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BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE Religion and Public Education in a Multicultural America James W. Fraser BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE This page intentionally left blank BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE Religion and Public Education in a Multicultural America James W. Fraser St. Martin’s Press New York BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE Copyright © James W. Fraser, 1999. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. ISBN 0–312–21636–X Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fraser, James W. Between church and state : religion and public education in a multicultural America / James W. Fraser. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0–312–21636–X (cloth) 1. Religion in the public schools—United States—History. 2. Church and state—United States—History. 3. Pluralism (Social sciences United States—History. I. Title. LC111.F68 1999 379.2’8’0973—dc21 98–55303 CIP First edition: August 1999 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 In memory of three great educators: Lawrence A. Cremin Paulo Freire Kenneth Haskins This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS Acknowledgments . ix Introduction . 1 1. From Holy Commonwealth to the Strange Compromise of 1789. 9 2. Creating an American Common School and a Common Faith: Horace Mann and the Protestant Public Schools, 1789–1860. 23 3. Who Defines What Is Common? Roman Catholics and the Common School Movement, 1801–1892 . 49 4. Literacy in the African American Community: Church and School in Slave and Free Communities, 1802–1902 . 67 5. Native American Religion, Christian Missionaries, and Government Schools, 1819–1926 . 83 6. Protestant, Catholic, Jew: Immigration and Nativism from the Blaine Amendment to the Scopes Trial, 1875–1925 . 105 7. Prayer, Bible Reading, and Federal Money: The Expanding Role of Congress and the Supreme Court, 1925–1968 . 127 8. Culture Wars, Creationism, and the Reagan Revolution, 1968–1990 . 155 9. Changing School Boards, Curriculum, and the Constitution, 1990–. 183 10. What’s Next? Prayers, Vouchers, and Creationism: The Battle for the Schools of the Twenty-First Century . 217 Notes . 241 For Further Reading . 259 Index . 269 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS THIS BOOK OWES ITS EXISTENCE to two friends who insisted I write it. My longtime friend and former colleague, Nancy Richard- son, associate dean at Harvard Divinity School, extended an invita- tion for me to discuss this topic at Harvard. After some reluctance I agreed, and the result was a seminar on religion and public education, which I taught at the Divinity School in the fall of 1997. In the midst of my teaching that seminar, a new friend, Michael Flamini, senior editor at St. Martin’s Press, responded to my enthusiasm for the conversations taking place in my class with a proposal that I publish a book on the same topic. Between Church and State is a result of the support and persistence of these two friends. I am deeply grateful to the faculty and staff of Harvard’s Divinity School for their welcome while I taught there. Most of all I am grateful to all of those students from the Divinity School, the Graduate School of Education, the Kennedy School of Government, and the Law School who participated so enthusiastically in our mutual efforts to understand this complex and difficult issue. Our conversations and their research are reflected throughout this vol- ume. For fourteen weeks that fall we were able to model the kind of thoughtful, engaged, and respectful society that is essential if more light and less heat is to be brought to this difficult topic. I want to acknowledge the crucial role that each of them played in this work. They are: Michele Bagby, Kristin Barstow, Christopher Burr, Nell Carlson, Albert Chevez, Lorraine Claassen, Lucy Conroy, Brendan Cullen, Cathleen Dennison, Jeremy Dutchman, Mark Farha, Valerie Forti, Leslie Gelsleichter, Delia Gerraughty, Richard Grenell, Joshua Howard, Asbury Jones, Angela Lee, James Oliver Lee, Patricia Lyons, Jacob Montwieler, Peter Niemeyer, Sandra Platt, Tonya Robinson, Deborah Sabin, Christine Sandoval, Elizabeth Sclater, X / BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE Regis Shields, Bethany Shull, Margaret Sommerfeld, Carrie Stam- baugh, and Gail Tatum. Every book takes a toll on all of life’s other activities. I appreciate the support of many friends and colleagues who have put up with missed deadlines and unreturned telephone calls. At Northeastern University presidents John A. Curry and Richard M. Freeland and deans Robert P. Lowndes and James Stellar supported my need to take time away as did my many colleagues in the Center for Innovation in Urban Education, especially the assistant director, Angela Irving. As with previous publications, Elizabeth Wallace’s research and editorial assistance has been indispensable. This is our third book together and I am very grateful for her commitment. Eliza Garfield of the Harvard Graduate School of Education has been a thoughtful and engaged critic throughout the development of this book. My friends at Grace Church in East Boston have been a constant source of encouragement, friendship, and sanity. No book can be written without family support, and I have been richly blessed by Britney, by my daughters Madison, Kaitlin, Rebecca, and Megan, my son-in-law Robert, and by my beloved wife, Katherine. Finally, research and writing on the topic of religion and education has returned me to my own earliest roots as a scholar. In writing this book I have been reminded of my deep intellectual debt to my extraordinary teachers at Columbia University, Lawrence A. Cremin, Robert T. Handy, Robert W. Lynn, and Douglas M. Sloan. All four are cited in this book, but all four shaped me and my thinking about these issues far more deeply than the limited citations in the text imply. INTRODUCTION IN THE LAST HALF DECADE OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, students in DeKalb County, Alabama, with the support of the state’s governor, boycotted classes while demanding the right to have prayers in their schools. A school board in Fort Myers, Florida, fired the superintendent and the board’s own lawyer because both seemed to be dragging their feet in implementing a program to study the Bible in the schools. The Wisconsin state Supreme Court approved a program in which families in Milwaukee could use state-funded vouchers to attend private religious schools. The National Academy of Sciences bemoaned the fact that, because of political pressure, many high school science classes skip over the study of evolution. And, tragically, in the fall of 1997, a high school student in Kentucky killed three of his classmates while shooting into a crowd of praying students. At about the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court over- turned a congressional action called the Religious Freedom Restora- tion Act as well as one of its own decisions so that teachers supported by federal funds could again offer their services inside parochial and other private religious schools. A majority of members of the U.S. House of Representatives voted in favor of the Religious Freedom Amendment to the Constitution. Clearly the proper relationship between religion and the public schools of the nation is a pressing issue to many of the nation’s citizens. Those who thought that the issues of religion in the schools had been solved some time after the battles over evolution in the 1920s, or after the Supreme Court’s decisions in the 1960s banning formal- ized prayer and Bible reading, have clearly turned out to be mistaken. The United States enters a new century with its citizens deeply divided, sometimes confused, and often angry about their differing opinions about the proper place of religion in the public schools of 2 / BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE the nation and the current legal mandates regarding the relationship of religion and public education. Different citizens often are unhappy in different ways. But one thing is very clear: a consensus does not exist. And a thoughtful observer can be relatively certain that battles about church and state, and more specifically about religion in the schools, are going to be characteristic of the first decades of the new millennium as they have been for the last two centuries. Americans have always disagreed about the proper relationship of religion and the public schools, but they have disagreed differently at different points in the nation’s history. The European colonial settlers generally believed that the schools should teach the faith of the established church, but they argued passionately and violently over which religion should be established. After the American Revolution, with the question of a formal religious establishment for the United States generally resolved in the negative, a new split emerged between those who saw the need for a civic religion that could hold a diverse citizenry together, and who argued that the school was the perfect means to secure this civic religion, and those many others who feared that the new establishment would trample on their unique faith as much as a formal state church might have in the past. By the end of the nineteenth century, these splits had shifted so that much of the nation’s elite was in agreement regarding the broad terms of a “civic religion”—although they might not use that term—and growing minorities, including most Roman Catholics, many Jews, and an emerging group of Protestant fundamentalists, who felt themselves to be clearly excluded from the consensus. The end of the twentieth century has seen yet another new development as the consensus that served for so long has itself become unglued in the tensions of a diverse nation attempting to come to terms with its new diversity—diversity of race, faith, and worldview.

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