The Supreme Court Was Wrong to Bar Religion from Public Schools

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The Supreme Court Was Wrong to Bar Religion from Public Schools

David Lowenthal

David Lowenthal, who has taught political science at Boston College since 1966 and has served on the National Council for the Humanities, argues here that the Supreme Court was incorrect when it tossed out prayer and Bible readings from public schools. He says that Americans draw much of their morality from Judeo-Christian beliefs and that the best way to inculcate morality is to use the Bible and references to the belief in God. Lowenthal concludes that the Founders did not intend to bar religion from the schools. By interpreting the Constitution to do so, the Supreme Court has provoked hostility among much of the population.

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In no area has the erroneous decision of the Court to apply the establishment clause against the states had graver implications than in public education. It should be clear to us, as it was to those founders of American public education, [Thomas] Jefferson and Horace Mann, that public schools have no more important function that the making of good citizens, men and women with the moral and intellectual attributes necessary to preserve democracy. This public function can involve a range of activities, including the teaching of rights and duties, the study of the deeds and discourses of our great men, and the practice of civic virtues inside and outside the schools. It requires inculcating the principles of the Declaration of Independence, but strongly emphasizing the duties corollary to rights that the Declaration implies but does not spell out, and admonishing the young to revere the Constitution and laws. It requires conveying some sense of the great challenges of republican self-government and instilling the moral qualities needed for the citizen to take care of himself, work well with others, and love his country: sturdy independence, sobriety, decency, neighborliness, patriotic concern for the common good.

The Value of God in Public Schools

Among a people drawing much of its morality from the Bible, such civic training cannot be accomplished without referring all to a just God and strengthening rational elements from the Declaration with religious elements from the Bible. When Jefferson designed a system of public education for Virginia, he spoke of using nonsectarian prayers drawn from the Bible, teaching the Declaration and the principles of natural theology and ethics, and even encouraging sectarian education and worship. In doing so, he laid down the main lines of what the states can constitutionally and prudentially do in their own interest. In his view, such practices did not violate the ban on religious establishments and the guarantee of free exercise found in Virginia's own constitution (since added in all other state constitutions). And they certainly do not violate any historically accurate reading of First Amendment liberties into the Fourteenth—supposing such reading necessary.¹

1. refers to the Supreme Court's practice of interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment to mean that state laws must not violate the federal Constitution

In [Abington Township v.] Schempp [1963], where the Court struck down as an establishment of religion the use of Bible readings and the Lord's Prayer in the public schools, Justice [William] Brennan claimed the practice involved using "religious means to serve secular ends where secular means would suffice." He suggested that such important secular purposes as "fostering harmony and tolerance among the pupils, enhancing the authority of the teacher, and inspiring better discipline" may be served by various secular devices rather than by religion. But these purposes, mainly dealing with conditions that should prevail within the schools, fall far short of what the states intended to accomplish with the help of Bible reading, which was the general training of citizens. And there is good reason to believe that public morality, in a country nourished on the Bible, is best taught by linking its principles to the belief in God. Certainly, a connection Jefferson, [George] Washington, [French statesman and author Alexis de] Tocqueville, and Mann all favored should not be subjected to airy dismissal by the Supreme Court, but left to reasonable legislative discretion.

The First Amendment, like its counterparts in state constitutions, forbids establishing any religion but does not forbid teaching the Declaration's teaching about "nature's God" and the rights and duties He supports. Nor does it forbid gathering from the Bible or the holy books of other Americans those passages that would reinforce the moral qualities needed for citizenship in American democracy. In Christian churches the Bible, used for its own sake, can be taken full strength and in all its parts and dimensions, but its place in the public schools is wholly and simply to serve the secular purposes for which the public schools exist. This requires a principled selectivity in finding passages that have the desired effect while avoiding passages that do not, whether because their moral point is unsuitable or their spirit sectarian. No doubt state legislatures or school boards should make clear their secular intent, and assure believing citizens that, in principle, all holy writings may contribute to this common civic purpose. The result will be not only to instill or reinforce the moral qualities citizens need, but to impress Americans with the degree to which the various religions agree on certain moral fundamentals and contribute to the well-being of American society. In short, the public employment of religion will help religion as well as civil society, guaranteeing it a lofty public place in the body politic.

While parts of the Bible and other scriptures may be helpful to American democracy, the backbone of American political belief clearly derives from reason rather than revelation, and displays itself for all to see in the Declaration of Independence. What the Declaration conveys, strictly speaking, is not a religion at all, but a set of beliefs, anchored in the existence of God, the Creator of the natural world. It calls for no common worship, no rituals, no priesthood; it has nothing to say about the various experiences of bliss or woe, from cradle to grave, around which religions build their most impressive ceremonies; it does not instruct us how to pursue happiness but concerns itself solely with the preservation of our rights. Thus, the public schools can and should teach the Declaration's rational core, supplemented by a stress on civic duties that are also known through reason to be such, but are better illustrated and more strikingly enjoined by various religions than by the Declaration itself. States that convey such necessary beliefs through their public schools, even with prayers, found or devised, which testify to them, are hardly establishing a religion; they are neither preferring one of the existing religions, nor creating a new one. What they are doing, or should be doing, is teaching the civic morality without which their form of government cannot endure.

Why the Engel Ruling Was Wrong

Before it was struck down as an establishment of religion in Engel [v. Vitale (1962)], the following prayer, composed by the State Board of Regents, was recited in New York's public schools: "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our country." The Regents had taken pains to write a nonsectarian prayer to which all believers could conscientiously subscribe, and had even gone so far as to allow students who could not—on whatever ground, religious or irreligious—to abstain from the proceeding. It was part of what they called "Moral and Spiritual Training in the Schools." The Court, through Justice [Hugo] Black, argued that prayer was a religious activity, and an official prayer the beginning of a religious establishment. Quoting copiously from [James] Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance, as if the First Amendment were simply an excerpt from that document, Black conjured up all the dangers of sectarian faction that the framers sought to prevent. A footnote toward the end of the opinion, we should recall, maintains that the Declaration's references to the Deity should not keep it from being recited as an historical document, and that school children can also be asked to sing official anthems (such as the "Star-Spangled Banner") which include "the composer's professions of faith in a Supreme Being."

There are several errors in Black's reasoning. The first is his failure to recognize that some references to God derive from philosophy and not from religion—as in the Declaration itself—and that therefore some form of prayer, directed at such a God, may conform to philosophy rather than religion. Consider the Declaration's references to "nature's God," to the "Creator," to the "Supreme Judge of the world," and to the "Protection of Divine Providence": would prayer to such a Being be inappropriate? Black's second error is to assume that a religious activity—supposing prayer to be such—implies a particular religion of which it is an activity. The Board of Regents tried to formulate, for school use, a prayer religious believers could agree upon generally. Thus, having school children express this prayer is not to form a new religion, but to ask them to avow for public purposes, in the classroom together, part of what they would express separately within their own churches and temples, or in the home. Precisely the same is true of the prayers opening daily sessions of Congress and the state legislatures, as well as the countless invocations of God's help and blessing found in presidential addresses. (Justice [Potter] Stewart, in his lone dissent, quotes such passages from Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln, Cleveland, Wilson, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Kennedy.) Even supposing these to be rooted in religious rather than philosophical beliefs, they certainly form no part of a particular organized religion, do not prefer one religion over another, and hence fail to constitute an establishment of religion. Or are presidents employing such invocations in their official utterances to be impeached for violating the Constitution?

The reasons which moved the Board of Regents to introduce such a prayer in the first place receive utterly no attention in the Court's opinion (or Justice [William] Douglas's concurrence). The Regents were not being frivolous or light-headed, though the wording of their prayer might well have been more copious and dignified, and better connected with historical precedent. They wanted students to sense a dependence on Almighty God, and to think of the benefits they should want to see brought not only to themselves but to parents, teachers, and country—that is, to those in whose debt they remain. They were intent on overcoming, in other words, the growing sense among the young that they are subject to no higher law, have no superior obligations, may act as they please, and think solely of themselves. In the name of civic education and morality, they were contradicting a dangerous egoism. Unfortunately, they were themselves contradicted by a Supreme Court that had nothing in its lexicon but the word "liberty," making it increasingly difficult for public authorities to inculcate that sense of duty and discipline without which liberty becomes a dangerous threat to others and oneself. Only recently, since the 1960s, has it become possible to call the public schools "godless" with any accuracy, a change concurrent with a precipitous decline in the teaching of citizenship and its demands, generally abetted by a Court that stripped school authorities of essential powers in order to magnify student rights. Thus has the Court contributed to the widespread spirit of laxity and lawlessness, aroused deep resentment within much of the population, and engendered a mounting conservative (and religious) reaction to its own "liberal" recasting of the Constitution.

Monotheism vs. Individual Rights

But the term "liberal" should not be conceded to those who are fanatics in the name of liberty, and who invoke the names of Madison and Jefferson without studying the fullness of their thought. These great men realized that the Declaration, anchored in monotheism, would itself anchor the American people's belief in inalienable rights, with the right of religious freedom included within the right to the pursuit of happiness. However paradoxical in appearance, the right to be different—in religion and other matters—depends for its effective continuance on the general public's not markedly differing about the right itself—that is, on a very widespread agreement concerning the right itself. The same is true of equality: no stronger basis can exist for the equal rights of all men, regardless of race, religion, sex, or ethnic background, than the teaching of the Declaration of Independence. To assure the most widespread conviction in connection with these rights, and at the same time in connection with the duties that alone can make the rights lastingly effective, is certainly a vital part of each state's authority, and the most important object of its educational system. This entails teaching the monotheism inherent in the Declaration, and against this imperious need no plea of individual rights should be permitted to prevail. Jefferson had no hesitation to require the study of the Declaration, as well as courses in natural theology and ethics, at the University of Virginia. Nothing in the First or Fourteenth Amendments keeps us from doing something similar today.

The Bill of Rights 1