Supreme Court Speaks up for Religion in American Life

That nativity scene at the Pawtucket city hall is not unconstitutional.

In a ruling that helps anchor religion more firmly in the mainstream of American life, the Supreme Court ruled last month that the city of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, did not violate the Constitution by erecting a nativity scene at its city hall.

A five-to-four majority on the Court agreed that “there is an unbroken history of official acknowledgment by all three branches of government of the role of religion in American life.” Citing a previous ruling, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger wrote, “We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.”

Thus, the case, known as Lynch v. Donnelly, took on significance far beyond the borders of Pawtucket’s annual Christmas display in a city park. That display was challenged by a group of taxpayers and the American Civil Liberties Union for including a 140-square-foot manger scene, or crèche, in the midst of decorated trees, Santa Claus, snowmen, and other seasonal trappings.

Lower courts had ruled that the crèche violated constitutional prohibitions against government promotion of religion. In oral arguments before the Supreme Court last fall (CT, NOV. 11, 1983, p. 52), an attorney for the mayor of Pawtucket called Christmas “a dominantly secular holiday with religious roots and components.” U.S. Solicitor General Rex E. Lee, entering the case on behalf of the Reagan administration, tried not to diminish the religious significance of the crèche, arguing that Christ belongs in Christmas, and removing any hint of him from such a display is “cultural censorship and intellectual dishonesty.”

Both of these arguments found their way into the high court’s decision last month. It emphasizes that the Constitution “affirmatively mandates accommodation, not merely tolerance, of all religions, and forbids hostility toward any.” In a strong dissenting opinion, the remaining four justices focused on the crèche itself rather than the broad sweep of American tradition and accused the majority of being swayed by the fact that the “Christmas holiday seems so familiar and agreeable.”

The decision is one of four in recent years that have applied the brakes to accelerating efforts to expunge religion from public expression. The Court granted “equal access” to Christian college students who were told they could not meet for prayer on campus; it upheld the right of state legislatures to employ chaplains; and it allowed Minnesota to offer tuition tax deductions for private school students.

In the Pawtucket case, the chief justice plainly states how he views the “wall of separation” between church and state. Burger calls the “wall” a “useful figure of speech” that serves as a reminder that an established state church is not allowed in America.

However, he says the metaphor does not accurately describe “the practical aspects of the relationship that in fact exists between church and state. No significant segment of our society and no institution within it can exist in a vacuum or in total or absolute isolation from all the other parts, much less from government.”

The opinion lists numerous examples of official acknowledgment of American religious heritage as well as “governmental sponsorship of graphic manifestations of that heritage.” Among these, noted Burger, are the national motto “In God We Trust,” the “one nation under God” language in the Pledge of Allegiance, the presidential proclamations of days of prayer, and the celebration of Thanksgiving.

The crèche, in comparison, is merely “one passive symbol,” the Court ruled. Forbidding its use “would be a stilted overreaction contrary to our history and to our holdings.” Burger thus agreed that religion need not be locked in a closet. He also wrote that the crèche serves a secular purpose as well when it is considered in the context of the Christmas season as a whole.

Opponents of the crèche based their case on a three-part test used by courts to determine if the constitutional requirements of separation have been breached by the religious practice. Those three questions ask whether a secular purpose is being served by the religious practice; whether the government is advancing religion; and whether there is evidence of excessive entanglement between the two.

Noting that Pawtucket’s entire display “is sponsored by the city to celebrate the holiday and to depict the origins of the holiday,” the Court decided that “these are legitimate secular purposes.” There is no reason to impute a hidden agenda to the crèche’s sponsors, as the ACLU sought to do. The crèche does not represent “a purposeful or surreptitious effort to express some kind of subtle governmental advocacy of a particular religious message.”

In the strongly worded dissent, Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., attempted to isolate and reject what he believes is a subconscious bias in favor of Christianity that pervades the nation’s institutions and threatens the liberty of nonbelievers. The primary effect of the crèche’s display is not to celebrate a holiday, Brennan wrote, but rather “to place the government’s imprimatur of approval on the particular religious beliefs exemplified by the crèche.

“Those who believe in the message of the nativity receive the unique and exclusive benefit of public recognition and approval of their views,” he wrote. This constitutes “religious chauvinism,” which silently tells members of minority religious groups, or those who reject all religions, “that their views are not similarly worthy of public recognition nor entitled to public support.”

The dissent calls into question the very nature of Christmas, saying that government recognition of the holiday “does no more than accommodate the calendar of public activities to the plain fact that many Americans will expect on that day to spend time visiting with their families, attending religious services, and perhaps enjoying some respite from preholiday activities.”

This de facto denial of any transcendent significance illustrates the widening chasm between proponents of secularism and people of faith in many areas of life. By addressing this issue head-on, the Supreme Court brought the conflict into the open and has staked out, on both sides, the terms of a debate that promises to grow in intensity.

A Double-Edged Decision By The Court On Grove City College

The tale of Grove City has two endings, with good news and bad news for Christian colleges around the country. The Supreme Court ruled last month that private schools, like Grove City College in western Pennsylvania, are subject to government regulations even if they receive no direct federal aid. The good news, according to Christian educators, is that the reach of the government’s controlling arm is limited to specific programs.

The court ruled six to three that Grove City College may be held accountable for federal rules against sex discrimination because it enrolls students who receive tuition money from the government, known as Pell grants. Even though the checks are payable to individual students, not the school, the Court said any scholarships, loans, or grants to students “constitute federal financial assistance to that entity.”

This is the reasoning the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare used in 1977 when it required Grove City College officials to sign a form stating they met the requirements of Title IX, a law prohibiting sex discrimination in “any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

Grove City College, affiliated with the United Presbyterian Church, never has accepted direct federal assistance and adheres strictly to a nondiscrimination policy of its own. It refused to sign the government form on principle, and appealed to the Supreme Court when a lower court said it had to comply.

Because a sex discrimination statute was at issue, feminist groups rallied behind the original government challenge. However, they were just as dismayed by the decision as conservatives because of the way the Court limited Title IX’s impact. It said Title IX, in this instance, only affects Grove City’s student loan program, not the whole school.

Kim Colby, an attorney with the Christian Legal Society, said the Court combined a broad reading of “aid” with a narrow reading of “program,” thus disappointing nearly everyone.

At the National Organization for Women, president Judy Goldsmith saw the decision as a serious setback: “It is shocking that the Court would rule that in effect sex discrimination is acceptable in programs, departments, or activities in educational institutions that don’t specifically receive federal funds.” Title IX has helped guarantee funding for women’s athletics and a host of other school programs.

Women’s rights groups saw Grove City as a key test of whether sex-discrimination laws will be applied as broadly as laws prohibiting racial discrimination. They believe the Court reduced the legal firepower of Title IX from cannon strength to mere pop-gun efficacy.

Much of the Court’s reasoning hinges on “congressional intent”—what Congress really meant when it passed both Title IX and student-loan legislation in the early 1970s. The opinion, written by Justice Byron R. White, said, “We have found no persuasive evidence suggesting that Congress intended that the [Education] Department’s regulatory authority follow federally aided students from classroom to classroom, building to building or activity to activity.”

Likewise, the opinion finds that the language of the law “contains no hint that Congress perceived a substantive difference between direct institutional assistance and aid received by a school through its student.”

On this point John Dellenback, president of the Christian College Coalition, vigorously disagrees. At the time the legislation passed, he was a congressman from Oregon and served on the House Education Committee. “To the best of my recollection that was not the intention. Our target purpose was to help students, not institutions, by providing the student with choice.”

Dellenback said the Court’s reasoning is akin to saying that a veteran’s pension check spent on groceries constitutes federal aid to the supermarket.

Grove City College is one of 71 members of the coalition, an association for schools that stake their existence on a distinctively Christian outlook and program. Dellenback believes the Grove City ruling will give pause to all other church-related private schools.

“It is tremendously important for our colleges to ask themselves, ‘How do we remain faithful to our basic Christ-centered mission?’ ” rather than worry about how to change policies to comply with the law, he said. All the other colleges also have students receiving federal aid, and the ones approached with compliance forms have signed them.

Only one other college in the country, Hillsdale College in Michigan, has refused to sign on principle. The Supreme Court’s ruling will be binding upon it as well.

Another troubling aspect of the case involves potential court challenges to Christian schools because of government entanglement. Like unwitting carriers of plague, students with federal loans may expose their schools to an epidemic of questions about whether a pervasive Christian commitment is compatible with any government support. The First Amendment’s “establishment clause” has long been interpreted to prohibit church-state entanglements or aid to a particular religion.

These concerns were addressed in a single paragraph at the end of the Court’s opinion. White wrote that there is no constitutional infringement as long as students may “take their [grants] elsewhere or attend Grove City without federal financial assistance.” CLS’s Kim Colby found this particularly unsettling because it gives Congress authority to attach any sort of condition to federal aid as long as the institution is free to refuse the aid. The hard reality for Christian colleges, like most others, is that their survival hinges on being affordable in times of diminishing enrollment and rising costs.

Grove City College officials are disappointed by the ruling, but unperturbed. Spokesman Robert W. Smith said, “We assume the government will offer us another compliance form to sign, and we will not sign. Grove City will probably be removed from the list of eligible colleges for students with Pell grants to attend.” Currently, 300 of the school’s 2,200 students receive the aid, and the school plans to raise funds on its own to bridge expected gaps in their ability to pay. Sympathetic donors have contributed $400,000 to the school to cover six years of court costs.

Three Supreme Court justices signed a reluctant concurring opinion in the case, lambasting the Carter administration for “an unedifying example of overzealousness on the part of the federal government.

“One would have thought that the Department, confronted as it is with cases of national importance that involve actual discrimination, would have respected the independence and admirable record of this college,” they wrote. “But common sense and good judgment failed to prevail.”

A New Study Predicts Growth And Decline In U.S. Churches

More than 10 years have passed since Donald McGavran published his classic study, Understanding Church Growth. In McGavran’s wake, several other specialists have begun educating Christian leaders in principles of church growth.

The father-son team of Win and Charles Arn, publishers of Church Growth: America magazine, have done their own pioneering in the field. Recently, the Arns released a 10-year forecast of growth-and-decline trends for a number of Protestant denominations. Their predictions include the following:

• Denominations expected to grow by 20 percent or more include the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the Christian and Missionary Alliance, the Evangelical Free Church, the Assemblies of God, the Church of the Nazarene, and the Church of God, Cleveland, Tennessee.

• Churches expected to grow by 10 to 20 percent include the Churches of Christ, the Christian Church, the Advent Christian Church, the Salvation Army, the Reformed Church in America, the Free Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and the Church of God, Anderson, Indiana.

• Denominations expected to grow by as much as 10 percent include the Southern Baptist Convention, the Church of the Brethren, the Evangelical Covenant Church, the United Methodist Church, the Episcopal Church, the Free Will Baptist Church, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and the Christian Reformed Church.

• The American Baptist Churches in the U.S.A. and the Conservative Baptist Association of America are predicted to decline by as much as 10 percent.

• The American Lutheran Church (ALC), the Lutheran Church in America (LCA), and the United Church of Christ are expected to decline by more than 10 percent.

Why will some denominations grow and others won’t?

“One common denominator between growing churches is an emphasis on mission, reaching out to the surrounding community’s needs,” says Charles Arn. “In this sense, theology and doctrine are not the crucial connections to church growth.”

As an example, Arn compares the growth forecasts of the three major Lutheran denominations. The Missouri Synod will grow the most, while the LCA and the ALC (scheduled to merge by 1988) will decline the most, according to the forecast. With Lutheran theology and doctrine common to all three bodies, the variation in growth forecasts is based on what Arn calls “mission consciousness. Missouri Synod is strong on the Great Commission,” he adds, “while the ALC/LCA has other priorities and not much outreach into the community.”

The study warns against denominational mergers and institutionalization, which Arn says contribute to decline. “The longer a group exists,” he suggests, “the more likely it will be concerned with self-perpetuation. The more this happens, the more the original reason for existing is lost. Sometimes a church’s goals will digress from ‘mission’ goals to ‘survival’ goals, as is happening to some degree in the Southern Baptist Convention.”

Arn says denominational headquarters do not determine whether churches will grow. Rather, the crucial link is the district office. “A commitment on the part of district executives to provide direction, insight, and practical tools will often determine whether or not churches will grow in that particular district.”

The forecast includes only denominations with which the Arns’ organization, the Institute for American Church Growth, has had extensive contact. The study was based on computer analysis of 30,000 churches, observations from staff members around the country, extensive reading of church publications, and an examination of courses offered in denominational seminaries.

DANIEL W. PAWLEY

North American Scene

Fearing a boycott of its annual cookie sale, the Detroit-area Girl Scout Council has revised a program on teen sexuality. After an antiabortion group charged that the original program would deal with birth control and abortion, troops threatened to cancel orders for about 450 cases of cookies. The council subsequently removed discussions about birth control and abortion from the program.

Unmarried young women who attend church regularly are less likely to get pregnant than those who do not attend church. A national survey indicates that church-going women aged 17 to 20 are also less likely to have an abortion, says Frank Mott, a sociologist at Ohio State University. He did find, however, that unmarried women who attend church and have a child are not more likely to want to keep the baby than those who do not attend church.

Three congregations in Minnesota and Iowa have left the American Lutheran Church (ALC). The pastors of the churches say the Commission for a New Lutheran Church is not sensitive to the views of conservative Lutherans. The commission is planning the merger of three Lutheran bodies: the ALC, the Lutheran Church in America, and the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches.

A California teenager convicted of shooting his father will spend two years of his sentence building schools and preaching the gospel in Hong Kong. Robert Moody, convicted of voluntary manslaughter, claimed that God told him to kill his father to protect his family from sexual abuse. Moody, 19, will spend the first two years of his five-year probation working with Youth With a Mission.

The Montgomery County (Md.) Council has voted to ban discrimination against homosexuals in employment, housing, and public accommodations. The bill generated a bitter dispute between fundamentalists and the local gay community. As a partial compromise, the law allows employers to refuse a job to a person who advocates homosexuality if the job involves working with minors of the same sex.

More than two dozen doctors sent a letter to President Reagan, agreeing with his statement last January that fetuses suffer pain during an abortion. The letter responded to a recent statement by Dr. Erwin Nichols, a spokesman for the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Nichols said there is no evidence that fetuses feel pain early in pregnancy.

The Boy Scouts of America has introduced a new religious emblem for Hindu scouts. The Dharma emblem will reward advancement in Hindu knowledge and spiritual growth. The Scouts have emblems for 17 other religions.

Postal officials are investigating the theft of 69,600 pieces of mail addressed to Oral Roberts. The mail was discovered in a commercial storage building in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The missing letters contained about $1.5 million in checks. Police estimate as much as $250,000 in cash may have been removed from the envelopes.

The Director Of Keston College Wins The Templeton Prize

An Anglican priest who heads a center for the study of religion and communism will receive this year’s Templeton Foundation Prize.

Michael Bourdeaux, founder and director of Keston College in Kent, England, will receive the $210,000 prize next month. Donated by John M. Templeton, a Presbyterian layman, the Templeton Prize is the world’s largest annual monetary award. Past recipients include Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Billy Graham, and Mother Theresa.

“Michael Bourdeaux has … highlighted the suffering of those under exile, prison, or psychiatric hospitals and has given a strong injection of hope to those who have shown the costly witness to the truth,” the foundation said in its citation. It added that Bourdeaux and his colleagues have “developed one of the most crucial links in religious freedom between East and West.”

“I think that Keston College has a significant role to play in the future formulation of international Christian relations,” Bourdeaux says. “The prize is a confirmation of what we are doing. We shall be more self-confident in stating what we believe.”

For the past 15 years, Bourdeaux—an Oxford graduate—and his colleagues have conducted their research in defense of religious rights on a shoestring budget. “The financial aspect of the award is extremely important to Keston,” Bourdeaux says. “We have only just begun to build up any kind of reserve and have been living from day to day.”

Although the prize money was awarded to Bourdeaux personally, he intends to use it to benefit Keston. The $210,000 will be invested as a family trust, and each year the income from the trust will be given to the college. Bourdeaux says he plans to designate the first year’s income for a building addition to the Keston College headquarters.

Bourdeaux took up the cause of beleaguered believers in communist societies in 1959 when he spent a year at Moscow State University. There he encountered Russian Christians who pled, “Be our voice in the West.”

He returned to England and began not only to speak for Soviet Christians but also to enlist other scholars to form the research organization that came to be called Keston College in 1974.

Although Keston is well known for its publicity of Christians in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the organization has broadened its scope to include China and many other Communist-dominated countries. Pursuing its unofficial motto, “the right to believe,” Keston monitors the situation of Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists as well. The college has been a primary source of information about many Christian dissidents, such as Soviet Baptist pastor Georgi Vins and the Russian Pentecostalists known as the Siberian Seven.

The significance of Keston College has long been recognized by Christians in communist countries. One Soviet Baptist wrote, “It is a great shame that many do not understand the mission of Keston College.… Through Keston College, the Lord preserves many souls in his holy hands in countries where religion and religious liberty are scorned and where the Creator himself is scorned.”

Bourdeaux has spoken and written extensively to enhance Western understanding of religion in communist countries. In addition to his six books, Keston has produced numerous other publications, including the scholarly journal Religion in Communist Lands and a biweekly news service.

The organization has affiliates in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. Charles Little, chairman of Keston U.S.A., says the recognition of Bourdeaux through the Templeton Prize “will bring benefit in raising consciousness in the U.S. about the plight of people in the Eastern bloc.”

ANITA DEYNEKA

If a Christian school opened shop just when the public schools around it began integrating, must the Christian school recruit minority students to prove it is not racist? That question, which arose more than 10 years ago in Mississippi, was debated last month before a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C.

The controversy dates back to a lawsuit filed in 1971. Several black families in Mississippi asked a court to deny tax-exempt status to church-run schools known to discriminate by race, and to schools established or expanded in the early 1960s. The presumed racism of the latter schools, the court decided, could be disproved with “clear and convincing” actions to the contrary, such as conducting programs to recruit minorities.

Charging that the 1971 injunction was not upheld properly, the families reopened the case in 1976. Tougher court orders were issued in 1980. And they were reaffirmed last July in federal district court.

The Clarksdale (Miss.) Baptist Church entered the fray even though it was never named in the suit. In fact, the church already had satisfied Internal Revenue Service (IRS) examiners. The church’s day school responded to two IRS inquiries after being told it was among 51 schools that raised a suspicion of discrimination. The IRS dropped the matter, and only five schools were threatened with revoked tax exemption unless they began a program to recruit minorities.

But Clarksdale Baptist objected on principle and filed an appeal on grounds that the inquiry and the court order violate the First Amendment guarantee of religious freedom. The church, affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, is represented by noted constitutional attorney William Ball.

The church school operates in a Mississippi community of 25,000 where 60 percent of the population is black. When the U.S. Supreme Court banned prayer and Bible reading in public schools in 1963, the congregation of Clarksdale Baptist Church responded in the same way many fundamentalists did—it opened a Christian school. That is how the church’s pastor at the time, Lucius B. Marion, paints the picture.

But those pushing for public school integration said they saw a different motive at work. The church opened its school in the fall of 1964, just when desegregation got under way in Mississippi. At first, the church school offered only first and second grades, the same grades targeted for public school integration that year.

“The religious character of an institution does not preclude the possibility that it is also racially discriminatory,” the church school’s opponents point out. Clarksdale’s current pastor, Donald R. Dunavant, agrees. But he says his church and school, though they are all white, are vigorously opposed to racial discrimination.

“The crux of the matter comes down to whether the state can dictate how a church runs a ministry,” Dunavant says. Forced recruiting of minority students would constitute “court-ordered evangelism,” he says, since every aspect of the school’s program incorporates the beliefs of the church. Requiring it to advertise for minority students mandates expenses and energy not germane to the church’s main mission; and shouldering a burden of proof sullies the church’s name and reputation, he says.

Supporters of the court order say it is the government’s duty to verify a religious organization’s entitlement to tax exemption. They cite the U.S. Supreme Court precedent set last year in the Bob Jones University (BJU) case. That decision held that nondiscrimination is a “compelling state interest” that overrides even sincerely held religious beliefs that include racial bias.

In the BJU decision, the high court gave the IRS authority to revoke the South Carolina school’s tax exemption because of its policy against interracial dating and marriage. Even the Reagan administration, in a brief filed by the Justice Department, sided against Clarksdale Baptist because of the BJU decision. Supporters of the Clarksdale school have tried their best to wrestle out from under the comparison.

Constitutional attorney Ball says Clarksdale’s case is different. “They hold a Calvinist view,” he says. “They’re out to convert everybody and may not exclude blacks from their religious mission.

“If blacks do not attend the church’s school, let it be remembered that neither do they attend the Amish schools of Pennsylvania or Hassidic schools in Brooklyn,” Ball adds. He objects most strenuously, though, to the implied guilt the court order imposes on churches. “The district court has now legislated—there is no other word for it—a presumption that church schools are to be considered intentionally discriminatory.”

A federal appeals court faces the task of sorting out 20-year-old motives and suggesting IRS guidelines acceptable to all parties involved. Whether the court accepts the distinction Dunavant and Ball draw between the Clarksdale school and BJU could have major consequences for other Christian schools throughout the country.

BETH SPRING

Personalia

U.S. Senator Mark Hatfield (R-Oreg.) has received the 1984 Distinguished Service Award from the Southern Baptist Christian Life Commission. Foy Valentine, the commission’s executive director, said Hatfield’s career is characterized by integrity, vision, courage, and effectiveness. Billy Graham received last year’s award.

A Southern Baptist, Charles Kimball, has been named director of the National Council of Churches’ (NCC) Middle East office. A former director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, he will help NCC-member churches better understand the Middle East region.

Fred P. Thompson, Jr., will retire in May as president of Emmanuel School of Religion in Johnson City, Tennessee. He will become a professor at large. Calvin L. Phillips, pastor of South Side Christian Church in Munster, Indiana, will become president.

John R. Knecht has announced his retirement as president of United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. He will step down in June 1985, or sooner if a successor is named. Knecht has long been involved in ecumenical outreach.

Don D. Petry has been named interim president of CBN University in Virginia Beach, Virginia. He succeeds Richard F. Gottier who resigned for personal reasons. Petry formerly was the university’s vice-president for administration.

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