Today the Supreme Court hears a case that could
undo a century of decisions that have attacked and undermined religious beliefs
by secularizing public education.
Today the U.S. Supreme
Court hears a case that could determine whether parents and taxpayers have any
choices about the kind of religion American children are taught with taxpayer
funds. Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue concerns
whether private donations may support schools that make their religious beliefs
explicit. It could also undo a century of U.S. court and legislative decisions
that used animus between Protestants and Catholics to attack the faith of both
kinds of Christians’ children over the last century.
Five years
ago, Montana’s legislature enacted a tiny school choice program that allows
residents to deduct up to $150 on state taxes for their donations to private
school scholarships. Eighteen states offer similar
charitable opportunities, which fund private schools using private money.
Montana’s taxation agency, however, banned religious schools from accessing
these private donations, on the grounds that would violate the state
constitution’s ban on using public funds
for “sectarian” schools.
Since these
school choice programs employ private funds, instead of direct taxpayer support
such as through vouchers, they have been less successfully challenged in courts
on the grounds Montana’s bureaucracy employed. Thirty-seven states include some
variation of this prohibition in their constitutions, and several run programs
similar to Montana’s, often with courts’ approval. Now the Supreme Court will
deal with the discrepancy.
It is
expected to use the occasion to consider anti-religious constitutional
provisions like Montana’s, known as Blaine amendments,
after the 19th century politician James Blaine. During Blaine’s crusade to
enact these policies, the word “sectarian” was understood to mean specifically “Roman
Catholic.”
That’s because it was then the norm, since the American founding,
for tax funds to support openly religious schools. In the first three-quarters
of the United States’ existence, many American schools were directly funded by
tax dollars and run by local churches, and sometimes even taught by local
ministers (often the most educated person in a town).
So until
Supreme Court and legislative changes in the mid-1900s, U.S. public
schools were usually overtly Christian:
“In the 1800s, the country was predominantly Protestant, and public schools
taught a generic Protestantism. Teachers led students in daily prayer, sang
religious hymns, extolled Protestant ideals, read from the King James Bible,
and taught from anti-Catholic textbooks.”
During the height of Catholic immigration to the United States,
however, many Protestants didn’t want to allow Catholics equal access to local
public funding for the schools their churches ran. They thus created barriers
to public support for religious schooling, such as Blaine Amendments, that at
first affected only Catholics, but eventually also turned on Protestants.
These barriers and others lawmakers and courts added ultimately
drove Christianity from publicly supported U.S. K-12 education. They helped lay
the legal and cultural groundwork for eventually substituting atheism for
Christianity as the religion of U.S. schooling. It’s a sneaky move, because
atheism and secularism are easier to falsely view as “neutral,” when they
are in fact a competing religious understanding of the ultimate questions every
faith seeks to answer.
The truth is that there is no neutrality about religion. To not
believe in God is a religous belief, just as believing in God is a
religious belief. To include the Bible in curricula is a religious decision,
just like not including the Bible in curricula is a religious decision.
To pray or not to pray: both are religious questions. Both teach
something about the importance, existence, and nature of religion, as does
every other decision about a school’s instruction, teaching methods, and
priorities. Instruction techniques must change based on whether one holds the
religious view that humans are by nature sinful or the competing religious view
that humans are born perfect and corrupted by institutions.
Yet for a century or more, we’ve accepted the dangerous fiction
that it is possible for law and public institutions to be neutral on religious
questions. This has had the effect of making secular atheism the dominant
religion of American public life, all while pretending it wasn’t happening.
On that
basis, in 1962 the Supreme Court held that
the U.S. Constitution’s requirement that “Congress shall make no law respecting
an establishment of religion” required U.S. public schools to ban prayer. In
1962, the court banned public schools from
Bible readings as part of instruction. In 1971, it banned states from funding nonreligious
instruction in private religious schools. In 1985, it banned schools from
allowing one minute for silent prayer or meditation, and in 2000 banned students from
voluntarily leading prayers at football games.
While the
Supreme Court repeatedly took a sledgehammer to American Christians’ ability to
pass on their faith using their own tax dollars and supposedly locally
controlled institutions, our politicians have refused to redress the bigotry
against religion this entails. For if it is bigotry for Protestants to have
banned Roman Catholics from equal access to public education funds solely on
account of their religion, it is also bigotry for atheists to have effectively
banned Protestants and Catholics from equal access to public education funds
solely on account of their religion.
Either we all are allowed to educate our children according to our
religious beliefs, or some get to impose their religious beliefs on others.
There are no two ways about it. There is no such thing as a school that does
not teach religion. There is only such a thing as a school that teaches that
religion is unimportant, false, foolhardy, a side matter, unrelated to “real
life,” a private matter, or not worth considering. These are all religious
teachings — or antireligious teachings. Whatever you call them, they are not
religiously neutral. They are religiously biased.
U.S. public schools impose religious beliefs on
children. According to young Americans who have abandoned their family’s faith,
they did so on average before leaving high school.
One of their top reasons for abandoning the faith is the scientism they are
taught in their schools. The other top reason are the sexual relativism they
are taught in their schools.
The majority of young Americans believe the point of an
education is to be able to buy stuff to make themselves happy, which
directly contradicts religious teachings that the point of life is to love God and serve our neighbors.
Thanks to Obergefell v. Hodges, public schools are now bound to take sides on
the deeply religious question of what constitutes a marriage and proper
relations between the sexes. Increasingly, public schools preachidentity
politics’ religious beliefs, such as the idea that sins like racism accrue
based on skin color (intersectionalism) and can be solved through collective
political action rather than individual repentance.
The Supreme Court has
spent a century attacking religion under the guise of neutrality. Its decision
on this case could reverse more than a century of injustice that the court has
until now pushed apace.
Joy Pullmann
is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of five
children. Newly out:the second editionof her ebook
recommending more than 400 classic books for young children. She is also the
author of "The Education Invasion: How
Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids," from
Encounter Books. She identifies as native American and gender natural. Find her
on Twitter @JoyPullmann.
