Given the growing concern about juvenile violence, the awareness that deeply religious people live longer and enjoy better health than do thoroughly secular Americans, and the belief that honesty and personal integrity are at low levels in many young people today, we are not surprised that educators are showing a new interest in religion, spirituality, and character development. Nor were we surprised when Educational Leadership asked us to write about "how U.S. public schools can address spirituality, while honoring each child's freedom of religion." The topic is important. Unfortunately, our proposals are unlikely to please most public school educators.
In part, the request reminds us of the terms foxhole religion and deathbed conversion. Society is in trouble, and God may be the solution. However, the god we talk about in such circumstances little resembles the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob worshipped by Jews, Muslims, and Christians. The reason is clear: When individuals or even whole societies want to use God to solve problems, the god they end up worshipping is not the God of the Bible but an idol of human creation. Why? The God of Western religion is, to use Paul Tillich's phrase, the ultimate ground of being; he deserves worship and obedience for his own sake and refuses to be used by his worshippers. If we try to use God to further our own schemes—even important schemes like maintaining a safe and flourishing society—we end up worshipping an idol, a false god.
To put the matter another way, the worship of God is full of meaning but has no purpose beyond itself. Catholic theologian Romano Guardini (1935) writes that Catholic liturgical worship entails learning how "to waste time for the sake of God" (p. 183)—wanting to be in God's presence just because he is God and because the most appropriate human responses to God are worship and adoration.
We live in such a busy age that many of us do not know how to waste time even with friends, children, parents, spouses—how to be with people close to us simply because being with them is good in itself. We are not being facetious when we ask whether educators—not to mention legislators and business leaders—really want students to learn about wasting time. Religion can sometimes be more than a little subversive of dominant cultural values, including our pervasive utilitarianism and busyness.
Horace Mann's Legacy
At virtually no time in the past century and a half has the public school system—which Sidney Mead (1963), the renowned historian of religion in the United States, aptly called our "established church"—been fair in terms of teaching spirituality or religion. The best historical evidence suggests that much of Horace Mann's passionate interest in the common school was driven by his fear of Roman Catholics with their "foreign" and "papist" ways and by his desire to ensure that students were taught correct—what Mann referred to as "nonsectarian"—religion and morality. Not surprisingly, this "nonsectarian" religion was virtually identical with his own Unitarianism. Initially, orthodox Protestants resisted Mann's vision of the common school, but eventually their fear of Catholicism led them, reluctantly in many cases, to support the common school movement and to overlook Mann's equal dislike of Calvinism and Roman Catholicism (Glenn, 1988; McCarthy, Skillen, & Harper, 1982).
Well into our own century, Roman Catholics were at a decided disadvantage in public schools, as were atheists, humanists, and other religious and secular minorities. As Catholic Bishop John Hughes repeatedly pointed out in the 1840s, reading the Bible without comment and engaging in moral education without reference to religious doctrine may have seemed nonsectarian to Horace Mann, but such practices were decidedly sectarian to many Roman Catholics and to some Reformed and Lutheran Protestants (Kaestle, 1983). And when these "dissenters" founded their own schools embodying their religious beliefs, public school partisans often claimed that such schools were undemocratic and divisive.
Hostility sometimes led to suppression efforts. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, several states attempted, without success, to regulate private religious schools into conformity with the public school model (Wisconsin in 1889), to force children to attend a public school for at least part of the school year (Illinois in 1889), or simply to abolish private schools (Oregon in 1922) (Randall, 1994).
This same period witnessed a gradual decline of Protestant influence in public life. After World War II, a thoroughly secular education quickly displaced Protestant domination of public education. The controversial U.S. Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 regarding state-sponsored prayer and Bible reading merely culminated a long process of secularization of public education (Carper, 1998). Proponents of such education considered it religiously neutral, but they were mistaken because secular answers to life's Big Questions—Who are we? What does it all mean? How should we live?—typically compete with traditional religious answers. Indeed, if we adopt a functional definition of religion—as sociologists and anthropologists frequently do in their analyses of culture—and ask how ultimate commitments and worldview convictions actually operate in the lives of individuals and communities, it is fair to say that public schools today are saturated with religion, but of a secular and humanistic variety.
Secular Humanism in Public Schools
We can almost hear the minds of some educators clicking shut, but this understanding of secular humanism is well-grounded. The claim that secular humanism is religious was first made not by Catholics and Protestant fundamentalist critics but by secular humanists themselves, including John Dewey (1934).
Any fair reading of most sex education, values-clarification, and home economics texts—and even many science texts—makes abundantly clear the religious indoctrination by government schools: Life is about self-fulfillment and satisfying one's personal desires rather than about learning to love God and neighbor; value claims, including moral claims, are relative and subjective rather than objective and absolute; freedom is essentially the absence of restraints rather than the result of obeying God (or, for Plato, conforming one's life to the Beautiful, the Good, and the True); autonomy ought to be a chief goal of education rather than, as traditional Jews and Christians believe, heteronomy (living under the authority of God). Biology texts seldom clearly point out the difference between embracing a naturalistic method for doing science and promulgating a metaphysical worldview that sees all life in materialistic or atheistic terms (Glenn, 1987; Johnson, 1995; Nord, 1995).
Our analysis of public education holds that far too much spirituality and religion already exist in government schools and that secular humanism is an intolerant sort of religion that brooks no compromise.
The Need for School Choice
Our next conclusion will sound even more radical: The most just way to deal with religion in government-run public schools would be to get the state out of the business of operating schools. In the broad, functional sense of the term religious, all education is inescapably religious because every coherent curriculum rests on certain foundational beliefs about human nature, what the good life is like, how we ought to live, and so forth. There is no neutral way to deal with these questions. Secular reason is not epistemologically privileged over religious reason. Postmodernists have it right when they question the hegemonic claims of Enlightenment rationalism.
Because it is unlikely that the government will stop operating schools and limit its efforts to guaranteeing the equitable funding of, and access to, education, educators should work for the more attainable goal of universal school choice. The state should give parents the economic support to enable them to choose their children's school. Such choice is clearly enunciated in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, and it is noteworthy that grassroots inner city blacks and Hispanics are among its strongest supporters. Stephen Arons (1983) sums up the current situation: "We have created a system of school finance that provides free choice for the rich and compulsory socialization for everyone else" (p. 211).
If the value of school vouchers were pegged inversely to family income, a choice system not only would respect freedom of religion and conscience but also would, for the first time, enable the poor in the United States to compete effectively for a first-rate education.
Because genuine parental choice in education is still some years away, it remains important to find fair and effective ways for dealing with religion and spirituality within our present education system. We find two proposals unacceptable. The "cafeteria" approach exposes students to a variety of religious views and then encourages them to choose the most appealing. This approach fails for two reasons. First, most students are not mature enough to make intelligent decisions about such deep matters, matters that will profoundly affect their lives. Second, teachers are not sufficiently competent and do not have enough time to teach about different religions fairly and comprehensively. Take Buddhism, for example. Those who know a little about Buddhism think that they know a great deal. When they learn more, they realize that they know almost nothing.
Another ineffective approach is to teach objectively "about" religion. Time, however, does not permit teaching about various religions in anything but the most superficial manner. And who decides what objective means? Is it objective to teach the Bible as literature rather than as scripture, as our courts have indicated is acceptable? We think not. For most Christians, the Bible is not well described as literature; it is scripture or the Word of God, and these terms carry all kinds of theological baggage that nonbelievers find unacceptable. Further, who will do this objective teaching in government schools? Will it be a Christian fundamentalist, a graduate of the Moody Bible Institute, who believes that the Bible is inerrant and that salvation is only through Jesus Christ? Or will it be a Harvard Divinity School liberal who considers much of the Bible oppressive to gays and women and believes that we must essentially rewrite the Bible for our own age?
A Released-Time Model
Within present educational structures, the only approach that will even remotely satisfy the requirements of justice is the released-time model for religious instruction introduced as a progressive reform in Gary, Indiana, in 1914. Such an arrangement permits priests, pastors, rabbis, and others to instruct small groups of students in the religious and moral beliefs of their parents. A released-time model honestly accepts that we are a religiously diverse society and that trying to teach religion and spirituality (or even about religion and spirituality) to all students in common classes will inevitably lead to distortion and indoctrination.
Consider just one dimension of the one-size-fits-all approach. Presenting students with snippets from various religious traditions inevitably carries relativistic overtones. We would never teach science by presenting students with a mix of mainstream science, astrology, Lysenkoism, and phrenology and then encouraging them to make up their own minds. We want our children taught true science, and most thoughtful parents also want them taught true morality and true religion.
When students are well established in the truth, they can benefit from gradually learning about other religious and moral traditions, a practice best left to the college years. A good deal of unnecessary controversy could be avoided if sex education, human relations, decision making, and other controversial subjects having to do with who we are and how we should live were removed from the general school curriculum and included within the released-time component.
Will children under such a released-time arrangement become less tolerant of others who hold different moral and religious beliefs? Will they become incapable of participating effectively in a democratic polity? We think not. No good evidence suggests that children educated in independent religious schools or in Catholic parochial schools (or, for that matter, children who are home schooled) are any less tolerant of people of different faiths and races than are children taught in public schools.
Jay Greene (1998) suggests that nonpublic schools, on average, show greater racial tolerance and tend to transmit stronger democratic values than do their state counterparts. This should not be surprising, because a central theological conviction of Christians is that people should come to faith in Christ not under coercion but freely. And politically, the great majority of Christians are strongly committed to a democratic polity and to religious freedom—for everyone, not just for Christians.
Sectarian—a Biased Term
Religious Americans have no monopoly on bigotry and intolerance. Indeed, we maintain that the entire discussion of religion, spirituality, and education would be greatly facilitated if educators stopped referring to religious schools, curriculums, textbooks, and students as "sectarian."
In an age sensitive to racial and ethnic slurs, our courts, even the U.S. Supreme Court, continue to use the biased formulas "religious = sectarian" and "secular = nonsectarian," even though the term sectarian has a mean-spirited heritage, including narrow-minded, schismatic, heretical, unorthodox, and rigid. Historically, people used it to —alize and to disenfranchise their religious and political opponents. For Horace Mann, sectarian referred to the wrong kind of religion; today it often refers to religion in general and in some contexts is a synonym for denominational (for example, sectarian prayers).
But on what possible grounds do our courts, media, and most educators stigmatize religious Americans as sectarians while using the far more neutral term nonsectarian to refer to nonreligious Americans? We have not yet heard a satisfactory answer to this question, just as we have never met anyone who preferred to be described as a sectarian (Baer, 1990).
In conclusion, we underscore our earlier point: If one accepts a functional view of religion, then the truth about government public schools today is not only that they are pervaded with religion of a secular sort, but also that they are thoroughly intolerant of all competitors. Schools can legitimately impose secular religion and spirituality on students (because this practice is wrongly thought to be religiously neutral), but theistic religion is completely excluded—hardly a model of religious tolerance. A released-time model, in contrast, is thoroughly consistent with liberal political commitments.
Justice demands that we move quickly toward universal school choice (Skillen, 1994). But until such a plan is implemented, the released-time model may well be the best option. Released-time would empower parents to make decisions about their children's religious and spiritual education and would go a long way toward eliminating the kinds of societal conflict that James Davison Hunter (1991) so well describes as "culture wars."
