The Bible, the School, and the Constitution: The Clash that Shaped Modern Church-State Doctrine by Steven K. Green (review)

In The Bible, the School, and the Constitution, Steven Green analyzes the nineteenth-century controversy known as "the School Question" that arose in response to the rise of public education and ensuing debates over the separation of church and state. In the early part of the century, the common school movement drew inspiration from Revolutionary era concerns about the need for an educated citizenry. Another precedent was the charity schools run by Protestant groups that offered "non-sectarian" education. By the 1830s, the movement, influenced by the ideas of Horace Mann, expanded in response to urbanization, immigration, and industrialization. Reformers began to advocate for common schools both as a public good and as an alternative to avowedly sectarian parochial schools.

The School Question had two intertwined facets: the use of school time for religious activities and the use of taxes to fund schools. Green argues that contemporary church-state jurisprudence on these questions developed out of the precedents established during the nineteenth century. He further argues that careful attention to this history shows that a wide array of interest groups conducted a very public debate about fundamental issues of pluralism and diversity; the moral responsibilities of citizens and their government; and the social function of education. "The School Question" was a stand in "for a debate over America's cultural and religious identity at a crucial time" (8).

Green's chief concern is to debunk the notion, advanced most notably by Justice Clarence Thomas in 2000, that the Supreme Court's hostility to public funding for religious schools had a direct lineage from nineteenth-century anti-Catholicism (6). Green, an expert on the Blaine Amendment that was proposed in the 1870s to prohibit any funding of religious schools, argues instead that a full history of this period reveals that nativist animus towards Catholics was but one strand of a complex situation. He gives notorious incidents such as the Philadelphia Bible riots of 1844 (provoked by Protestant anger over a school board measure that addressed Catholic concerns about the use of the King James Bible in public schools) full consideration, but concludes that nativism was primarily a proxy for other ethnic and economic tensions (84). Where Green most ably shows that the status of religion in public education was not simply Protestant versus Catholic is in his chapters on court cases about school Bible readings in Cincinnati and on several proposed amendments to the Constitution that would have settled the question of funding. Protestants divided amongst themselves over these issues along evangelical, moderate, and liberal lines. While Catholics uniformly protested what they saw as Protestant religious exercises in the schools, they varied in their attitudes towards public schools. Other groups, including educational reformers, Jews, secularists, and free thinkers also took part in these debates (118).

Green's most salient point is that while the language was often heated, discussions over the School Question were thorough, attentive to fundamental American principles, and above all, democratic. He suggests, in other words, that the legal consensus that had coalesced by the late nineteenth century, which rejected public funding for religious schools and sharply limited religious expression in public schools, was legitimate. This book will be of special interest to scholars of church-state relations. While it does not give a full account of the social and cultural transformations that affected the common school system, it will nevertheless also be highly useful to historians of education for its fine account of the legal basis for secularism in American public education.