, but let it also see to it that religious sects keep their hands off each other.” This case also made the significant articulation that panProtestantism was unjustifiably exclusionary, an idea still contrary to the popular assumption of the time.26 The degree to which religion was being pushed out of public education at the close of the century is a disputed matter, however. Warren Nord, echoing Samuel Windsor Brown’s 1912 argument in The Secularization of America, contends that “textbooks, the official curriculum, and the governing purposes of education had become almost completely secular by the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the fact that a ceremonial religious shell continued to envelop public education into the twentieth century only helped obscure the fact that its substance was now almost entirely secular.” Other scholars criticize these depictions of dominant secularization in schools in the late 1800s, arguing that religion was not in retreat but simply subordinated to other ends, its presence still very much alive. The Minor case in Ohio and an 1890 case in Wisconsin—both dealing with Bible reading—were not indicative of the range of decisions; the general inclination of courts was to support opt-out policies for dissenters rather than outlaw religious elements in the curriculum. The Wisconsin case decision even included the claim that religious beliefs held by all faiths would not be sectarian in nature and thus could be taught. Justice...