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The controversy

             Rehnquist's critique reflects the broader debate that arose around the Court's position from Engel onward. Of the arguments leveled against the neutrality doctrine, one of the most prevalent is that articulated by Rehnquist: the Court has read the framers' intent too broadly; the First Amendment was meant simply to ban establishment of a "national" religion and to discourage government favoritism among Christian sects. As Rehnquist wrote in Wallace, "nothing in the Establishment Clause requires government to be strictly neutral between religion and irreligion, nor does that Clause prohibit Congress or the States from pursuing legitimate secular ends through nondiscriminatory sectarian means...."[27] Consequently, these critics contend, generically phrased prayers and Bible reading should be viewed as nonsectarian and therefore as permissible. (I should note here that this presentation summarizes only one thread of the larger, tangled debate regarding broad versus narrow constructions of the religion clauses of the First Amendment. While a detailed discussion would be impractical and only partially relevant to my particular focus, a very general sense of the dispute may be gained by contrasting Rehnquist's position with the following comment by Jefferson, in his Notes on Virginia:

The rights of [religious] conscience we never submitted, we could not submit.... Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors? Fallible men; men governed by bad passions, by private as well as public reasons. And why subject it to coercion? To produce uniformity. But is uniformity of opinion desirable? No more than of face and stature.[28])

             Arguments favoring narrow First Amendment interpretations rest largely on the view that the United States is an historically, even inherently, religious nation. As the Court itself commented in Zorach v. Clauson (1952), "[w]e are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being."[29] In light of this history, it is argued, removing religious activities or references from the schools means neglecting the nation's most fundamental traditions and their influence on our institutions.[30] Pfeffer identifies a broader version of this argument, that religion comprises a significant part of humankind's "common cultural heritage;" public education thus "stultifies itself if it ignores religion, the basis of the whole of civilization and perhaps the most potent motivating force in human life."[31]

             Pfeffer also cites the related contention that excising religious instruction from the classroom amounts to a "hostility" toward religion: "The omission of religion from the curriculum is completely condemnatory.... If all subjects but religion are included in the curriculum but religion is conspicuously omitted, the inevitable result is that the child will be led to believe that religion is undesirable or at best unimportant."[32]

             However, assertions that the Court's rulings are antagonistic to religion, or that they neglect the historical influence of religious beliefs on the world's social institutions, confuse teaching religion--conducting religious exercises--with teaching about religion, i.e., with presenting nonpartisan, fully inclusive instruction regarding the roles of religions in society--a distinction explicitly acknowledged by the Court in Schempp. (To clarify, Pfeffer--a prominent advocate of separationism--does make this distinction. His preceding remarks describe one side of the wider debate about the public schools' responsibility for religious instruction, and summarize positions put forward by advocates of religious exercises in the classroom.)

             Opponents of civic neutrality contend further that the inculcation of values and ethics is an integral part of the educational process, and that religion infuses moral codes with substance and meaning. As Nielsen asserts,

[e]ducation is not ethically neutral, but inevitably premised on an interpretation of the meaning of human life. Decisions about values and character cannot be avoided in teaching; can such decisions be made in integrity without religious values? A system of education which is effective in denying all reference to an Absolute Good inevitably restricts the pupil's moral growth.[33]

To isolate teaching from values (perhaps more precisely, from the source[s] of given values), the Court's critics maintain, is to create a moral vacuum in the classroom, one they allege has contributed to an increase in social dilemmas such as crime, delinquency, family instability, and more.[34]

             For these critics, the school's enforced silence on religious claims to ultimate truth  may also erode children's moral development by failing to reinforce parental or community values. According to Nielsen, the Court's stance "minimize[s] the role of indigenous opinion and community responsibility. They have taken questions of practice out of local control, precluding discussion, compromise, or cooperative action."[35]

             More recently, observes Provenzo, "ultra-fundamentalist" Christian denominations--his term for those Protestant sects which profess a literal interpretation of the Bible and regard their position as the only authentic religious truth--as well as other groups have found in the Court's actions "a clear demonstration of the increased secularization of society. The removal of school prayer was seen as the first step in a series of efforts to impose state control on individuals--limiting them in their right to practice their religious beliefs."[36] The Court's rulings also symbolize for ultra-fundamentalists American society's growing endorsement of secular humanism, a philosophy they regard as anti-Christian and, indeed, as a religion in its own right.[37] The humanist philosophy that ultra-fundamentalists believe the Court to propagate itself violates the Establishment Clause, they claim, by establishing a "state religion" of humanism.[38]

              Underlying each of these contentions are two further, more essential questions: what is, or what should be, the proper role of the public schools in a liberal democracy? To Horace Mann and other 19th-century proponents of the common school--a concept and creation from which the current public-school system has evolved--the schools were seen as democracy's central mechanism for promoting social cohesion through the curricular inculcation of "common" loyalties and Protestant religious values.[39] Mann and his supporters felt such a unifying framework was needed to supplant sectarian-based hostilities that they saw as an immediate, dire threat to the integrity of the social fabric; Glenn argues that these concerns were rooted in the concomitant influx of Catholic immigrants to Massachusetts, where Mann, a Unitarian-Protestant, sought to establish common schools.[40] Contrary to ultra-fundamentalists, Glenn advances the more extreme position that both the past and present assimilationist functions of the schools--and thus government-sponsored universal education, as conceived since Mann--are inherently problematic. The schools' former inculcation of a "common" Protestantism, as well as their contemporary secular emphasis, Glenn claims, promote specific values that some religious believers do not share:

Formal education--like other forms of socialization--presents pictures or maps of reality that reflect, unavoidably, particular choices about what is certain and what in question, what is significant and what unworthy of notice. No aspect of schooling can be truly neutral....

It is the reality-forming, the legitimating role of the common school, a role central to its mission from the start, that continues to be experienced as oppressive by many parents who have a different view of reality.[41]

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