Second Thoughts on ‘Child Benefit’

A wide assortment of Church-related agencies are complaining about the way the U. S. Office of Education is administering last year’s precedent-setting school-aid act. The Office of Education is charged with violating elements in the act designed to preserve the constitutional principle of church-state separation.

Among those expressing anxieties are influential spokesmen from the National Council of Churches, the National Association of Evangelicals, Americans United, the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, the American Jewish Committee, and the American Civil Liberties Union.

On one section of the law, “the Office of Education has not transmitted in any meaningful way the church-state settlement reached in the halls of Congress after strenuous and tense debate,” charges Director Dean M. Kelley of the NCC’s Commission on Religious Liberty. “Local and state administrators are left to find their way without the markers set along the outer limits of constitutionality.”

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 was the first act providing funds for schools below the college level on a broad scale. Every previous attempt had been defeated, mainly through inability to resolve the church-state issue. The 1965 measure got around the problem with the so-called child-benefit concept.

The idea was that pupils in church-related and other private schools were just as entitled to federal funds as public school students. But the Constitution has been interpreted by the Supreme Court as forbidding the granting of public funds to parochial schools. Under the child-benefit concept, the money was to be given so that it aided the students in parochial schools but not the schools themselves. Public agencies were to keep control.

The distinction seemed a fine one but gained wide support. In recent months, however, there has been increasing feeling that it was too fine. Some who supported the bill are having second thoughts, primarily because of the type of regulation—or lack of it—by the Office of Education.

In New York City and other metropolitan centers, public school teachers are being required to go to parochial schools to provide special services. In Detroit, a suit has been filed by several public school teachers who contend that teaching in a parochial school violates their consciences.

In Louisville, a bloc of theater tickets was purchased for parochial school students with federal money. In Rhode Island, biographies of Roman Catholic leaders have been approved by the state government to be “loaned” to Roman Catholic schools as library books.

The Baptist public affairs office quotes Office of Education spokesmen as saying the 1965 act cannot be administered in accordance with the wishes of those who want strict adherence to understandings reached during the legislative process while the act was in the making. Critics counter that if the act cannot be administered along clean church-state lines, provisions that affect church-state relations should be dropped.

The 1965 law has been under congressional review this spring, since it is valid only until next month and must be renewed. The Administration is asking a four-year extension. But critics think that until the intent of Congress is carried out with greater fidelity, the legislation should be reviewed yearly.

Originally, the bill was to promote dual enrollment, and much of its aid for parochial school students was to be administered in this way. Parochial students were expected to go to public schools for some of the more religiously “neutral” subject matter. Kelley told a Congressional committee, however, that since enactment of the bill, “the scope of dual enrollment has been reduced and the scope of ‘mobile educational services’ has been expanded.”

The trouble with “mobile equipment” is that it hardly qualifies under the child-benefit concept. It tends to benefit the school as well as the child.

Experts in church-state relations had understood the 1965 act to specify that major equipment was to be placed in parochial schools only for therapeutic, remedial, or welfare services. That was an important distinction. Benefits for parochial school students that were already being provided in their schools were not to be supplied by public money. Many contend that this distinction is now widely ignored.

Textbook aid and library books are another sore spot. The Office of Education has received numerous complaints that loans of books are being so regarded only in a technical sense—that federal funds are providing parochial schools with books that they have no intention of ever returning. A spokesman for Americans United has asked that the Office of Education specifically require establishment of local public depositories.

Advocates of church-state separation are worried. There are rumblings that the government should erect special buildings for parochial schools, ostensibly for public-service activities. There is precedent for this in the science and language laboratory grants and loans that the federal government provides on the college level—to church-related as well as to public and private institutions.

Some observers feel the erosion of church-state separation will continue unless the U. S. Supreme Court draws a definite line in the matter of government aid and church-related education. Key cases are pending that might bring sweeping decisions by the court.

The I.A.C.S. Debate

The proposal by CHRISTIANITY TODAY for establishment of an Institute of Advanced Christian Studies is stimulating interest and debate among evangelical educators. Influential Christian leaders are endorsing the plan, but some express reservations. The proposal (see May 13 issue, page 28) calls for a center of evangelical research and writing to advance Christian truth in the modern academic milieu. Highly qualified scholars related to the institute might later become the graduate faculty core of a Christian university, but this development is not essential to the project. Ideally, the institute would be located near an outstanding secular campus. It could begin operating as early as the fall of 1967 or 1968, if support is mustered.

Some critics think the institute would compete with presently existing evangelical institutions; others view it as a move of isolation from the world.

Even some who favor the basic plan have reservations because of material obstacles. They contend that the growing taxation of wealth increasingly limits philanthropy, and that the problem of private financing today may be too acute to support such an evangelical breakthrough, however necessary.

Governor Mark O. Hatfield of Oregon, a former professor of political science at Willamette University, takes note of some of the problems but feels nevertheless that “the potential rewards in the invigoration of the intellectual climate of our churches is enormous. The challenge of this idea deserves our considered response.”

Editor Carl F. H. Henry, in a keynote address to the annual convention of the Evangelical Press Association this month, called on editors to urge 40 million U. S. evangelicals to give one dollar each to the project. If the center is not established by 1970, the money will revert to other tax-exempt projects listed in advance as alternatives by the contributors.

A number of strategically placed evangelicals would like to see the proposed institute established immediately.

Says Dr. Calvin D. Linton, a dean of George Washington University, “The intellectual and scholarly validity of historical, conservative Christianity deserves the clearest and worthiest academic visibility. For many reasons, the present structure of higher education is not able (or not willing) to support it adequately, surely not to a degree approaching the emphasis given to advanced study in science or social research. The proposal of an Institute of Advanced Christian Studies merits the most urgent attention and encouragement.”

One of America’s top business leaders says the idea “strikes a responsive note during a day of confused movements in the theological field.… Our age of science,” declares Dr. Elmer W. Engstrom, chief executive officer of RCA, “needs to be interpreted and understood through the eyes, ears, and voices of evangelical Christianity.”

According to Dr. George L. Bird, chairman of the graduate division of Syracuse University School of Journalism, “a new Christian institute to study Christian revelation and the divine influence in human life is deeply needed. The American youths I know cry out for spiritual guidance—but mostly in vain.” Bird regards the American campus as “one of the neediest mission fields on this globe.”

The “mechanism” of the institute, notes Professor Martin J. Buerger of MIT, “has great possibilities, and I heartily support it.” Buerger declares that “Christianity could profit by a standard-bearer of academic stature, especially as a nucleus for a great Christian university on an evangelical, trans-denominational base which would light a beacon in these days of materialism and deviation from the fundamentals.”

Dr. Orville S. Walters, director of health services at the University of Illinois, observes that “the establishment of such a center would provide evangelical scholars with the favorable conditions for scholarly work to be found in many large universities, but usually committed to secular projects. The plan would enable evangelical scholars, usually loaded heavily with teaching, to have some freedom for creative writing, and to make an adequate presentation of the conservative theological viewpoint in contemporary intellectual issues.”

Such a development, adds Dr. Gordon H. Clark, is “long overdue.” Clark, chairmen of the philosophy department at Butler University, believes that “the problems of establishing another liberal arts college would be gigantic. An Institute of Advanced Christian Studies is obviously more feasible, and, in view of the actual opposition to Christian scholarship in secular universities, much more needed.”

Million-Dollar Doctorate

At the cost of one million dollars, Pepperdine College of Los Angeles decided that neither its honor nor its honorary degrees are for sale.

The will of the late D. B. Lewis, wealthy manufacturer of “Dr. Ross” cat and dog food, left $1 million to help Dan Smoot carry on his work as a right-wing commentator, $1 million to the John Birch Society, $1.5 million to found Defenders of American Liberty as a counterpart of the American Civil Liberties Union, and $1 million to Pepperdine College.

The will stipulated that the Pepperdine bequest depended on the college’s granting an honorary doctorate to Dan Smoot within six months. Although almost half of Pepperdine’s approximately 1,500 students come from the Churches of Christ, the theologically conservative college is not denominationally owned or financed, and depends solely on gifts and tuition.

According to President M. Norvel Young, the school’s board of trustees unanimously rejected the bequest because “whatever the merits of a proposed recipient, the academic process precludes awarding a degree based on the contingency of any gift.” Norvel issued a statement declaring that Pepperdine, “as an independent, Christian, liberal arts institution of higher learning, is committed to the virtues of integrity, sincerity, morality, reverence for God, and respect for our fellow man.”

William Teague, Pepperdine’s vice-president, said that even if Pepperdine’s supporters had disapproved of the action 100 per cent, “we still would have done what we did.”

D. B. Lewis was long a member of the Pepperdine College Board.

JAMES DAANE

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