In its memorable decision Abington v. Schempp, from 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that daily Bible readings in Pennsylvania’s public schools amounted to “unconstitutionality under the Establishment Clause.” Neither allowing for use of the Catholic Douay translation as an alternative to the Protestant King James Version nor a provision for students to excuse themselves from the exercise could obscure the “sectarian” character of the ceremony or its “pervading religious character.” The First Amendment’s prohibition of religious establishments, as applied to the states by the Fourteenth Amendment, demanded religious “neutrality,” which the religious character of the daily Bible readings violated. Without this ban, the Court foresaw that “the breach of neutrality that is today a trickling stream may all too soon become a raging torrent.”1 Only eleven years earlier, however, the trickling stream had not seemed nearly so threatening when the Supreme Court dismissed an appeal of a decision by New Jersey’s highest tribunal allowing that state’s provision for daily Bible readings in public schools to continue.2 Yet when, in 1952, the New Jersey court elaborated at length to justify the practice and when, in 1963, the Supreme Court wrote even more extensively to declare it unconstitutional, the original logic that had supported Bible reading in public schools for so much of American history in so many of the states had almost vanished.
The purpose of this contribution to a Festschrift that could not be more well deserved is, first, to spell out the logic widely accepted in the founding era concerning the fate of democratic republics and, then, how that logic led instinctively to the practice of daily Bible readings in schools as tax-supported public education began in the new United States. This chapter shows, second, how that logic gradually lost focus as the practice was debated in and out of court from the mid-1850s to nearly the present. Third, it notes briefly why a higher logic led some defenders of the Bible as a divinely given book to argue that it should not be read in the public schools. The chapter closes by expressing an
1 The Founding Logic
In two related articles, John Witte has identified with clinical precision the founders’ conceptual reasoning that would later lead to daily Bible readings in tax-supported schools.3 His careful consideration of the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 and the concerns of its principal author, John Adams, set out what might be called the New England variant of standard revolutionary political theory—that is, the moral calculus of democratic republicanism. By the second half of the eighteenth century, American patriots with virtual unanimity held that to survive, a republic required virtuous citizens. They also believed that to nurture virtuous citizens, nothing was more important than religion. With equal certainty, they posited that religious nurture could not be entrusted to the inherently corrupting pattern of Old-World religious establishments. The New England variant that Adams advocated held that a carefully constrained establishment—what he called “slender” or “moderate and equitable”—could avoid the evils of Britain’s state church while allowing religion to encourage republican virtue in the citizenry.4
In Witte’s summary, “Adams was convinced that the establishment of one common public religion among a plurality of freely competing private religions was essential to the survival of society and the state.” Then, quoting from statements made at widely separated points in Adams’s life, Witte explains that while Adams stood resolutely for free religious exercise, he also insisted that citizens in a republic “must just as certainly begin by ‘setting religion at the fore and floor of society and government.… [I]t is religion and morality alone which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand.’
As the happiness of a people, and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depend upon piety, religion, and morality; and as these cannot be generally diffused through a community but by the institutions of the public worship of God, and of public instructions in piety, religion, and morality: Therefore, to promote their happiness, and to secure the good order and preservation of their government, the people of this commonwealth have a right to invest their legislature with power to authorize and require … [the agencies of local government] to make suitable provision, at their own expense, for the institution of the public worship of God, and for the support and maintenance of public Protestant teachers of piety, religion, and morality.6
Other New England constitutions—newly written, as in Vermont and New Hampshire, or taken over from a colonial charter, as in Connecticut—repeated much of the Massachusetts formula. But so also did a few states not in New England (Delaware, Georgia, and Maryland) echo in their new constitutions at least some of the same.7
Virginia is regularly portrayed as moving completely in the opposite direction. Yet the leaders who constructed that state’s new government were just as committed as their New England peers to the moral logic of republican government, but without the New England variant. Patrick Henry hoped to see a multiple-church establishment or “general assessment,” where taxpayers designated their taxes to the religious bodies of their own choice. As is well known, James Madison’s skillful maneuvering frustrated Henry’s plan. Yet in
It is worth pausing to underscore how pervasive the moral calculus of democratic republicanism remained for more than half a century. Founders might differ on the wisdom of even “slender” church establishments, as illustrated by Adams and Henry versus Madison and Backus, but they agreed on what they thought would secure political freedom, stability, and responsibility: a democratic republic required a moral citizenry, and religion provided the essential grounding for that morality.
So it was expressed by the Confederation Congress in 1787, when it passed the Northwest Ordinance for organizing the opening frontier: “Religion, morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”9
So it was articulated even more memorably in 1796, when George Washington’s Farewell Address specified “religion and morality” as the “indispensable supports” for “political prosperity.” In this address he raised a rhetorical question: “Can it be, that Providence has not connected the permanent felicity of a nation with its virtue?” He answered by reasoning to another rhetorical query: “’Tis substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule indeed extends with more or less force to every species of free government. Who that is a sincere friend of it, can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric?”10
Thomas Jefferson, who resisted any extension of New England influence, especially church establishments, nonetheless regularly affirmed his belief in the republican calculus. When, early in the new century, a correspondent explained why he “considered Christianity as the strong ground of Republicanism,” Jefferson himself wrote to another correspondent first to qualify, but then to confirm: “the Christian religion when divested of the rags in which they [the domineering clergy] have inveloped [sic] it, and brought to the original
A generation later, Joseph Story’s highly regarded Commentaries on the Constitution, from 1833, provided a magisterial restatement of conventional republican theory. Story fully supported the separation of church and state as defined by the First Amendment, but he also took for granted that, “The promulgation of the great doctrines of religion,” which included cultivation of “all the personal, social, and benevolent virtues,” could “never be a matter of indifference in any well ordered community.” So fundamental did Story consider the relationship between religion and the health of American society that he was prepared to make a further assertion: “Indeed, in a republic, there would seem to be a peculiar property in viewing the Christian religion, as the great basis, on which it must rest for its support and permanence, if it be, what it has ever been deemed by its truest friends to be, the religion of liberty.”12
Circumstances, emphases, and conceptions of political well-being did change as the nation’s history unfolded. But at least through the time of Story’s Commentaries, almost no controversy surrounded John Adams’s foundational conception of the requirements for a successful republican government.
2 The Logic Applied to Public Schools13
On the basis of that consensus, it was an entirely natural step that, when tax-supported public education began, influential Americans instinctively concluded that readings from the Bible were an ideal means to secure the future of the republic. If morality in the citizenry was essential for a republic to flourish, what better way to inculcate that morality than by prescribing instruction for as many children as possible from a repository of moral teaching almost universally respected. (It is important to remember that, until the
Between the adoption of the Massachusetts Constitution in 1780 and Justice Story’s summary of U.S. Constitutional logic in 1833, however, three significant changes did affect the application of republican logic.
First, John Adams’s New England variant of that logic was discarded. In a process extending over two generations, with Massachusetts the last to fall into line the same year that Story published his Commentaries, the states came to agree with Virginia in considering any tax support for the churches as compromising the separation of church and state.
In a second development that is more difficult to chart specifically, the nation’s conventional wisdom about human nature began to shift. As recently documented by historian Robert Tracy McKenzie, the movement was from realism to optimism.15 Isolated quotations are not proof positive, but they do suggest an evolution of conventional wisdom—from, that is, George Washington (“The motives which predominate most in human affairs is [sic] self-love and self-interest”) and Alexander Hamilton (“Men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious”) to Andrew Jackson (“I have great confidence in the intelligence, and virtue, of the great body of the American people”) and the nation’s first widely recognized historian George Bancroft (“The Spirit of God breathes through the combined intelligence of the people”).16 Shifting opinions about human morality inevitably affected the moral calculus of democratic republicanism. If traditional views about the threat of sin gave way to confidence in innate human capacities, the “religion” necessary to preserve republican freedom became less explicitly Christian and more generically humanistic.
The third important development was the beginning of tax-supported common schooling. In the new United States, citizens mobilized at different times
Historian David Komline has shown that the “common school awakening” in the United States occurred with strong religious backing that came from representatives of the Protestant denominations who agreed to subordinate their theological differences for a broader educational goal. To such ones it seemed obviously “nonsectarian” when such differences were set aside so that the Bible they all trusted could serve a public purpose.17 Quakers spearheaded New York City’s Society for Establishing a Free School (1805). Many local programs with leaders from many denominations adopted the English Quaker Joseph Lancaster’s system of older children instructing younger children (ca. 1800–1835). The generically evangelical Thomas Gallaudet featured general biblical instruction at his Connecticut Asylum for the Education of Deaf and Dumb Persons (1817). In the 1820s the moderately evangelical Congregationalist Emma Willard set up the Troy Female Seminary in Troy, New York; Unitarians founded the Round Hill School in Northampton, Massachusetts; and two conservative evangelical Congregationalist sons of the late Yale College president Timothy Dwight began a short-lived academy in New Haven that included Black as well as white students. During the 1830s New York City expanded its tax-supported educational systems under leaders from many Protestant denominations; Massachusetts established its system with Unitarians in the lead; and the parallel development in Ohio was supported by Congregationalists (including Lyman Beecher), Methodists, Universalists, “Christians” (especially Alexander Campbell), and even Roman Catholics (particularly Bishop John Baptist Purcell).
Yet despite educational developments marked by an extraordinary diversity of sponsorship and a multitude of different ways to collect taxes, organize levels of instruction, and train teachers, the panoply of early common schools in the United States uniformly provided regular instruction (usually more than simple reading) from the King James Bible. That instruction inevitably
An early instance was provided by Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the new nation’s foremost physician. In 1786 Rush published a plan for the Pennsylvania legislature to establish a tiered statewide system of tax-supported schools, a plan his title designated as “the Mode of Education, Proper in a Republic.” Rush began with an explicitly Christian rehearsal of the standard republican calculus: “The only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in RELIGION. Without this, there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments.… [T]he religion I mean to recommend in this place, is the religion of JESUS CHRIST.” To Rush, it was obvious why “a Christian cannot fail of being a republican,” since “every precept of the Gospel inculcates those degrees of humility, self-denial, and brotherly kindness, which are directly opposed to the pride of monarchy and the pageantry of a court.” To operationalize this reasoning, Rush proposed instruction from the scriptures. This proposal grew directly from his conception of good government: “there is no book of its size in the whole world, that contains half so much useful knowledge for the government of the states, or the direction of the affairs of individuals as the Bible.”18 Although Rush’s pamphlet would be reprinted several times, his imprimatur was not required either to promote Bible reading in common schools or to explain the republican purpose behind the reading.
One of the clearest statements concerning both republican purpose and the Bible appeared in 1848 from Horace Mann, a leading pioneer of American public education who had gained a national reputation through his service as secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education. Mann’s way of positioning the Bible in the schools occupied a central place in his lengthy twelfth “annual report on education,” from 1848. In effect, Mann hoped to sustain John Adams’s New England variant of the republican calculus, but with public
From first to last, that support dominated Mann’s rationale. Instead of using Bible reading to evangelize, and certainly instead of dispensing with it altogether, Mann thought that “all sensible and judicious men, all patriots, and all genuine republicans” would agree that “those articles in the creed of republicanism which are accepted by all, believed in by all, and which form the common basis of our political faith, shall be taught to all.” Such education would naturally stress how to prevent “immoralities and crimes [that] break over all moral barriers, destroying and profaning the securities and sanctities of life.” For emphasis, he expressed his great satisfaction that an earlier Massachusetts law had spelled out the vision so fully: “our law explicitly and solemnly enjoins it upon all teachers, without any exception, ‘to exert their best endeavors to impress on the minds of children and youth committed to their care and instruction the principles of piety, justice, and a sacred regard to truth, love to their country, humanity, and universal benevolence, sobriety, industry, and frugality, chastity, moderation, and temperance, and those other virtues which are the ornament of human society, and the basis upon which a republican constitution is founded.’”20
If, however, Mann sounded like a reprise of Rush, two aspects of his report anticipated later American history. First was his messianic confidence in what public education could accomplish, and accomplish without Christian conversion or the agency of the Holy Spirit. Rather, “it is the opinion of our most intelligent, dispassionate, and experienced teachers, that we can, in the course of two or three generations, and through the instrumentality of good teachers and good schools” produce a much better “state of society,” and do so “without any miracle, without any extraordinary sacrifices or, costly effort, but only by working our existing common-school system with such a degree of vigor as can easily be put forth, and at such an expense as even the poorest community can easily bear.”21 Without pausing to mark the transition, this hopeful Unitarian had taken up the advocacy of John Adams, who had also been a Unitarian, but one worrying about natural human tendencies. In contrast, Mann expressed
A second aspect of Mann’s report involved a confusing use of terms— “religion,” “Christianity,” “sectarian,” and “nonsectarian”—that, when later disaggregated, would lead to the Schempp decision that removed the Bible reading he so ardently defended. After Mann quoted the Massachusetts law about the “virtues … upon which a republican government is founded,” he immediately asked a rhetorical question, “Are not these virtues and graces part and parcel of Christianity?” Yet elsewhere in the report, he took pains to insist that he wanted nothing that could be identified with anything specifically Christian. Certainly there should be no establishment of religion. Moreover, the question about what exactly “religious truth is” should be left “to the arbitrament, without human appeal, of each man’s reason and conscience.” Again, because “our public schools are not theological seminaries,” they are not allowed to teach anything about what “is essential to religion or to salvation.”22 In other words—and lumping together the terms of endless battle in later legal controversies—Mann held that the Massachusetts practice “founds its morals on the basis of religion; it welcomes the religion of the Bible.… But here it stops … because it disclaims to act as an umpire between hostile religious opinions.”23 But, realistically, could the Protestants’ revered version of scripture function as a truly nonsectarian guide for public morality?
In one of the earliest legal challenges to daily Bible readings, a Massachusetts court in 1859 simply reiterated the republican argument without Mann’s excess baggage. The court took up the question whether a schoolteacher had been in his rights to strike an eleven-year-old Catholic student on the hand for thirty minutes with a rattan stick for failing to recite the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments in the language of the King James Version.24 The youth, Thomas Whall, had been counseled by his parents and his priest to refuse because of their objection to the required use of the Protestant Bible. The court’s judgment exonerated the teacher and sanctioned the practice by leaning heavily on the ability of local school boards to determine their own procedures (“The authority of a parent cannot justify the disobedience, by a child, of
Yet like Mann’s extensive 1848 report, this brief judgment from 1859 equivocated on what would become a stress point in later judicial considerations. It claimed that the Bible was in the public schools not “for the purpose of teaching sectarian religion, but a knowledge of God and of his will, whose practice is religion.” If “the Bible [meaning the King James Version] has long been in our public schools, … no scholar is requested to believe it, none to receive it as the only true version of the laws of God.”26 The judgment seemed to be saying several things that did not cohere: (a) The Bible reveals God’s will. (b) God’s will is the basis for republican virtue, which is why the Bible is mandated for use in common schools. (c) But public school pupils do not have to believe that it is God’s will for them as individuals.27 As reasons for keeping the Bible in common schools multiplied and legal reasoning verged toward judicial doublespeak, focus on the moral calculus of democratic republicanism was bound to waver.
3 The Logic Diluted
The Massachusetts police court that rendered the 1859 Commonwealth v. Cooke decision was not the first to adjudicate whether required readings from the King James Version should be allowed in tax-supported schools. That distinction
As in Massachusetts, the challenge in Maine came from a Roman Catholic family objecting to readings from the King James Version; as also in the later case, historical anti-Catholic instincts played an obvious role in the decision.28 The Maine court opined at length on procedure, specifically concluding that the rights of a duly established local school superseded the rights of the Catholic parent who had sued (“A law is not unconstitutional, because it may prohibit what one may conscientiously think right, or require what he may conscientiously think wrong”). But when it turned to why it was good for schools to require Bible readings, reasoning wandered. Early in their ruling, the judges affirmed that “the entire book is the noblest monument of style, of thought, of beauty, of sublimity, of moral teaching, of pathetic narrative, the richest treasury of household words, of familiar phrases, of popular illustrations and associations, that any language every possessed.” Later in their ruling they praised the King James Bible: this “particular version … from the idiomatic English of the translation, and the sublime morality of its teachings, furnishes the best illustration which the language affords of pure English undefiled, and is best fitted to strengthen the morals and promote the virtues which adorn and dignify social life.”29
Along the way the court did remember that Maine’s legislature had mandated a provision coming closer to the republican calculus: “all the instructors of youth” should diligently teach “the principles of morality and justice, and a sacred regard for the truth; love to their country, humanity and universal benevolence; sobriety, industry, and frugality; chastity, moderation, and temperance; and all other virtues, which are the ornaments of human society.” But that judgment was also compromised by the concession that students did not have to believe what they were required to read: “No theological doctrine
And so it would go until Schempp in 1963. In the famous “Cincinnati Bible War” of 1869–1870, defenders of daily readings from the King James Version again mixed and matched their arguments. In an effort to end strife among the city’s majority Protestant population, its large Catholic minority, and a rising number of Jews, the Cincinnati Board of Education in the summer of 1869 voted to eliminate Bible readings. When an ad hoc group of Protestants filed suit to reverse the decision, the Superior Court of Cincinnati scheduled four days of arguments at the end of November to consider the suit. A large book of four hundred pages brought those arguments to the public.
Lawyers defending the practice came closer to articulating the founders’ republican calculus than others who would follow in their path. They cited specifically the provision of the 1787 Northwest Ordinance that provided for “schools and the means of education” to support the “religion, morality, and knowledge” required for “good government and the happiness of mankind.” They hammered even more on the school board’s error in disregarding a paragraph from Ohio’s revised constitution of 1852: “Religion, morality and knowledge … being essential to good government, it shall be the duty of the General Assembly to pass suitable laws, to protect every denomination in the peaceable enjoyment of its own mode of public worship and to encourage schools and the means of instruction.” While attorneys for the board stressed “every denomination,” the plaintiff’s lawyers emphasized the civil purpose of this provision: “Compliance with the teachings and requirements of the Christian religion is all that is necessary to make a perfect citizen.… The recognition of religion and God necessarily implies the recognition of the Holy Bible.”31
From this point forward, defenders of Bible reading regularly offered a more diffuse rationale, sometimes convincing the courts, sometimes not. In 1898 the Michigan supreme court allowed readings to continue from a book of scripture selections. Most of the arguments in this case focused on sectarianism, constitutional free exercise, and the meaning of worship. Only offhand references echoed the republican calculus, as when the judgment referred to “the moral precepts of the Ten Commandments … which are intended to inculcate good morals,” or when one of the judges dissenting from the decision explained
Only a few years later, the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled the other way. In this 1902 decision, a parent from Gage County complained that his children were being required to take part in daily exercises that included Bible reading and sometimes the singing of gospel songs. Court records show that the state superintendent of education defended the practice by quoting from the clause in Nebraska’s constitution that echoed the reasoning of the 1780 Massachusetts Declaration of Rights: “religion, morality, and knowledge” were described as “being essential to good government.” Yet Justice John Joseph Sullivan, speaking for a unanimous court, upheld the complaint by repeating arguments that were now being heard much more frequently. In the court’s judgment, daily readings from the King James Version constituted a “sectarian” imposition. Moreover, forcing children to participate in a sectarian variety of “religious worship” violated the Nebraska constitution’s guarantee of religious liberty to all, and thus threatened the “public” character of Nebraska’s educational system.
The arguments defending Bible reading provided by state superintendent William Jackson, which the court rejected, were noteworthy for their variety. He did eventually hint at the republican calculus (“No more complete code of morals exists than is contained in the New Testament which reaffirms and emphasizes the moral obligations”), along with an effort to distinguish what was moral from what was religious (“The Bible teaches the highest morality apart from religious instruction”)—yet only after wandering further afield: “The Bible surely cannot be considered as falling within the category of sectarian books.… The Bible is the rarest and richest book in the department of thought and imagination … the greatest classic of our literature.”33
A similar potpourri of arguments defending the practice came from Illinois justice John Hand, who dissented when, in 1910, the state supreme court ruled that since required daily Bible readings and hymn singing constituted “worship,” they were not allowed. In protest, Justice Hand contended that Illinois had long recognized the need for youth to embrace principles of justice and morality in order to preserve a safe society. But unlike arguments extending back to Horace Mann, he also defended the particularly religious character of scripture by citing Justice Story from an 1844 ruling: “Where can the purest principles of morality be learned so clearly or so perfectly as from the New Testament? Where are benevolence, the love of truth, sobriety, and industry
Into the recent past, even as the Constitutional arguments were strengthened against Bible readings, the older pattern of catch-as-catch-can defenses continued. In its landmark Schempp ruling from 1963, the Supreme Court expounded at great length on why the practice constituted a “sectarian” breach of “neutrality.” Along the way, it provided only a cursory summary of the argument offered by defenders of the practice—that, in the Court’s summary, the daily exercise contributed to “the promotion of moral values, the contradiction to the materialistic trends of our times, the perpetuation of our institutions and the teaching of literature.”35 By contrast, when, in 1950, the New Jersey Supreme Court had affirmed the practice in a unanimous judgment, it expatiated at some length on why Bible reading in public schools had still, as of that year, been approved in more states than it had been disallowed. With a concern absent from the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision of 1963, the New Jersey jurists also linked their judgment (upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1952) to what they viewed as the all-out competition of the Cold War. Their ruling is worth extensive quotation in order to illustrate the many arguments enlisted to defend the practice so shortly before it would be ruled unconstitutional.
While it is necessary that there be a separation between church and state, it is not necessary that the state should be stripped of religious sentiment. It may be a tragic experience for this country and for its conception of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness if our people lose their religious feeling and are left to live their lives without faith. Who can say that those attributes which Thomas Jefferson in his notable document called “unalienable rights” endowed by the Creator may survive a loss of belief in the Creator? The American people are and always have been theistic.… The influence which that force contributed to our origins and the direction which it has given to our progress are beyond calculation. It may be of the highest importance to the nation that the people remain theistic, not that one or another sect or denomination may survive, but that belief in God shall abide. It was, we are led to believe, to that end that the statute was enacted; so that at the beginning of the day the children should
pause to hear a few words from the wisdom of the ages and to bow the head in humility before the Supreme Power. No rites, no ceremony, no doctrinal teaching; just a brief moment with eternity.… It may be that the true perspective engendered by that recurring short communion with the eternal forces will be effective to keep our people from permitting government to become a manmade robot which will crush even the Constitution itself. Our way of life is on challenge. Organized atheistic society is making a determined drive for supremacy by conquest as well as by infiltration. Recent history has demonstrated that when such a totalitarian power comes into control it exercises a ruthless supremacy over men and ideas, and over such remnants of religious worship as it permits to exist. We are at a crucial hour in which it may behoove our people to conserve all of the elements which have made our land what it is. Faced with this threat to the continuance of elements deeply imbedded in our national life the adoption of a public policy with respect thereto is a reasonable function to be performed by those on whom responsibility lies.36
Echoes of the republican calculus are difficult to find in this judgment. Instead, the New Jersey justices emphasized the need to hold absolutism at bay, general theistic traditions and religious feelings, and a desire that students pause for “a brief moment with eternity.” The link between the Bible and the moral calculus of democratic republicanism, which had been so strong with Horace Mann and the Massachusetts Police Court, and which had survived piecemeal long thereafter, had faded away.
4 A Higher Logic?
Before attempting final comments on this history, a brief word is in order to document a different strand of American legal-religious reasoning—voices that agreed with the Schempp Court in holding that devotional Bible readings should not be required in public schools, but because they wanted to preserve an explicitly Christian understanding of the scriptures. These individuals worried that recommending Bible readings for their political utility undermined the singular importance that Christian believers should ascribe to the theological uniqueness of scripture.
John Witte has catalogued an extensive roster of Massachusetts residents who, in debates leading to the new constitution of 1780, objected to the
The most unusual intervention in the Cincinnati Bible War of 1869 had come from an attorney, Stanley Matthews, who argued in favor of banning the readings. Yet Matthews, who would later be appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by his friend James A. Garfield, spoke as a friend of traditional Christianity, repeatedly stressing, “I am a Calvinist Protestant. I believe in the doctrines of election and predestination.… [The Bible is] a sacred book in the highest sense of the terms.”38 But then Matthews reversed the logic expressed by many defenders of the practice. Precisely because he valued Christian truth so highly, he did not want its transmission handed over to civil authorities. An image from the Old Testament underscored his reasoning: “Let no unholy hands be laid upon the sacred ark.” The religious education children most needed was not ethics for citizenship, “not merely … the learning of abstract morals.” Instead, “the duties of a religious life” could only be found “in the Gospel of God our Savior, and the scheme of redemption for a lost and sinful race as revealed in the person and work of the God-Man, Christ Jesus, and held forth in the instructions, and services, and means of grace, and living oracles, committed to the keeping of the church of the living God, as his kingdom on the earth.”39 The responsibility for that religious training belonged to parents and the churches. In Matthews’s view, doctrinal fidelity remained far more important than civic utility.
I am opposed to the reading of the Bible in public schools.… [S]uch presentation is opposed to the Christian religion at its very heart. The relation between the Christian way of salvation and other ways is not a relation between the adequate and the inadequate or between the perfect and the imperfect, but it is a relation between the true and the false.
The minute a professing Christian admits that he can find neutral ground with non-Christians in the study of “religion” in general, he has given up the battle and has really, if he knows what he is doing, made common cause with that synchronism which is today … the deadliest enemy of the Christian faith.40
To Americans who agreed with Matthews and Machen, opponents of required Bible readings were entirely correct to view them as “sectarian worship.” To those who defended the nonsectarian or secular functions of the exercise, opponents called not for the separation of church and state but for the rescue of the holy from the profane. Their reasoning nicely complicates a debate that all too often has been caricatured as Christian America versus secular America.
5 Opinion
The secondary or derivative question posed by the history sketched here is whether mandatory readings from the Protestant King James Bible have been a good way for Americans to promote the personal virtue without which republics fail. The answer must certainly be “no.” Citizens in the early United States relied on this expedient because, having left behind the props of European Christendom, they feared for the future of a democratic republic. With near unanimity they agreed that the Bible, the divinely revealed Word of God, was uniquely capable of encouraging the virtue without which republics failed. Yet in short order, many also realized that imposing the Protestant Bible could only be justified by insisting on its moral, civic, and nonsectarian purposes. (Some jurists, nonetheless, long continued to include Christian reverence for scripture alongside their republican, cultural, and traditional arguments for the practice, even as a few Christians denounced it for turning a book of divine salvation into a utilitarian tool for civic health.) Confusion between reasons for respecting the Bible as God’s Word and reasons for putting it to use to promote republican virtue prepared the way for later courts to view the practice as sectarian and, with the Schempp Supreme Court, to rule it unconstitutional for violating religious neutrality. In addition to constitutional reasoning, the nation’s manifest religious pluralism, eventually including “no religion,” has
But what of the primary or foundational question? Was John Adams wrong when, out of his concern for the American republic, he defended a “slender” church establishment—or when Horace Mann, for the same reason, applied the New England variant of republican political theory to common schools? Were they correct in worrying about their republic falling prey to the corrupting excesses of democracy?
The answer to these questions depends on how one now evaluates prospects for the American republic. In the twenty-first century, where the founders’ realistic view of human nature no longer commands general assent, there exists no agreed-upon framework to account for the clashing pursuit of differently defined individual rights. A sober view of the nation’s history must also recognize that many severe impediments (especially racial and economic impediments) have undermined the republican ideal of liberty and justice for all; these impediments have also frustrated the ability of citizens to act with altruistic public virtue even if they wanted to. Moreover, republican worries seem justified in a political climate where advocacy from the Left focuses on what government should do and from the Right on what it should not do, but with neither Left nor Right stressing the duty of citizens to develop the internal moral character that could subordinate personal advantage to the public good.
In the scope of human history, the American republic is still a short-lived experiment. Already in its history it was once saved from dissolution by the force of arms rather than by the restraint of public virtue. Some may conclude that the nation’s future is secure despite current difficulties. By contrast, my reading of American history leads me to agree with John Adams that, in fact, “the good order and preservation of civil government essentially depend upon piety, religion, and morality.” I cannot, however, specify a plan for implementing this wisdom that would be allowable under the Constitution’s wholesome requirements for maintaining both liberty and religious impartiality. I am therefore left with the kind of commendation and uncertainty with which John Witte ended his study of the 1780 Massachusetts constitution: “the balance that the Supreme Court has struck in favor of a complete disestablishment of religion can … no longer serve a people so widely devoted to a public religion and a religious public. Somewhere between extremes, our society must now find a new constitutional balance—with Adams’s efforts serving as a noble instruction.”41
Abington School District v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203, 222–24 (1963).
Doremus v. Board of Education, 342 U.S. 429 (1952).
John Witte, Jr., “’A Most Mild and Equitable Establishment of Religion’: John Adams and the Massachusetts Experiment,” in Religion and the New Republic: Faith in the Founding of America, ed. James H. Hutson (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 1–40; John Witte, Jr. and Justin Latterell, “The Last American Establishment: Massachusetts, 1780–1833,” in Disestablishment and Religious Dissent: Church-State Relations in the New American States, 1776–1833, ed. Carl H. Esbeck and Jonathan J. Den Hartog (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2019), 399–424.
On Adams’s qualifications, see Witte, “A Most Mild and Equitable Establishment,” 18–19. For religious contributions to Revolutionary republican theory, see Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), chap. 5 (“Christian Republicanism”).
Witte, “A Most Mild and Equitable Establishment,” 16.
Quoted here from Daniel L. Dreisbach and David Mark Hall, The Sacred Rights of Conscience: Selected Readings on Religion Liberty and Church-State Relations in the American Founding (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2009), 246.
Esbeck and Den Hartog, Disestablishment and Religious Dissent, 302–03 (Vermont), 334 (Connecticut), 357 (New Hampshire), 45 (Delaware), 235–36 (Georgia), and 318 (Maryland).
See Carl H. Esbeck, “Disestablishment in Virginia, 1776–1802,” in Esbeck and Hartog, Disestablishment and Religious Dissent, 145, 150–52.
“An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States North-West of the Ohio River,” in Dreisbach and Hall, Sacred Rights of Conscience, 238.
“Farewell Address” (Sept. 19, 1796), Washington: Writings (Library of America), ed. John Rhodehamel (New York, 1997), 972, 971.
Benjamin Rush to Jefferson, Aug. 22, 1800; and Thomas Jefferson to Moses Robinson, Mar. 23, 1801; in Jefferson’s Extracts from the Gospels, ed. Dickinson W. Adams, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Second Series (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 318, 325.
Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution (1833), cited from The Founders’ Constitution, 5 vols., eds. Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 5:108a, 108b.
My treatment of state court decisions in all that follows depends heavily on the superb accounts in two books by Steven K. Green, The Bible, the School, and the Constitution: The Clash That Shaped Modern Church-State Doctrine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), and, especially, The Second Disestablishment: Church and State in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
If documentation is needed, see Mark A. Noll, America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794–1911 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 99–100 and passim.
Robert Tracy McKenzie, We the Fallen People: The Founders and the Future of American Democracy (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2021). The quotations that follow are among the many highlighted in this insightful book.
George Washington to James Madison, Dec. 3, 1784: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-12-02-0320; Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist No. 6 (Nov. 14, 1787): https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-04-02-0156; The Papers of Andrew Jackson, Vol. VI, 1825–1828, eds. Harold Moser and J. Clint Clifft (Knoxville: University Tennessee Press, 2002), 143; George Bancroft, “The Office of the People in Art, Government, and Religion” (Address at Williamstown College, Aug. 1835); and https://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/rbannis1/AIH19th/Bancroft.html.
David Komline, The Common School Awakening: Religion and the Transatlantic Roots of American Public Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). I have summarized and augmented Komline’s superb research in order to explain why required Bible readings in tax-supported schools continued unabated when, in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, public reliance on scripture otherwise began to decline. See Noll, America’s Book, chap. 14, “The Common School Exception.”
Benjamin Rush, A Plan for the Establishment of Public Schools and the Diffusion of Knowledge in Pennsylvania: To Which Are Added Thoughts upon the Mode of Education, Proper in a Republic, Addressed to the Legislature and the Citizens of the State (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1786), 15–18.
On Mann’s self-consciousness in substituting public education for church establishment, see Nathan S. Rives, The Religion-Supported State: Piety and Politics in Early National New England (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2022).
Horace Mann, “Report for 1848,” in Annual Reports on Education by Horace Mann (Boston: Lee and Shepard; NY: Lee, Shepard, and Dillingham, 1872), 700, 704, 736–37.
Ibid., 708.
Ibid., 736 (“virtues and graces”), 718–20 (opposition to establishment), 723 (“each man’s reason”), 729 (“essential to religion or salvation”).
Ibid., 729–30.
For insightful treatment of this case in the wider sweep of the nineteenth century, see John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 7–11.
Commonwealth v. Cooke, 7 Am. Law Register 417 (Ma. Police Court, 1859), 417, 421, 423.
Ibid., 423.
This ruling was brought to a close by a quotation from the Gospel of Mark (3:25) that Abraham Lincoln in that very year made famous (if “a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand”) and by a proposition that later court decisions would reverse: if the religious convictions of a single child’s parent were able to overturn the decision of a properly authorized agency of Massachusetts government, it would violate “that heretofore impassable gulf which lies between Church and State.” Commonwealth v. Cooke, 424, 425.
For the anti-Catholic environment in Ellsworth, Maine, see John T. McGreevy, American Jesuits and the World: How an Embattled Religious Order Made Modern Catholicism Global (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 36–41.
Donahue v. Richards, 38 Me. 379 (1854), 380, 383, 401–02.
Ibid., 399 (both quotations).
The Bible and the Public Schools: Arguments in … the Superior Court of Cincinnati, with the Opinions and Decisions of the Court (Cincinnati: Robert Clark, 1870), 9 (Northwest Ordinance), 39, 290–321 (1852 Constitution), 150 (“Bible”).
Pfeiffer v. Board of Education, 118 Mich. 560 (1898), 561, 571.
State ex rel. Freeman v. Scheve, 65 Neb 853 (1902), Jackson quoted at 855–56.
For a thorough discussion of People ex. rel. Ring v. Board of Education, 92 N.D. 251, 254–56 (ILL. 1910), see Green, Second Disestablishment, 321–24. Justice Hand quoted Supreme Court Justice Story from Vidal v. Girard’s Executors, 43 U.S. 127 (1844).
Abington School District v. Schempp, 374 U.S. at 223.
Doremus v. Board of Education, 5 NJ 435 (N.J. 1950) 75 A.2d 880
Witte, “A Most Mild and Equitable Establishment,” 23–24 (quotation from the Town of Dartmouth, 23).
Stanley Mathews for the board, in The Bible and the Public Schools, 207, 228,
Mathews, in The Bible and the Public Schools, 257.
J. Gresham Machen, “The Necessity of the Christian School,” in Forward in Faith (Educational Convention Year Book, 1933); quoted here from J. Gresham Machen: Selected Shorter Writings, ed. D. G. Hart (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2004), 170–71.
Witte, “A Mild and Equitable Establishment,” 31.