Peter N. Herndon
In the Puritan colonies of New England, education was an integral partner to one’s faith. In 1647, the Massachusetts legislature passed an historic law that required a school in every Massachusetts town. The statute began with a reference to Satan being active in keeping men from a knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, and was therefore ordered
“…that every township in this jurisdiction, after the Lord has increased them to the number of fifty householders, shall then forthwith appoint one within their town to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write and read.”(quoted in Fraser, pages 10-11)
The Puritans were committed to an educated citizenry; this education would have as its goal the inculcation and preservation of their Christian faith. To be able to read was to have the power to understand God’s truth as recorded in the Holy Scriptures. Young children learned their alphabet by reciting the rhymes for each letter contained in the
New England Primer.
Each letter was coupled with a Biblical lesson from A (“In Adam’s Fall, we sinned All”), through Z (“Zacheus he did climb the Tree, Our Lord to see.”) Education was an essential part of one’s faith. The public schools were the place to teach not just three, but the
Four
R’s: Reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic
and
Religion.
Elsewhere in the colonies in the 1600’s and 1700’s religious instruction in schools promoted the dominant values of society as a way of passing these values down to succeeding generations. In rural Virginia, the official Anglican-Episcopal state church existed until the time of the Revolution. Although society was less structured than in Massachusetts, the Virginia legislature passed laws that threatened parents with fines if they did not send their children for religious instruction under the auspices of the local church officials. The Connecticut and New Haven colonies followed the Massachusetts model of required religious instruction in the public schools. In 1683, Pennsylvania’s law required parents and guardians to instruct their children to read and write “so that they may be able to read the Scriptures and to write by the time they attain to twelve years of age; and that when they be taught some useful trade or skill, that the poor may work to live, and the rich, if they become poor, may not want.” (quoted in Fraser, page 12) In Pennsylvania, at least, there were practical elements mixed with the biblical ones.
The emphasis and enforcement of laws varied from colony to colony. It was up to the Protestant denomination in power to establish religious instruction guidelines that would bring up the youth of the colony in a way prescribed by their own religious beliefs. According to one historian, Sidney Mead, the thirteen original colonies were basically “a collection of holy commonwealths” enacting various religious laws and offering little toleration for minority faiths, with the exceptions being William Penn’s Quakers in Pennsylvania and Roger Williams and the Baptists in Rhode Island. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, worked hard to end Virginia’s two centuries old Anglican religious establishment, and were able to pass a law in 1786 giving all religious faiths equal footing, and removed the favored status given to the Anglicans.
By the time of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, the question was this: was there one single state church that would work for the entire new nation? Could one religious model, say the Puritan one in Massachusetts, get the support from the Presbyterians, Baptists, Anglicans and Quakers who also believed their models were superior? Clearly there had to be compromise. And the compromise was that no one church would dominate. There just were not enough votes for any one faction to win. Remarkably there was very little debate over the adoption of Article VI that stated: “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” Just two years later Congress approved the First Amendment, with language that made it clear that a national established church was not in the cards for the new nation.
So why the continued debate over the place of religion and public schools? Didn’t the First Amendment clearly forbid the government from getting entangled with religion in schools? The answer is contained in the first five words of the Amendment--”"
Congress
shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion….” Not until the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 were the protections of the Bill of Rights applied to the states. And it was up to the states to administer the public schools, not the federal government. It is significant that the United States Supreme Court remained silent on school and religion for another eighty years until 1947, when the Court chose to rule on its first establishment case in schools (
Everson v. Board of Education)
. It has only been since the mid-twentieth century that the battle of church and state within schools has been fought out in the Supreme Court arena. With that said we return to religion in schools following the passage of the Bill of Rights in 1791.
The compromise that allowed for religious freedom and disestablishment proved a victory for the diverse religious groups that populated the new nation. As a result of this compromise, the established churches gave up an important aspect of their power, the power to control public education. Why was this power so important? Many in the churches firmly believed that power over education was the power to shape the religious and moral values of future generations. Without this power to educate from a biblical viewpoint, many religious leaders would argue not only were the foundations of the church at risk, but so were the moral foundations of the state.
As early as 1776, future President James Madison warned of church-state entanglements and wrote into the Virginia Declaration of Rights that “all men should equally enjoy the fullest toleration in the exercise of religion.” Early on in the nation’s history, as President, fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson made it clear that, in his view, there was an essential need to keep religion and government interests separate. The following oft-quoted letter to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut in 1802 contained this warning:
-
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man
-
and his God, … I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between church and state.
-
(quoted in Alley,
Without a Prayer
, page 36)
Jefferson always saw this wall of separation as a very high one. Unlike his predecessors, Washington and Adams (and his successors to the Presidency) he refused to call for an national celebration for thanksgiving and prayer, on the constitutional grounds that it was a matter for religious groups, not the President, to determine. Despite the compromise made by establishment churches during the Constitutional Convention, and despite warnings from President Jefferson, Protestant religious doctrine continued to influence public education well into the nineteenth century.