[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.e., Protestant), while ensuring that nomoney could ever go to Catholic education.56The state of Bible reading was but symptomatic of the greater threats toProtestant culture, and the hearings allowed the religious conservatives toexpress their views of the proper relation between church and state.The Rever-end James King of the Evangelical Alliance argued that the public schoolsshould advance Christian values because the nation was Christian according tolaw and tradition.King cited statements by Joseph Story, James Kent, and otherjurists who had argued that Christianity was incorporated into the law andserved as the basis of republican government.57 Stevenson, whose organizationsupported an amendment to the Constitution to recognize the lordship of Godand Jesus, readily concurred: Our institutions bear broad and deep the impressof the Christian religion.The morality which is enforced by our laws is Chris-tian morality.The offense[s] which we restrain and prohibit by law throughoutthe nation are offenses under the moral standards of the Christian religion. Based on this same foundation, the public schools should be distinctly Chris-tian: If there is any sense in which we are a Christian nation, and in which thisis a Christian Government, [then] in the same sense and to the same extent ourschools ought to be Christian. Securing devotional Bible reading was part of alarger agenda that included state enforcement of blasphemy laws, Sunday laws,and other laws for the defense of social purity according to a Christian stand-ard.Unquestionably, the religious conservatives sensed that the culture and itsinstitutions were becoming secular, and alarmingly so.58In the end, Blair s amendment fared no better than his education fundingbills.Even though Blair chaired the committee, his proposal was never broughtup for a vote.Southern Democrats opposed the bill based on their resistanceto any federal role in the operation of state-run public schools.Also, the Catho-lic hierarchy, with its political influence among northern Democrats, fiercelyopposed the amendment for its ban on funding parochial schools and itspromise of increased Protestant dominance over the public schools.59 A more 310 T HE S CHOOL Q UESTIONmodest measure to counteract the secularization of public education mighthave attracted greater legislative support.But Blair s proposal represented astep back from current understandings of nonsectarian education.Despiteproponents claims that they were seeking no change, the amendment wouldhave constitutionalized a pre-Mann view of allowable religious practices.Manypeople may have disagreed with the trend, but few wanted a return to the daysof instruction in Calvinist tenets.60 Defeat was also attributable to the work ofthe Religious Liberty Association, an agency of the Seventh-day AdventistChurch.The association was formed to battle the amendment and the com-panion Blair Sunday-Rest Bill, which would have mandated a national Sundaylaw (discussed in chapter 10).Led by the Reverend Alonzo T.Jones, who testi-fied in both hearings, the association worked feverishly against the proposalsby issuing pamphlets, holding rallies, and mounting petition drives.The asso-ciation gathered over 230,000 signatures on a petition against the schoolamendment, even though the denomination had less than 100,000 membersat that time.Facing such odds, the amendment died in committee.61The failure of the Blair education amendment highlighted the generalfrustration that conservative Protestants faced over the decline in Bible reading.As much as they attributed the cause to a cabal of Catholics, Jews, and secular-ists, all knew that the reasons were much more multifarious and systemic.Pressures to make public education professional, academically rigorous, andaccessible to children from an increasing variety of backgrounds meant thatpotentially divisive religious issues had no place in the schools.Also, Protes-tants could not agree on the issue of Bible reading.A growing number of mod-erate Protestants supported pro forma exercises or their complete abolition.Others believed that the Bible could be retained by emphasizing the literary,historical, or even scientific aspects of the text: The literary and historical studyof the Bible.[can] be taught purely from the standpoint of objective science, insisted one Bible scholar.Still others resisted compromise if the Bible wouldbe used only when its spiritual aspects were deemphasized: The use of theBible in the public schools should be devotional, not academic. Traditionalistsclung to the belief that there are great fundamental religious principles whichare tacitly admitted by all Christian people, Romanists as well as Protestants. 62This division among Protestants meant there was no consensus for how tostem the secularizing trend. The fact that the Bible is generally excluded fromthe public schools of the United States, where it was used as a book of devotionand instruction, is not to be attributed to a growing disregard for religion, summed up an editorial in Biblical World. This situation had been created bythe friends of the Bible rather than its enemies; for if the friends of the Biblecould have agreed among themselves as to how the Bible should have been T HE S ECULARIZATION OF N ONSECTARIANISM 311taught in the schools, their influence would have secured the continuance ofsuch instruction. As evidence of how intractable was the issue, Biblical Worldreaffirmed that [r]eligion and morality are primary features in a true educa-tion. But, the editorial continued, if the Bible were again to be taught in theschools as it was formally taught, the same objections would arise. In order torestore the Bible, it had to be taught the right way, relying on the best mod-ern science of religious and ethical teaching, which would recognize trueChristianity wherever it exists and be able to distinguish between essentialsand nonessentials. 63 It was but one more proposed solution to an intractableproblem.Legal ResponsesPressure to secularize public education, coupled with the absence of a uniformProtestant response, meant that Bible reading would continue to declinethrough the last decade of the century and into the next.Federal educationcommissioner William Torrey Harris summarized the situation in an 1895 gov-ernment report:[Outside] New England there is no considerable area where [theBible s] use can be said to be uniform.This condition has come aboutas much by indifference as by opposition.There has been achange in public sentiment gradually growing toward completesecularization of the Government and its institutions.Seculariza-tion of the schools is accepted or urged by many devout people whodeem that [this is] safer than to trust others with the interpretation ofthe laws of conscience.64Despite this trend, Bible reading, in one form or another, remained com-mon in many rural areas and in religiously homogeneous communities withsmall or politically powerless immigrant populations.When accommodationwith religious dissenters was unavailing, lawsuits sometimes ensued
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
