Religion in the Public Schools

Irreligious minorities ought not to be allowed to exploit recent Supreme Court rulings against compulsory devotional exercises in the public schools. Just as the state is not to compose or sanction religious exercises in the public schools, so teachers are not to use public schoolrooms to shape anti-theistic attitudes. To promote irreligion in the classroom is as much a violation of public trust as to promote sectarianism. Public school teachers serve in some respects as agents of the state. They are not entitled to make the classroom an instrument of secular humanism (unfortunately the onslaughts of John Dewey’s philosophy infected wide areas of American public education with this malady already a generation ago).

We can expect atheistic forces to utilize the Supreme Court decision to further the cause of irreligion.

Moreover, in Los Angeles the American Civil Liberties Union already has started action to delete the words “under God” from the flag salute. Certain administrators (as in Washington, D. C.) suggest substituting for the Bible selected “inspirational” readings from Emerson or from other profoundly unbiblical writers—a “solution” guaranteed to offend perspicacious American parents more than ever. What kind of “neutrality” is this, that excludes the teachings of Jesus, Paul, and Moses from devotional use and instead requires school children to absorb Emerson, for example, for spiritual inspiration?

To prevent the Supreme Court action from encouraging godlessness in education, America’s devout masses must act at the community level; they must insist that the instructional program of their public schools accurately reflect the teaching of the Bible and the significance of our historic Christian convictions. Citizens who pay soaring school taxes with currency marked “In God we trust” have every right to deplore any education premised on “God we ignore.” The founding fathers deliberately incorporated theistic affirmations into the nation’s definitive political documents. They would surely have insisted that a student unfamiliar with the content of the Bible remains an outsider to the best ingredients in the nation’s heritage and purpose. They would have stressed that to lose the vision of God destines a nation and its people to defeat and oblivion.

True religion is not a product of state legislation nor of culture; its source is independent of human forces—it is supernatural in origin. Yet while Christianity transcends culture, and is not reducible to a national way of life, public institutions are not therefore to function as if God were non-existent. It is strange how certain Protestants deny that the Church has any stake in public prayer as a part of the cultural pattern, but insist on the Church’s stake in public welfare programs as a part of the political pattern!

That pure religion is voluntary, moreover, does not mean automatic repudiation of the cultural significance of Christianity. We cannot erase the shaping force which the Christian religion gives in so many ways to all realms of learning and life. This fact is there for all to see and must be recognized. To confine the significance of Christian commitment to the arena of private piety is to surrender society to such secular ideologies as scientism, political democracy, and Communism, which ignore the place of divine revelation and redemption in reorganizing human life.

If public education is necessary to assure an enlightened citizenry in a democracy, and if religion and morality are twin supports of a republic, then not all corporate and institutional affirmations of religious faith are improper and undesirable. Moreover, voluntary religion—so loudly espoused by all spokesmen today—soon withers in a secular climate of public affairs, but thrives in a setting which reflects the responsibility of the state and its citizens to the eternal world.

The majority opinion of the Supreme Court takes cognizance of the Bible’s proper role in the instructional program of the public school. The Bible is to be introduced, not to indoctrinate, but to help students to understand literature and history and to be aware of the cultural and social impact of biblical religion. Educational institutions which profess to pursue truth in its wholeness cannot honestly evade the biblical record with its distinctive view of God, of man, and of the world. At the same time, the public schools, unlike private or parochial schools, are not at liberty to evangelize, be it for the God of redemption or for evolutionary atheism.

Spokesmen in areas where the Roman Catholic Church has a large stake in parochial schools contend that since secular humanism is now entrenched in public education, parochial schools are necessary to perpetuate American theistic traditions. Parochial schools, they add, are therefore entitled to public funds. It is significant that the loudest Roman Catholic condemnation of the recent Supreme Court decision came from areas such as Boston, New York, and Los Angeles, where Romanism has invested heavily in parochial schools. We must remember, however, that no official establishment of humanism yet exists in the public schools (the activity of some public school administrators notwithstanding), and there is yet time, however diminishing, to check those educators who propagate a naturalistic philosophy of life in the classroom. Parochial schools have been justified for a long time on other grounds. Sectarian schools ought therefore to be supported by their sectarian constituencies, lest public funds be used to promote sectarian theology if not actual religious establishment. The court ruling that compulsory religious devotions are illegal in public schools strengthens the obstacles to government aid to parochial schools.

Protestants, at the same time, have no reason to draw Christian consolation from the spiritual predicament of the public schools. It was the cooperation of inclusivist Protestant church councils that at the local level often supported school administrators addicted to modernistic and humanistic philosophies. And as individuals many Protestant clergymen have been indifferent to perpetuating America’s spiritual heritage, or even theological perspectives of the recent past. Some of these men retain but little of the theism of Jonathan Edwards and express scant sympathy for the Protestant revivalism of the early colonists. Moreover, the vitality of the modernist movement as a whole is parceled and diffused in a diversity of thought that ranges from the old liberalism to humanism to existentialism to the devil knows what next.

The Supreme Court’s decision for “devotional neutrality” in public schools prohibits any required practice of prayer. (To practice his religion, of course, the atheist simply continues his non-praying.) This legislation, some feel, involves improper government intervention in the schools, and the Supreme Court may very soon be faced with appeals predicated on constitutional guarantees of the “free exercise” of religion. At any rate, the conviction is widening that certain minority elements in American religious life—whether Jewish, Unitarian, or humanist—have expanded the non-establishment concept in recent years to the point of threatening the principle of “free exercise.”

Public schools were never intended to carry the burden of instilling devotional attitudes in the younger generation. Nor does anybody honestly believe that assembly or classroom religious observances were inaugurated to relieve homes and churches of this responsibility, or to compensate for an absence of religious education in church or home. Those who depended primarily upon the public schools to furnish the Christian ingredient for welding the elements of our American way of life certainly relied on the wrong source of supply. Public schools do not exist either to mediate Christian faith or to proselyte for sectarian commitment. Writing or sanctioning of prayers is surely not a governmental responsibility, religious practice and commitment is not to be secured through legal proscription, and coercion has no place in achieving conformity of religious ideas and experiences. Is this to mean, however, that no opportunity be provided for a serious academic pursuit of the content of religion? And is all ceremonial and institutional recognition and affirmation of God in public life—the schools included—therefore to be abolished? It is completely possible, moreover, to teach about religion without evangelizing—and, in fact, there are public school teachers who have been doing so in the interest of competent teaching and thorough learning.

The question of how much and what kind of religion should remain in the public schools is far from settled. Elimination of all religious emphases, however gradual, would destroy the public schools and stimulate the demand by parochial schools for public funds. There is wide feeling that public schools are becoming increasingly secular and indifferent to religion and morality. This feeling accounts in part for the growing tendency among evangelicals to establish private day schools. While public schools are not responsible for the breakdown of religious teaching in the home, they are often guilty of an easy contentment with mechanistic philosophies and of indifference to presenting the whole truth. As a result, the public schools, although banned from outright transmission of Christian insights and experiences, in effect communicate a pseudo-religious heritage.

In a real sense, however, public schools are already teaching religion in the classrooms. Every complex of ideas has its hidden absolutes, and the public schoolroom may easily become a haven for invisible false gods. The fact that ultimates are not stated overtly but are conveyed secretly and without articulation indicates how subtly the adversaries of our inherited religion can promote their preferred alternatives. Deference to false gods and their false ideas leads in turn to personal and national immorality and delinquency.

THE HUMANIST

He exists because he was created.

He is here because he was placed here.

He is well and comfortable Because divine power keeps him so.

He dines at God’s table.

He is sheltered by the roof God gave him.

He is clothed by God’s bounty.

He lives by breathing God’s air,

Which keeps him strong and vocal,

To go about persuading people

That, whether God is or not,

Only man matters!

CLARENCE EDWIN FLYNN

Another devastating feature of these modern pseudoultimates is their heterogeneous character. Each teacher develops his own network of presuppositions. In trying to distill a religious outlook from this panorama of perspectives the student is tempted either to accept a polytheistic approach, whereby various gods govern various facets of life, or simply to view religion as a composite of numerous unrelated or uncoordinated pockets of resistance to secularism. If the teaching of religion once again becomes explicit, then Christianity’s emphasis on the relevance of the Creator-Redeemer God for every aspect of reality and life may at least point up, if not challenge, the weaknesses of the contemporary alternatives.

Still another feature is the comfortable yet unfruitful promotion of “religion in general” by those who look askance at any specific religion and deplore “sectarianism.” All historical religions are in fact specific and sectarian; “religion in general” is but a speculative abstraction, a philosophical device for extracting one’s own preferences from the religious mainstream, and for suppressing what truly brings the sinner to terms with his Creator and Lord.

To offset such criticism some educators have considered “shared time” proposals as a hopeful adjunct to public school programs that concentrate on a non-religious curriculum, are devoid of devotions, and guard against references to God. These proposals are being challenged in some quarters, however, on the basis that “shared time” violates the concept of the unity of education. Public schools, it is stressed, should include an interest in the nation’s theological heritage, particularly in the theistic affirmations incorporated into the distinctive patriotic documents and in the historic role of religion in American life and culture. The truth of religion, moreover, is not marginal but integral to academic concerns; the requirement of wholeness demands its inclusion as a requisite component of the educational curriculum, therefore, rather than an extracurricular adjunct.

The gulf between religious theory and practice can be bridged somewhat by the example of the teacher, whose personal behavior and attitudes are more important than ceremonial patterns for a vital expression of beliefs. Too long our politicians have professed ability to unite the divided segments of society, while failing to preserve harmony in their own homes; too long our educators have known the answers to every problem except how to live the good life. Needed in American education is not a return to the little red schoolhouse, but rather the return of the godly public school teacher. Next to the local minister, the godly public school teacher can be a leading force for both truth and righteousness at every American crossroads.

Time Alone Will Tell

The banning of nuclear testing in the air is most desirable provided the free world has not unwarily walked into a web from which disentanglement will be difficult should the Russians take the opportunity to strengthen themselves at the weakest point of their nuclear potential. President Kennedy has admitted that the United States has taken a calculated risk, and that time will show whether the clouds of nuclear war have receded.

The one thing which may prevent Russia from taking illegal advantage of others is her growing fear of Red China. The joke current in Russia—“If you are an optimist you learn English; if a pessimist you study Chinese”—carries with it a deep-seated sense of uncertainty. We may be assured that Russia enters into no agreements without the unspoken reservation of their future discard whenever this seems advantageous. Since World War II, fifty out of fifty-three treaties made by the United States with Russia have been broken. The honoring of the fifty-fourth will depend not on a pledged word but on future expedience.

We may have gained a certain amount of time, or we may have merely made possible an even greater danger for the future. Time alone will tell whether we have been wise as a nation or have become dupes.

Come-But-Don’T-Partake Intercommunion

One of the five sections of the Faith and Order Conference in Montreal discussed what should be done to extend intercommunion. Ecumenical pragmatists consider common worship (rather than theological discussion) the “Open sesame” to church union. They favor delegates’ attendance and participation in worship at intercommunion services even where their church law prohibits partaking of the elements. One African delegate protested that his fellow Christian would hardly understand. “If a friend were to invite me to his home, and then eat dinner while I looked on, I would never enter his house again,” he said. But the come-but-don’t-partake strategy was hailed as a great ecumenical gain, despite opposition of one in three delegates.

President J. I. McCord of Princeton Seminary, chairman of the worship section, told newspapermen that ecumenical leaders will not encourage disobedience to church law, although isolation from a common Lord’s table unjustifiably erects a division within the body of Christ. Dr. McCord was asked why churchmen are timid about encouraging violations of church law which promotes what they consider an unspiritual compromise of the unity of the body of Christ, when they openly encourage violations of civil law on the ground that race discrimination unjustly cuts some persons off from the body of humanity. In both cases a religious principle is said to be at stake whose compromise is intolerable to sound Christian conscience. But then why the boldness on race issues and the shyness on church issues? Dr. McCord confined his comments to irrelevancies.

Political even more than principial considerations often seem to weight ecclesiastical policies. Not unconnected with the Montreal pressures is the fact that the Faith and Order Commission meets in 1964 in Cyprus, where the religious complex is almost totally Orthodox. Orthodox churchmen have been reticent about participating in ecumenical intercommunion services. They hold that the Lord’s Supper should be used to manifest a unity already achieved, not to promote unity. But most Orthodox delegates went along with the come-but-don’t-partake pressures. Cyprus will next exhibit the Church’s unity to the world not by “intercommunion” but by the spectacle of Christian “interattendance.”

What Of Evangelical Theological Concern?

If the World Council’s Montreal Faith and Order Conference proved a theological fiasco, evangelicals who have isolated themselves from the ecumenical movement have no reason to gloat. The ecumenical movement has at least sponsored some major theological dialogues to promote understanding and to probe the possibilities of larger agreement in the face of diversity. Independent evangelicals, while stressing that the unity of the true Church requires doctrinal consensus, seem to keep theological discussion (and hence the possibility of controversy) at a comfortable but unscriptural arm’s length.

The evangelical movement can hardly gain impressive vitality as a cultural force without some rebirth of theological earnestness and comprehension. Strange but not unearned is the judgment by not a few evangelicals that they find more theological stimulus in an ecumenical environment—even if it arrives at few satisfactory conclusions—than in an independent evangelical atmosphere where an emphasis on fellowship seems to crowd theological concerns to the margin.

The Montreal fiasco had to its credit the fact that the ecumenical movement was at least willing to assume the risks of theological dialogue.

The Widening Moral Gulf

Recent weeks have chronicled increasing evidence of a widening gulf between public and private morality in this country and abroad. Most spectacular is the case in Britain in which former osteopath Stephen Ward, entrusted by his profession with a ministry of healing, has ended his life a suicide, an example of debilitating moral decay. In America, former dean of Harvard Law School and former high government official James Landis has admitted failure to file income tax returns for five years, involving a gross income figure in excess of $300,000. New York’s Governor Nelson Rockefeller, aspirant to the United States presidency, apparently sees no contradiction between his alleged intention to honor political vows and his failure to honor the vows of a thirty-one-year-old marriage. Sixty-four-year-old Supreme Court Justice William Douglas marries for the third time, to twenty-three-year-old Joan Martin. And United States Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson expends his efforts to promote world harmony, yet is himself party to a divorce which may have cost him the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections.

What is particularly distressing is not evidence of an acute decline in moral integrity alone, but the apparently increasing tide of lax moral behavior on the part of those who assume positions of public responsibility. It is a false outlook which sees no connection between a man’s behavior to his wife or conduct of his financial affairs and his handling of public funds and civic responsibilities. Does the fate of the nation rest with the fate of its citizenry? Does the character of the individual rest, as Clarence Macartney once said, with the sum of the individual choices for good or evil which he has made throughout his life? If so, then it is time for America to reawaken to an immutable standard of public and private integrity. It is time for the Church to speak, warning of judgment and holding forth the promise of new life and new morality through regenerative belief in the Lord and judge of all.

The Content Of Education

Walter Lippman has rightly said that “there is a growing disenchantment with the results of a wholly secularized education.” With the passing of the years more and more of the areas of teaching have become completely divorced from any recognition of God. The results of creation are searched out, but the Creator is ignored. The laws of the universe are studied, but the Maker of those laws is discarded. The philosophic capabilities of man are explored, but the Source of all true wisdom is not considered. In every field man and his accomplishments are studied while the Sovereign God is not given even passing notice.

Little wonder this growing “disenchantment.” During his visit to Washington in 1960 Chancellor Konrad Adenauer reportedly said to Lyndon Johnson, then senator from Texas: “I have never seen as great a lack of moral integrity as I have among your young people. I do not believe that in the conflict between East and West the young people of the free world have the moral integrity to win.”

The reason for the decline in moral and spiritual convictions is not hard to find, for the precepts of the Bible have increasingly been ignored in the teaching of young people—in the home, in the school, and, in many cases, in the church itself.

In the home, prayer, Bible reading, and the family altar are neglected. In the schools secularization has triumphed. In the church young people are seldom consistently reminded how one becomes a Christian.

How many homes give Christ his rightful place, with prayer and the Word of God made central by example and by daily teaching? How many schools make any effort to nurture a recognition of the God of the universe as the One from whom and by whom all things consist? How many churches consistently preach and teach the central doctrines of the Christian faith?

America, as a nation, is not merely in danger of losing her soul. It is already lost wherever secularism triumphs over the spirit, where education ignores true wisdom, where the home is no longer a unit looking to God for help and guidance.

We believe part of the blame rests squarely on the Church. In recent years the Church has become increasingly concerned with economic, social, and political problems. There has been a corresponding decline in her spiritual mission. As a result people have lost any sense of sin as an offense against a holy God. The churches pay a number of lobbyists in Washington today to work for social and other legislation. No longer looking to men with changed hearts as “salt” and “light” in society, the churches are trying to secure government legislation for righteousness. Some consider government an agent of the Church. Such folly leads us deeper and deeper into the morass of futility. How can a new society be brought about without new men? How can we have new men unless Christ has transformed and taken up his abode in men’s hearts?

Nearly two millenniums ago our Lord said to his disciples, “Will ye also go away?” Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.” This affirmation holds good today.

The question of the Philippian jailor still takes priority today: “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” And Paul’s answer should be the message of the Church in this sophisticated nuclear age: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.”

We are disenchanted over the results of a secularized education. We are equally disenchanted over the results of a secularized Church.

Mob Pressures For Social Change

As the massive August 28 demonstration drew near, many clergymen ministering to District of Columbia churches raised solid questions about the role of churches in encouraging and supporting mob political demonstrations. While some denominational executives, presumably servants of their denominations, took the initiative in urging churches to identify themselves corporately and aggressively with the “march on Washington,” on the Washington scene itself clergymen of diverse theological and social viewpoints voiced reservations and even disapproval.

Clergymen registered full indignation in the face of race discrimination and every sympathy for minority rights, and they defended the right of public demonstration and protest. But many felt that the “march on Washington” loomed as a mob spectacle so full of coercive political pressures that its liabilities would far outweigh its values.

Among noteworthy comments were those of Dr. George R. Davis, minister of The National City Christian Church, located but five blocks from the White House:

“I reject the idea that solutions must finally be found ‘in the streets,’ by massive demonstrations, and by violence. I reject the idea that the Church to be relevant must ‘go along with’ just any policy of any group, or race, or pressure organization, even when such a group has cause for resentment, and is appealing for rights long over-due.… Ministers, churches, people in general, are expected to ‘jump when the whips are cracked’ today, to take an ‘all out position’ in one direction or another. I refuse!…

“I do not believe the Church should encourage marches or demonstrations which have almost a ‘built in potential’ for violence. It is beyond question the right of people to demonstrate when they have serious grievances, but when those demonstrations are promoted by such a variety of interests, organizations, motives, and are so easily the victim of persons or groups whose purposes may be questioned, the Church is under no moral or spiritual or Christian obligation to give support.… I do not believe the Church should encourage the Washington march and demonstration. And I do not believe responsible people anywhere should do it.… This … may now class me in the group of the ‘irrelevant church’ we are hearing so much about. Then let it be so. I am also becoming fearful as time goes along (… as one who has thought himself to be a liberal) of the artificially produced crisis, or crises, used for purposes not at all related to the eventual welfare either of majorities or minorities.”

Patrick Bouvier Kennedy

Most Americans do not know President Kennedy and his wife personally. But many fathers and mothers suddenly felt that they did as they followed press accounts of the birth and illness of the littlest Kennedy. Hurried, anxious hospital calls, a President standing by helplessly as his son breathed his last, a two-hour private visit to console his wife after their son had died—reports of these made fathers and mothers the country over know that in a profound manner they knew the Kennedys after all.

The Kennedy infant was the fifth child of a President to die during the father’s term of office. Abraham Lincoln lost an eleven-year-old son while in the White House. Calvin Coolidge lost a son of sixteen, about whom he wrote, “When he went, the power and the glory of the presidency went with him.” Neither the prestige of the most powerful office in the world, nor personal fortunes, nor tender years, renders the White House immune to the angel of death.

Like all little boys Patrick Bouvier Kennedy was born to live, and unlike most, he was born to live in the White House. But the mystery of life and death is impressed by nothing. The little Kennedy son lived only thirty-nine hours and twelve minutes, and never knew 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, nor even the cradle of his mother’s arms. Before two days were over his life was finished, for God had called him. Surely life has conflicts and paradoxes past our finding out. Hard upon the President’s achievement of a test ban treaty with Russia to preserve the lives of millions of people the world over, death entered the President’s own family, showing the glory and weakness of all human achievement. Truly He alone can disclose the secret of life and death’s uneven ways who also died and now lives to declare that he is the Resurrection and the Life. The Kennedys have our sympathy; may they also know His consolation.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.