The Contrarian Review

"'[U]nderneath us all there is uneasiness.... We do not seem to understand one another. We do not seem to be able to trust one another.'"
--Early-twentieth-century Bostonian, on the prospect of including "moral" teaching in the Massachusetts public schools.[1]

Beginning late in the 1940s, the United States Supreme Court has issued a series of opinions that have redefined the place of religion in the public schools. From the first these rulings proved controversial, regarded by some as hostile to religion, by others as too accommodating, and by still others as a well-wrought and exigent shield of fundamental liberties for religious minorities.

Of the issues scrutinized by the Court--which have included the teaching of evolution versus creation theory and the use of school facilities for religious instruction, among others--some of the most seminal and intensely debated concerned the practices of prayer recitation and Bible reading in the classroom. These cases also might be regarded as paradigmatic, even now encapsulating, in some form, philosophies that symbolize to many a fundamental point of deflection in American society's values, emphases, and perceptions. For those who oppose these cultural alterations, the decisions appear to inscribe and hasten the displacement of familiar, valued, prevailing beliefs and traditions--and, for some, their assumed position of privilege within the social/ideological structure. For those who welcome these shifts, however, the Court's rulings signify a movement toward more opened conceptions of culture and society, a social validation of more diverse modes of being--and thus, for some, of their own possible ascension within this social hierarchy.

These differing philosophies (and world views), and the arguments marshaled to advance them, in turn reflect distinct sets of assumptions about the nature and meaning of religious freedom in American public life, about the rights, roles, and power variously apportioned those who do, and who do not, share predominant views. I intend to identify a number of key positions that have been forwarded in this dispute, and to examine some of the central assumptions on which these positions seem to rest, with the objective of formulating at least a tentative evaluation of the conflict's potential for equitable resolution.[2]

Recent events make a return to this topic a relevant and necessary venture. Broad public support for some form of organized school prayer,[3] the correlative impetus in Congress to authorize it (expressed, most recently, by Oklahoma Rep. Ernest Istook and his sponsorship of the Religious Freedom amendment), and the success of other, more peripheral challenges, such as the 1997 Supreme Court ruling that allows public-school teachers to participate in parochial-school remediation programs--a retreat from precedent that may have set the stage for Court approval of school vouchers, according to some legal observers[4]--together threaten an erasure of the deep line Constitutionally graven between the public and private spheres.

The need to negotiate these controversies inclusively--in a manner that allows all voices to be heard, and to be heard equally--is an urgent one. At risk is the potential for religious freedom in American society: how expansively this freedom is to be conceived, and thus, how fully realized. What this and other First Amendment rights represent in action--the freedom of individuals to differ, to dissent--is essential to a vital democratic life. The right to challenge a status quo is the necessary complement of the right to protect it. As Bronowski and Mazlish conclude, after chronicling more than 300 years of Western social and intellectual history,

And while such a formalized sanction of dissent may be fundamental for the maintenance of a vital democratic culture, even this guarantee is not sufficient. As legal scholar Martha Minow notes, inequities in our society frequently have persisted because

For dissent to find firm purchase and effect substantive change, we must also foster the emergence of a public landscape in which a greater range of lived perspectives could be distinctly and mutually made visible--a setting in which we would be better able to describe and question closely the practices and premises that animate a status quo. When we bring presently or previously obscured perspectives clearly into the foreground, Minow submits, �[t]he status quo no longer seems natural and inevitable but is revealed instead as a reflection of choices made and choices that can be remade.�[7]

An education that would support this sort of vigorous democracy must be opened to a correspondingly diverse range of human voices; it must make possible a broadened and genuinely oppositional civic dialogue that could transform dialogue into dialectic. This more cosmopolitan and more critical conversation would need at its foundation a more divergent epistemology, one that asks us educators to teach in terms of the conflicts, of the very tensions, that have strained our conceptions of public community, truth, and reality.[8] By so doing, our students could better position themselves to engage more meaningfully in a pluralist civic life, insofar as this education enables them to consciously and critically (re)evaluate other views--even those views that appear radically �different�--while reciprocally articulating and challenging their own.

From this vantage, it is necessary to consider how, as educators, our presentations of reality inform our students' assumptions about the world, how these assumptions shape their conceptions of human difference, and how our own assumptions play a part in this reality-constructing process. We must distinguish carefully between forms of content and method that socialize and those that indoctrinate, i.e., those that, in the context of public life, engender intolerance and/or foreclose critical reflection. In this sense also, our practices should help students discern how categorizations of difference can create and perpetuate social inequalities, just as they should advance our efforts to avoid replicating these inequities, in miniature, within our schools and classrooms. If our larger concern for democracy is, in Minow's words, the need "to challenge persistent relationships of unequal power,"[9] we need first to see and understand the specific mechanisms that hierarchically situate groups and individuals within contemporary socioeconomic arrangements.

In her book Making All the Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Law, Minow identifies some of, and some sources of, the social and legal dilemmas that accompany our prevalent conceptions of difference: "The dilemma of difference grows from the ways in which this society assigns individuals to categories and, on that basis, determines whom to include in and whom to exclude from political, social, and economic activities."[10] Differences have social import, she asserts, when we view them as intrinsic to a person rather than as relational (that is, as the product of comparisons against a prevailing, thus assumed, norm), and when those possessing greater social power invest some differences with negative connotations:

Minow isolates several "buried" or unstated assumptions that often cloud attempts to locate and to examine perceptions of difference in our society and the inequities that frequently result from them. Because many of the arguments regarding religious exercises in the public schools reflect these assumptions--and because differences in religious views constitute one of the categories of difference to which our society has conspicuously assigned meaning--my analysis will in part employ Minow's conceptual framework.

As Minow argues, the questions and consequences of difference permeate our public life. When questions of religious difference are at issue these concerns carry particular urgency, because the freedom to choose a spiritual belief or disbelief, with the construction(s) of life it implicates, is integral to a person's sense of individual sovereignty. Within educational settings, where the specter of indoctrination arises, treatments of religion and religious difference therefore play a proportionately significant role. To the extent that our educational practices support or undermine the possibility for dissent--for the potential to act, think, or believe "differently"--they strengthen or weaken the prospect of nourishing a just and vibrant democratic life.

[2]Given the need to establish a clearer understanding of diverse perspectives on religious practice in the schools, some clarification of terms on my part seems necessary and appropriate. The terms "religion" and "religious practice," when discussed generally, are meant generally: by them I mean perspectives/practices relating to, or deriving from, systems of metaphysical belief that address ultimate meanings; that is, I use them within a general context as general terms, implicitly incorporating their many particular manifestations. Also, references to the religious "majority," or to "predominant" religious views, may prove confusing when any religious, areligious, or nonreligious person or group might, in some manner, be cast as a minority. However, as a practical matter, such references in the United States must be read to mean views broadly reflecting the beliefs/tenets of the "mainline" Christian denominations, as defined within their various historical contexts. Religious "minorities" are those who do/did not share the defining characteristics or tenets of these denominations.

Here it also appears necessary to clarify my topical focus and, briefly, to describe my methodology. By employing the Court decisions as a means of framing the debate, I do not mean to suggest that this avenue of approach is in any sense definitive or all-inclusive. Clearly other historical and sociological forces (I touch upon these to some degree) have played significant roles in defining the terms of the decisions and of the debate surrounding them, and in shaping the larger framework within which this collision of perspectives has been and continues to be conducted. But, as clearly, the cases and their particulars do form the debate's conceptual center. Insofar as my objective is clarification--in particular, the identification and examination of the fundamental rationales and underlying assumptions that have informed the debate, on all sides--the Court decisions (and what they entail, an explication of the reasoning of their authors, in conjunction with opponents' responses to that reasoning) seemed a logical and readily accessible vantage from which to gain some critical purchase. This approach also reflects my attempt to establish manageable boundaries for the discussion. (For an interesting historical discussion of the status of religious minorities in the United States--if perhaps one too uncritical of the value given consensus over oppositional views in American culture--see R. Laurence Moore, Religious Minorities and the Making of Americans [New York: Oxford University Press, 1986]. Also, in Cosmopolis [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990], philosopher Stephen Toulmin provides a pivotal historical perspective as we consider the particular battle lines that often demarcate our present-day �culture wars�). As for my methods, the materials selected appeared to discuss relevant aspects of the debate in some depth; the authors specifically cited seemed to present frequently advanced positions in their most representative form.

[3]See, for example, Stanley M. Elam and Lowell C. Rose, "The 27th Annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll of the Public's Attitudes Toward the Public Schools," Phi Delta Kappan, September 1995, pp. 41-56. This survey indicates that a significant majority of Americans (71 percent) would support a Constitutional amendment permitting organized prayer in the classroom; of those who favored the amendment, 95 percent did so "strongly" or "fairly strongly." A like majority (70 percent) preferred a moment of silence over spoken prayer, or broadly framed prayers, incorporating "all major" (Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim) religions (81 percent) over those reflecting only Christian beliefs. Questions asked in the poll did not overtly address the perspectives of atheists, agnostics, or others. See also Lowell C. Rose and Alec M. Gallup, �The 30th Annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll of the Public�s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools,� Phi Delta Kappan, September 1998, pp. 41-56, in which 67 percent of respondents voiced support for the Religious Freedom amendment.