The Yoder Case: Religious Freedom, Education, and Parental Rights (review)

Peters, author of the excellent Judging Jehovah's Witnesses (Lawrence, 2000) has written a short and readable study of the landmark case Wisconsin v. Yoder, which was decided by the Supreme Court in 1972. The case pitted Old Order Amish farmers Jonas Yoder, Wallace Miller, and Adin Yutzy against Wisconsin's requirement that all children attend school until age sixteen. The farmers wanted their children to leave school at fourteen, claiming that formal education beyond that age would undermine the children's upbringing in their faith and ultimately endanger the Amish tradition. The Court ruled in their favor, emphasizing that Amish children were trained by their community to be productive and hard-working members of society. The self-sufficiency and simple way of life integral to Amish faith, stressed Chief Justice Warren Burger's opinion for the Court, would be compromised by exposure of Amish children to high school.

The Yoder case expanded the protection available to plaintiffs in religious freedom cases, at least in theory. In practice, the case did not prove a particularly fertile source of new doctrine, or provide a safe haven for embattled religious minorities. Indeed, the sweep of Yoder was sharply limited by a 1990 case that relegated it to a holding based on parents' rights as much as religion, a "hybrid" rather than a tower of religious freedom.

If this much is well known, why bother studying a case that is something of a vestige? Part of the answer is provided by Peters' detective work and capacity to describe often isolated and embattled religious groups with sympathy as well as insight. He traces the migration of Amish farmers into Wisconsin as well as their long-standing conflict with officials in Iowa and other states over their children's education. As Peters carefully constructs the Amish community and its dealings with a ham-fisted state bureaucracy, he also reveals his own conviction that the Amish tradition was substantially threatened by states that insisted that children be trained in modern ways.

He also documents the involvement of other groups with the Amish, especially lawyers keen to promote governmental funding for parochial schools. In the 1960s, a series of cases holding that the establishment clause prohibited funding programs—including provision of teachers' salaries, certain supplies, tutoring, and others—meant that Catholic schools were hard-pressed. William Ball, who for years had argued that parochial as well as public schools should be funded by the state, believed that the Amish situation provided a new window for argument about the religious rights of parents. He and other sympathizers formed the National Committee for Amish Religious Freedom, which litigated the Yoder case and created a substantial record of expert testimony supporting the Amish claims.

As Peters tells the story, the victory came at a price. First, Ball and his colleagues had an agenda at odds with their clients': The very decision to "go to law" compromised Amish principles of separation from the world and non-resistance (61). Second, the community itself suffered: By the late 1970s, nearly two-thirds of the Amish had left the town where the suit began. Although most of them explained that they were leaving to find "better, flatter land," some Amish maintained that a split between more conservative and progressive members was the source of discord (169). One reporter speculated that the case itself, which was "designed to preserve a community[,] had actually torn it apart" (171).

None of these conclusions are surprising to those familiar with the social costs of litigation, especially at the Supreme Court. Moreover, Peters' analysis would have benefited from a more sophisticated approach to the complex relationship between Amish communities and the governments that enable such separatism, as well as to the...