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Religion and the Schools
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12955 |
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EDITORIAL
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| Issue
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5 / 1987 |
1,092 Words |
| Author
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Morton A. Kaplan
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Federal Judge Brevard Hand's decision that declared secular humanism to be a religion - thus undermining the legitimacy of textbooks in Louisiana schools that expressed that viewpoint - warmed the cockles of the hearts of Southerners who felt that their way of life was being undermined by Supreme Court decisions. Yet it outraged most legal scholars who recognized, as did the judge, that it challenged long-established Supreme Court precedents and declared to be a religion what they think clearly is not.
Unlike Judge Brevard, I do not believe that whether secular humanism is regarded as a religion is central to the issue in dispute. However, I should like to note in passing that it is not necessarily absurd to regard it as a religion, although I do not reach this conclusion myself.
It is not altogether clear what makes a body of belief a religion. If the assertion of a deity is required, then Buddhism, which clearly is a religion, would not be regarded as such. Is a sense of the holy required? Buddhists pray and most secular humanists do not. But then not all believers in a God pray. Deists such as Thomas Jefferson did not pray, except perhaps as a cultural exercise. If religion consists of a body of beliefs concerning the nature of the world and of proper moral behavior, then secular humanism would be a religion. Some regard Marxism as a religion.
To examine this issue from a constitutional perspective, I think we first have to inquire why the First Amendment to the Constitution established freedom of religion and prohibited the federal government from establishing religion. Many Americans had fled to the New World to escape the established religions of Europe and the religious wars that attended disputes over the establishment of religion. The object of the amendment was to prevent the federal government from establishing an organized church as the state religion and, thereby, to escape the debilitating religious quarrels of Europe.
One may ask why the same prohibition was not placed on state governments. Perhaps conceptions of federalism played a role here as all the first ten amendments applied only to the federal government. But the purpose of the First Amendment was beyond any dispute.
The early practice accorded with its purpose. God is mentioned on American currency. Congressional sessions opened with invocations to God. Clearly no barrier between religion and the federal government was intended or manifested in our early history. I express here no opinion on the desirability of this state of affairs, but recite only the undisputed facts.
The incorporation doctrine applied to the Fourteenth Amendment by the Supreme Court placed upon the states the same constraints the First Amendment had placed on the federal government with respect to religion. But the interpretation of the First Amendment and constitutional practice remained substantially unchanged. One may disagree with the Court's use of the doctrine of incorporation. But some use of it seems clearly reasonable, and it is of such long-standing that there would have to be an overriding reason to challenge it.
Only gradually in the twentieth century did the Supreme Court change the interpretation of the First Amendment to invoke a wall of separation between the
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