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Tennessee Textbook Decision Protects Freedom of Conscience
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12206 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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2 / 1987 |
2,001 Words |
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Thomas R. Ascik
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Nothing could be more indicative of the distortion in church-state relations in this country than the pervasive impression that the fundamentalist Christian parents in the Tennessee textbook case were seeking to force their own religious view on the school system. In fact, they were seeking exemption from the anti-Christian value imposed on them by the school system. It is more than a little ironic to see these parents stand accused of opposing American pluralism when a true pluralism in their school system would almost certainly have made their suit unnecessary.
Despite the widespread surprise that a federal judge could have given serious consideration to the complaints of the parents, U.S. District Court Judge Thomas G. Hull found that "essential constitutional liberties" were at stake when he ruled that the public school system in Hawkins Country, Tennessee, must accommodate the religious objections of the parents.
The essential constitutional liberty implicated in the case is the free exercise of religion, a right guaranteed by the First Amendment. The "free exercise clause" is not as well known as its First Amendment cousin, the "establishment clause." In fact, much of the misunderstanding surrounding the case seems to be a consequence of interpreting the court's free-exercise rationale in establishment-clause terms.
Since 1984, U.S. church-state jurisprudence - and public discussion of church-state relations - has been dominated by the landmark Everson v. Board of Education decision of the Supreme Court. In that decision based on the establishment clause, the court invented the "wall of separation" between church and state and purported to establish the public schools as "neutral" with respect to religion and irreligion. Before Everson, it had been commonly thought that the establishment clause only required neutrality among various religions but that it did not require government neutrality towards religion nor between religion and irreligion. Since 1948, most of the main church-state cases, such as school prayer and government aid to nonpublic schools, have been establishment-clause cases.
Neutrality impossible
The consequences of the Everson "neutrality" doctrine, as extended in subsequent court cases, are some of the dominant phenomena in education today. That neutrality between religion and irreligion has proven impossible and that Everson in fact resulted in a victory of the profane over the sacred in American public education is now the basis of two separate and opposite controversies in public education. In Mobile, Alabama, a group of parents is pressing the establishment-clause contention that the historical consequences of the attempt at neutrality have caused irreligion (secular humanism) to become a de facto established religion in public schools, On the other hand, the Tennessee parents succeeded in their free-exercise contention that the same irreligion was preventing them from practicing their own religion.
That the sacred has been almost completely excised from American public education is now beyond question. It has been definitively documented by three different studies of the treatment of religion in public-school textbooks. In 1985-1986, studies by New York University professor of psychology Paul Vitz; Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, a major supporter
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