There’s a cause group on Facebook called “Put Christ Back Into Schools.” I’ll wait while you decide whether to join up. Done? Okay, let’s move on.

The Cause

This group espouses the following two principles, which I shamelessly copied verbatim from their site.

1. Allow Teaching of and only the Bible by teachers at any time to students anytime.
2. Allowing the Bible (and only the Bible) to be an elective in all schools, and not forced upon.

Continuing on, they state:

We believe every teacher should have the right to teach the Bible at any time.

Please note: To clearify, this group is for teaching of the entire Bible, and only the Bible.

According 1st Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, every person has the right to religion. Why is praying/reading of the Bible not allowed in most schools?

The last question is the interesting one. Why is praying / reading of the Bible not allowed in most schools? I’ll take on the challenge of answering that here.

First, neither prayer nor reading the Bible (or any other holy text) is disallowed per se. Courts in the United States have consistently held that religious expression by students cannot be suppressed or abridged unless it can be shown to cause substantial disruption. What is disallowed is school sponsored prayer or Bible reading, even when it is ostensibly student-led.

Agents of the State and the Establishment Clause

The trick is that education is compulsory in the United States, and for this reason public schools are provided using public funding (i.e., our money). The schools are an institution of the government, and teachers and staff are acting as agents of the government.

Even so, prior to Reconstruction the individual states were free to do more or less what they wanted in this regard. The passage of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution applied the restrictions of the 1st Amendment to the several states via its “due process” clause. The historians and lawyers will correct me here if I’m incorrect, I’m sure.

Anyway, the 1st Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The first two clauses are the “establishment” clause and the “free exercise” clause, respectively. The free exercise clause protects students who wish to pray. The establishment clause restricts what teachers, administrators, or other agents of the government can do and, importantly, what they can use their positions to promote.

So, in summary, this is what has been interpreted by the courts (consistently, I might add) to prohibit school-sponsored religious activities.

The Courts

Daily prayer and Bible readings continued long after Reconstruction ended. In particular, there was a daily Bible reading and devotional at my public junior high school. So why doesn’t this continue?

The answer is that there have been court cases that have ruled that this is not permissible. There seems to be a misconception that those pesky atheists, led by the pesky Madalyn Murray O’Hair were the cause of all the trouble. Not (entirely) true.

The challenges to Bible reading and prayer that make up the case law were predominantly brought by religious people, and usually Christians. Some cases of note are the following.

In Weiss v. District Board, 1890, Catholics objected to the use of the King James Bible in Wisconsin Public Schools. I assume everyone knows the story of the formation of the Church of England, and why Catholics would prefer a translation such as the Douay-Rheims be used.

This case was later cited by Justice Brennan in Abington School District v. Schempp, 1963. This is actually the case where the Supreme Court articulated the ban on school-sponsored Bible reading. Schempp was a Unitarian, and here’s where Madalyn O’Hair shows up. She had a separate case that was consolidated with Schempp’s.

Back to prayer. In Engel v. Vitale, 1962 (the previous year), the Supreme Court ruled that school sponsored prayer violated the establishment clause. The plaintiff’s were primarily rabbinical organizations who objected to opening the school day with a prayer.

The Engel v. Vitale decision has since been extended in a variety of cases, and it is to many of these cases that most recent attention appears to be paid. For instance, in Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe, 2000 the Court ruled that a school policy sanctioning student-initiated and student-led prayer at school events violated the establishment clause. This action was brought by Catholic and Mormon families. Note that the school policy was held to violate the Constitution, not the prayer itself.

In the majority opinion written by Justice Stevens, the Court objected to prayer:

[...] on school property, at school-sponsored events, over the school’s public address system, by a speaker representing the student body, under the supervision of school faculty, and pursuant to a school policy that explicitly and implicitly encourages public prayer [...]

In short, the student was held to be acting as an agent of the school, and thus of the government. Teachers, administrators, and staff cannot act by proxy through students.

The Court’s position is nicely summarized in the “Lemon Test” arising from Lemon v. Kurtzman. A government action is deemed unconstitutional under the establishment clause if it fails to pass all three prongs of the test:

1. The government’s action must have a secular legislative purpose;
2. The government’s action must not have the primary effect of either advancing or inhibiting religion;
3. The government’s action must not result in an “excessive government entanglement” with religion.

Solutions?

I personally believe it is not necessary to have prayer or Bible reading in the public schools. We have churches and, for that matter, private religious schools. The real issue hinges on compulsory education and public schools.

I would suggest that the members of this particular cause instead consider supporting the elimination of or alternatives to public schools to disentangle the federal government from education altogether. If we wish to retain compulsory education (and most of us probably do), then we could institute a voucher system or other mechanism to provide more school choice.

I’ll close with the following quotation, that I believe summarizes my point quite nicely.

[...] we should at least be able to see that our interest would be best served not by asking the state to promulgate our values but by forbidding the state to promulgate any values at all. If the state can espouse some value that we love in spite of evidence and reason, it can, with equal justice, espouse others that we do not love.

– Richard Mitchell, The Underground Grammarian, v. 6, n. 7