The past two years have seen a sharp rise in religious controversy and polemic, centering chiefly around aid to religious schools, released time, and the general issue of the separation of church and state. But it is hardly a secret that this public discussion has been accompanied by a storm of discussion raging privately among the various denominations. Will Herberg joins the debate with his own strongly felt convictions, which we daresay will evoke equally strong counter-argument. His present article is the latest in a series of expressions of diverse opinions on the church-state issue which have appeared in these pages in the past several years, and which we intend to continue. Readers further interested are directed to J. M. O’Neill’s “Church, Schools, and the Constitution,” and Milton R. Konvitz’s “Whittling Away Religious Freedom” in our June 1947 and June 1946 issues respectively.
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More than once in recent months, Rabbi Philip S. Bernstein has had occasion to note with concern the marked deterioration of Protestant-Catholic relations in this country and to warn Jews against exacerbating these tensions. Indeed, the widening conflict within the Christian community may well constitute a major problem far overshadowing in its immediacy the more familiar problem of Jewish-Christian relations. Many thoughtful observers, Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, are disturbed over the cleavage, but few display any real conception of the gravity of the threat which this increasing divisiveness holds for democracy; and fewer still show any clarity on the fundamental issues involved. Some sober, searching thinking seems to be called for if a sharpening of the conflict is to be avoided.
I
Although it would be a mistake to see the situation primarily in terms of isolated issues, it is still worth noting that the most persistent occasion for ProtestantCatholic conflict in recent years has been the issue of church and state in education. Even in this problem many aspects are intertwined. There is first the question of basic attitude to the public schools, particularly in connection with the religious day schools which the Catholic Church and some Protestant denominations are conducting. But there is also the question of the role of religion in the public school pattern, and finally the most hotly debated issue of governmental assistance to non-public schools. Each of these questions, moreover, is loaded with all sorts of implications that range far beyond the particular points of conflict.
We must remind ourselves that the American public school system is preeminently the creation of American Protestantism. It was established because of the deep Protestant concern for popular education and assumed its characteristic “secular” form because of the American Protestant distaste for ecclesiastical control. This was particularly true of the Congregationalists in New England and of the Baptists and Methodists in the more outlying parts of the expanding nation. To this very day, these groups feel a deep emotionalœone might even say, proprietaryœinterest in the public school, despite the vast changes that have taken place in the inner character of public education in the course of the past half-century. And yet American Protestantism, for all its strongly affirmative attitude to the public schools, has in the past two decades become increasingly troubled over certain developments in public education and has been trying, though not very successfully, to understand and deal with the problems that these developments have created.
When the public school system first came into being in this country, it was nonsectarian rather than non-religious. And nonsectarian in those days meant all-Protestant, since non-Protestant groups were of relatively little social or cultural importance in most parts of the nation. It was taken for granted that religion, in the generalized Protestant sense, was the foundation of education, though the schools were not of course to be used to favor one Protestant denomination over another. In its ethos, the public school, as well as the community at large, was Christian and Protestant.
To a minor extent, this is still the case in some parts of the country. But by and large, under the impact of newly emerging social and cultural forces, the public school system has become something very different from what it was three-quarters or even half a century ago. By the end of the great immigration the country had ceased to be almost entirely Protestant; Catholics now make up a large part of the population, and so do Jews in certain urban centers. For these and like reasons, nonsectarian may no longer be equated with a generalized Protestantism; indeed, it has rapidly come to mean dissociation from religion as such. An important contributing factor has been the very considerable secularization of the Protestant consciousness itself in recent years. Administratively, public education today reflects the changing structure of the American community, with Catholics and Jews occupying positions of influence side by side with Protestants. But even more striking is the change in the spirit of public school education, which today is no longer religious, neither Catholic, nor Protestant, nor Jewish; it is, by and large, secularist, even militantly so. (I use this term to signify an outlook on life in which man is held to be sufficient unto himself and God disappears as an unnecessary, outmoded concept.) The most influential educational philosophies and centers of teachers’ training are self-consciously secularist, and so is educational practice in almost every part of the country. From nonsectarian, the public school has become “neutral” in matters of religion. As a matter of fact, many charge that this neutrality is no neutrality at all, that in effect our schools positively indoctrinate a substitute faith, arguing: “If you teach no religion at all, you are teaching a new cult, secularism.”
It would be a mistake to think that most Protestants in this country have such a picture of the situation. Most of them take the “neutrality” of the public school at its face value, and indeed see little difference between what emerges from this “neutrality” and their own “liberal” Protestantism, which (I use the words of a well-known Protestant teacher) is “sometimes not to be distinguished from humanism or mere ethical culture.” But many important Protestant leaders are deeply concerned, even alarmed. This concern, however, has resulted in very little, in part because of a confusion of counsel, but primarily because Protestant concern about the schools has been thoroughly bedeviled by an all-absorbing preoccupation with the Catholic “menace.”
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Catholics, on their part, never took the American public school to their hearts as did the Protestants. It was not of their creation, and did not in the beginning, any more than it does today, accord with their philosophy of education. Catholics cannot see any proper education for Catholic children that is not religiously grounded and religiously oriented, and that of course means grounded and oriented in Catholic faith. For the Catholic, therefore, the only really acceptable educational institution, particularly on the lower levels, is the church school, usually parochial in structure and administration. Indeed, probably half of the Catholic children of public school age in this country attend parochial schools; in 1947-48, there were 2,305,000 students in elementary church schools, 482,000 in secondary schools, and nearly 300,000 in more advanced institutions. The total number of Catholic schools was 10,900. The goal has never changed: “A seat in a Catholic school for every Catholic child.” This is not a matter of varying “opinion”; it is a matter of conscience and canon law.
Increasingly, certain Protestant groups, alarmed at the effects of public school “neutralism,” have moved in the same direction. Protestant religious day schools are by no means new to this country; in 1830, there were some 400 Lutheran schools in the United States, but these schools were motivated as much by ethnic cultural reasons (to preserve the German “language and heritage”) as by religious; and to an extent, this is still true of the “Continental” churches in this country, though decreasingly so. The present-day movement toward religious day schools under Protestant auspices is predominantly of a religious character. Compared to the vast Catholic structure, the Protestant day schools still amount to very little: in 1951-52, the over-all figure was 2,904 schools, almost entirely elementary, with about 190,000 pupils.1 But this represented a 61 per cent increase over 1937, and the movement is definitely gaining momentum. Its philosophy is well expressed in the recent pronouncement of President Henry Van Dusen of Union Theological Seminary: “Unless religious instruction can be included in the program of the public school, church leaders will be driven increasingly to the expedient of the churchsponsored school.” The Protestant position, even where it favors church schools, is by no means so categorical as the Catholic. On the whole, Protestants regard the church school not as something desirable in itself, but as something which they may some day have to accept because of the “religious failure” of the public school. Protestantism is still “for” the public school, but no longer without reservations.
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The spread of the religious day school has brought to the fore the problem of the relation of the government to such schools. This problem cannot be solved simply by repeating the hallowed formula of the “separation of church and state.” It is agreed on all sides that the First Amendment definitely prohibits the establishment of an official religion, or government action in any way favoring one religious denomination over another. But does it bar any and every governmental action extending aid on an equal basis to all religious groups? To this there is no unequivocal answer. In the McCollum case (1948), the Supreme Court seemed to say yes, but that is not what it said four years later in the New York released-time case. We may leave the exegesis of Supreme Court decisions to the proper authorities; it is, however, a matter of historical fact that neither in the minds of the Founding Fathers nor in the thinking of the American people through the 19th and into the 20th century, did the “separation of church and state” imply unconcern with, much less hostility to, religion on the part of the government. Indeed, the promotion of religion was always held to be one of the prime objects of public education. The Northwest Ordinance, a classical expression of early national concern with education, laid it down that: “Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged. . . .” And Jefferson himself, writing thirty-one years after the ratification of the First Amendment, stated in a discussion of public education: “It was not, however, to be understood that instruction in religious opinion and duties was meant to be precluded by the public authorities, as indifferent to the interests of society. On the contrary, the relations which exist between Man and his Maker, and the duties resulting from those relations, are the most interesting and important to every human being, and the most incumbent on his study and investigation.” Public education in this country generally operated on this principle during the earlier part of its history.
It is simply not true, despite the widespread notion to the contrary, that there exists or has ever existed in the United States a “high and impregnable wall of separation between church and state” (Justice Black’s words). The federal government has always given, and continues to this very day to give, direct aid to religious bodies, though of course on an equal and non-discriminatory basis. It pays the salaries of chaplains, religious functionaries selected by their churches and assigned to the various branches of the armed services; it has appropriated and spent money, at various times and in various ways, to spread Christianity among the Indians; it exempts churches and church institutions from taxation. As for church schools, provided they meet the specified educational standards, they are fully recognized and protected by law (Oregon case, 1925); their certificates and credentials are received on a par with those of public institutions; they are the recipients of considerable financial assistance from the public authorities (textbooks, Cochran case, 1930; bus transportation, Everson case, 1947; school lunches, National School Lunch Act, 1946). The question, therefore, is not so much whether church schools may be aided by public authorities, as in what way and to what extent they may be so aided; this question, however, cannot be answered with abstract formulas; there is, moreover, wide disagreement on it, not only among but within the various denominations.
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The position of the Catholic Church is that church schools (of all denominations, of course) are morally entitled to receive aid from public funds on a par with the public schools because they too perform a public educational function. In addition to religious instruction, which is itself of public concern, these schools, it is contended, carry on a program of general education specified by public authority and accepted as fulfilling a public requirement under the compulsory school laws. Catholic parents complain that they are saddled with a double burden, being obliged to support the schools which their children attend as well as the public schools of which they cannot in conscience make use. Catholic spokesmen are emphatic in denying that they are “against” the public schools. They are quite ready to support them for the use of those who find them acceptable; they do, however, ask that their own schools, which they say occupy a “semi-public” status, should also be supported.
This attitude is more or less in line with the practice prevailing today in Canada, Great Britain, and other countries, where denominational schools regularly receive support from the public funds. And it has been advocated in this country by many non-Catholics, by some even who are devoid of any religious concern but are moved by considerations of what they take to be equity and the public welfare. I recall a surprisingly large number of people with whom I discussed the matter, people of all shades of opinion, who, “off the record” and “in principle,” substantially endorsed the Catholic claim, but hastened to add that it was out of the question to advocate it in public at this time. And indeed it is, as Catholics themselves acknowledge. As a matter of immediate strategy, therefore, Catholics have concentrated on federal legislation to supply the so-called “auxiliary” services (social services, textbooks, transportation, etc.) to parochial school children along with those in the public schools.
Here they have come into conflict with much of official Protestant opinion. Protestants have tended to denounce all proposals to extend auxiliary services to church school children on the ground that they are merely disguised forms of “direct aid,” thus constituting a breach in the “wall” that is alleged to separate church and state. Some Protestants are so conscientiously committed to this view that they specifically include their own institutions among those which they demand should be barred from public aid; Baptist leaders have protested against government assistance to their own church hospitals, and there have even been voices raised against the public maintenance of military and prison chaplains. But on the whole, the crusade for the preservation of the “wall of separation” between church and state in education as elsewhere is conceived by Protestants as a defensive campaign against Catholic “aggression.”
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This feeling, which most Protestants seem to share, is the key to the current embitterment of Protestant-Catholic relations. “The nub of the whole matter,” comments the Information Service of the Federal (now National) Council of Churches in its September 10, 1949 issue, “clearly seems to be the fear on the part of non-Catholics of the political power and purposes of the Roman Church.” This defensive psychology appears to be rapidly permeating American Protestantism. Practically every Protestant leader with whom I discussed the matter referred in vague but disturbed terms to the “ominous growth” of the Catholic Church in this country and expressed grave concern over what the future might bring. One, in fact, called my attention to the “portent” of a Catholic majority (52 per cent, he said) in Holland, a classic land of Protestantism. “In another generation,” he exclaimed almost in anguish, “we’ll be a minority; America too will be Catholic.”
This fear of Catholic domination of the United States would at first hardly seem to be borne out by statistics. In the twenty-fouryear period from 1926 to 1950, church membership in this country increased by 59.8 per cent, as against a 28.6 per cent increase in population. The Catholic Church grew by 53.9 per cent, but in the same period Protestantism increased by 63.7 per cent. Most of this increase, however, was accounted for by the expansion of the Baptists, especially the Southern Baptists. The churches affiliated with the National Council, the authoritative national federation of Protestant (and some Eastern Orthodox) churches, grew only by 47.7 per cent, falling short of the total increase as well as of the comparable Roman Catholic growth. It cannot be denied that in those parts of the country in which Protestants and Catholics come into direct contact, particularly in the urban centers, the Catholic Church has been making notable headway.
More important even than the numerical growth is the comparatively vigorous institutional and cultural life of the Catholic Church, its really amazing skill in presenting itself attractively to the public, and the intellectual prestige it has lately acquired from the work of a number of artists, philosophers, and writers, mostly European. Catholic churches are full, where Protestant churches so frequently remain half empty. Catholic thinking, at least as seen from the outside, is aggressive and self-confident, whereas so much of American Protestant thinking, except on the very highest seminary levels, is thoroughly enfeebled by the abstractions of “liberalism” and “humanism.” Catholic religiosity has “substance” and numinous power, whileœhere one can cite ample testimony from Protestant self-evaluationœmuch of American Protestantism is little more than an emotionalized ethic and gospel of social service. And finally, Catholicism possesses unity and a fighting front, while Protestantism is fragmented, divided, and apparently incapable of any positive cohesion. Protestantism, in short, has lost the initiative; it has been thrown on the defensive, and what is worse, it has developed a defensive minority-group psychology in which it sees itself threatened on all sides. All this is not my own judgment, although I would not disagree with it; it is substantially the analysis presented to me by a distinguished Protestant theologian, who expressed himself more concerned over the “loss of morale” in Protestantism than over the plots the Catholic Church might be hatching.
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Not that there is no ground whatever for concern over Catholic power in the United States. Catholic power does constitute a problem for American democracy. It constitutes a problem first in the sense in which every potent special-interest group makes the workings of the democratic government more complex. Beyond that, it is a problem because the traditionally formulated political and social aims of the Catholic Church sometimes run counter to what most Americans hold to be the democratic way of life. The claims and pretensions of the Church to legal primacy, if not monopoly, in religion, education, and family relations, seem to many, as they do to me, incompatible, in their authoritarianism, with the liberal, pluralistic foundations of American democracy.
Equally disturbing is the Church’s tendency to confuse, or rather to equate, the spiritual interests of Christianity with the political and social, even economic, interests of the Vatican, the hierarchy, and the Church establishment. Catholics in America have sometimes employed the preponderance of power that has fallen to them in certain localities and states in ways that have given much offense to other citizens.
All this may be granted. And yet the Protestant reaction has surely been far out of proportion to any conceivable threat or provocation. There has been, in ordinary Protestant thinking on the Catholic issue, little or no sense of the relativities of politics, little or no sense of the very considerable gap that often separates the phrases of a creed from the actualities of a concrete situation. Everything is painted in the strongest colors without discrimination or mitigation, so that the resulting picture is often grossly false even when some of the details are in themselves not very far from the truth. “Most American non-Catholics,” Reinhold Niebuhr points out, “have a very inaccurate concept of Roman Catholic political thought and life. In this concept, it is assumed that if Catholics anywhere had their way, they would at once build a political structure as much like Spain’s as possible. . . . Some forms of deduction proceed on the assumption that on any and every question a religious group’s political attitude is dictated by its basic creed. Others do not even bother to start with the group’s actual basic tenets but with the tenets which the group is imagined to hold.” (“Catholics and Politics: Some Misconceptions,” The Reporter, January 22, 1952.)
Consider the vast excitement over the “Vatican appointment.” Whatever may be thought of the wisdom or the timeliness of President Truman’s proposal to appoint an envoy to the Vatican, only by the wildest stretch of the imagination can it be regarded as unconstitutional or a threat to the religious liberties of any group of Americans. Yet American Protestantism reacted to this proposal with a violence and fury that have given thoughtful Protestants pause. The only unity of which American Protestantism seems capable, it has been sadly noted, is unity against Rome. The major “Vatican lesson,” Social Action (Congregational) for May 1952 ruefully points out, is that “the psychological basis of much of American Protestantism lies in a negative rejection of Roman Catholicism. . . . The one emotional loyalty that of a certainty binds us together as Protestants … is the battle against Rome.”
It is this Protestant negativism and defensiveness that has opened the way for the strange alliance between a considerable section of American Protestantism and the forces of militant secularism, an alliance organizationally represented by the Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (POAU), launched some years ago under the auspices of Christian Century and a number of high Protestant dignitaries. It is this negativism and defensiveness that has made possible the “similarity” which a Federal Council of Churches report notes “between official Protestant pronouncements and the typical secularist position on all points discussed [in relation to religion, education, and the schools].” It is this that has driven American Protestants to interpret the separation of church and state to mean the abdication by religion of its responsibilities in large areas of social life and the abandonment of those areas to non- and anti-religious influences and control. American Protestantism has, in fact, conceded the primary secularist claim that religion is strictly a “private affair” and that culture and social life are to be built on humanistic foundations. But humanism and secular autonomy are now on the wane in many quarters, and so, by an astounding reversal of intention, American Protestantism, itself more religiously concerned today, has withdrawn as a religious influence in many areas, and thus has actually left the field free to the Catholic Church, which has naturally not failed to take full advantage.
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This anomalous situation is very well illustrated in the attitude adopted toward public education. The theory behind public education is traditionally very different in the United States and Great Britain from what it is on the Continent, and the difference is instructive. In Britain and America, the government engages in public education because experience has shown that this is the only way to provide adequate educational opportunities for the mass of the people; the government is obliged to do what individual and group effort has not been able to do. But wherever individuals or groups (non-governmental agencies) can offer the proper facilities, they have the clear right to compete with the government and are entitled to recognition and encouragement by the public authorities. In other words, the Anglo-American system is pluralistic. In France and in other Continental countries, however, the concept of public education, at least as propounded by its accredited spokesmen, is something altogether different. Public education is there looked upon not as a device for making up the inadequacies of individual or group effort, but as a “natural” activity of the state designed primarily to inculcate a common doctrine and create a uniform mentality among the citizens. From this point of view, private individuals and non-state institutions (churches, for example) really have no business in the field of education; they are rivals of the state and such rivalry is held to be intrinsically “antisocial,” even though under the circumstances it may have to be grudgingly tolerated. Of late, we have become increasingly aware that this doctrine, despite its popularity among Continental liberals and socialists, and its spread in this country, has a marked authoritarian, even totalitarian, potential.
The Supreme Court decision in the celebrated Oregon case (Pierce v. The Society of Sisters, 1925) made explicit the fundamental American doctrine on the question: “… the right of parents to direct the rearing and education of their children, free from any general power of the state to standardize children by forcing them to accept instruction from public school teachers only.” To this may be added a reference to a more recent decision (Prince v. Massachusetts, 1944) in which the Supreme Court declared: “It is cardinal with us that the custody, care, and nurture of the child reside first in the parents, whose primary function and freedom include preparation for obligations the state can neither supply nor hinder.” This is a doctrine that goes beyond particular Supreme Court decisions since it lies at the foundation of any tenable conception of constitutional democracy and the limited-power state.
American secularist educators are by no means reconciled to this doctrine. They still feel that the public school is the only “proper” educational institution which all children should somehow be required to attend in order that they might be protected against “divisive cultural influences” and helped to acquire a “common outlook.” These educators are constantly on the watch for some way of circumventing the intent of the Oregon decision. “A more satisfactory compulsory education law,” Professor John L. Childs of Teachers College, Columbia, has suggested, “might be one in which the state would require each child to spend at least one half of the compulsory school period in the common, or public, schools. Many Americans hope that states will pioneer in legislation of this sort.” Max Lerner is even more forthright. He has declared that “the first step [in breaking down the separation principle] was taken when the Supreme Court decided that a religious group could not be compelled to send its children to the public schools, and it could run its own schools at its own expense.”
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In way, of course, Max Lerner is right. State recognition, toleration, and protection of religious schools is a breach in any absolute separation of church and state. But such absolute separation was never contemplated by the Founding Fathers, is not written into the Constitution, and has never been the policy or practice of the federal or state governments; it is simply the eager dream of those who have no patience with the traditional faiths and desire them replaced by their own non- or anti-religious faith. The startling thing is that so much of Protestant opinion in recent decades has tended to go along with this concept of separation, to the point indeed of applauding Paul Blanshard when he denounces Catholics for affirming that they would disobey a law banning religious schools and compelling them to send their children to the public schools. Surely it needs very little unbiased consideration to recognize that this attitude, even though held by Catholics, is thoroughly in line with the best of democratic tradition, which has always tended to check pretensions of the state to a monopoly of social and cultural life.
The fact of the matter seems to be that in its inordinate preoccupation with defending itself and America against Catholic aggression, American Protestantism has surrendered intellectual leadership to non-religious forces and has been fighting the battle for the separation of church and state under essentially secularist slogans. In making “Blanshardism” its semi-official philosophy, it has done no service to Protestantism, to Christianity, or to the cause of religion in general.
Nor has it done any service to democracy. For “Blanshardism,” or rather the anti-Catholic animus it articulates, seems to me to constitute a much more serious threat to our democracy than any of the horrendous Romanist plots that Paul Blanshard has been so fond of conjuring up to make our flesh creep.
“This kind of reasoning,” says Reinhold Niebuhr, who has never hesitated to criticize Catholic teaching and practice, “is highly damaging to the mutual understanding upon which a democracy must rest. Democracy requires more careful and discriminate judgments about friend and foe, particularly since a political foe upon one issue in a vast welter of issues may be a friend on another.” American Catholicism is not without its share of responsibility for what Milton Konvitz has called the “frightening growth of Protestant-Catholic tensions,” but the major share, it seems to me, must be laid at the door of Protestantism, which has permitted itself to be maneuvered into an unreal, contradictory, and panicky position.
II
What has been the Jewish position on these questions? Strictly speaking, of course, there is no single Jewish position, even less so than there is a single Protestant position. But there are the pronouncements of responsible Jewish leaders and institutions, and the stand taken in particular cases by accredited Jewish agencies, from which a “Jewish position” is often inferred by other religious groups and the public at large. Insofar as such a “Jewish position” may be thus inferred, it is one that, in my opinion, should give grave concern to every American Jew.
It can hardly be denied that the intervention of most Jewish bodies in the current church and state controversy has generally not tended to allay the sharpening religious cleavage in American life. It has often operated on principles in some ways even more extreme and basically secular than those of the Protestant guardians of the “wall of separation.” It has shown little understanding of the realities of the educational and cultural situation as it confronts the religious parents, Christian or Jewish, who take their faith seriously as the substance of life.
Religious leaders, lay educators, and parent groups have in recent years become increasingly disturbed over the religious vacuum in public education, which is felt to have serious moral and spiritual consequences. With due consideration to constitutional limitations, a number of ways have been proposed to strengthen the foundations of the public school by compensating for the religious emptiness that is devitalizing it. President Van Dusen of Union Theological Seminary and former Dean Weigle of Yale have suggested a “common core” program of religious education; others have looked to various schemes of dismissed or released time to provide a partial remedy. All of these suggestions are animated by the desire to preserve the public school for its undoubted merits as a vehicle of cultural unification and to obviate the necessity of establishing separate church schools.
How has the most vocal Jewish opinion reacted to these proposals? Almost entirely in the negative, and often violently: spokesmen representing a broad segment of organized Jewish community life applauded the Supreme Court’s invalidation of released time in the McCollum case, joined in the opposition to the New York releasedtime program and criticized the Supreme Court’s validation of it, opposed Bible readings in schools, opposed the New York Board of Regents’ suggestion of a daily prayer, and of course opposed every variety of aid, direct or indirect, to religious schools. I am not trying to make a case for any of these plans or programs; they may all be very properly criticized as impracticable and ineffective. Indeed, it may even be contended, with considerable show of reason, that under present-day American conditions, with the bewildering diversity of cult that characterizes our “pluralistic” society, the practical difficulties in the way of any acceptable program of religion in the schools are quite insuperable. Perhaps that is so; nevertheless, all of the plans and suggestions, however impracticable in themselves, do point to a problem that cannot be ignored, especially by those who are so much concerned with repelling attacks on the public schools.
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What answer have Jewish spokesmen had for parents and educators? Only this: school and religion must be kept rigorously apart; no religion in the school or in any conceivable association with it; let the schools inculcate in the children “basic moral principles” and “social ideals,” the place for “religion” is the home and the church. Leaving aside the psychological unreality of this kind of mechanical division of labor, which flies in the face of any view of personality held by modern educators themselves, how can such a reliance upon secularism to do the work of moral education be supported? It is, in fact, not supported. It is simply taken for granted that “basic moral principles” and “social ideals” are autonomous, and can and should be established, validated, and inculcated without reference to religion. Nor is any consideration given to the actual realities of the American situation. Many argue that the literally godless education the child receives in the typical public school can be supplemented by religious teaching in home and church. But is it not usually the school, where the child spends so much of his waking day, that exerts the primary formative influence on his mind, so that whatever reactive influence there is, is likely to proceed from school to home, rather than the reverse? The school establishes the priority and prestige of ideas, and the child who becomes habituated in the school to thinking about things exclusively in secular and naturalistic terms is more than likely to regard the religious ideas he finds floating around in the average home or church with indifference and contempt. Even if the home could “compete” with the school for the soul of the child, the very idea of such competition is somehow shocking.
I am not suggesting that all parents feel this way or that the school is exclusively guilty in what has been called the “religious illiteracy” of the American child. On the contrary, many parents, including many Jewish parents, see no place for religion in education, or for that matter in life, and are quite happy at the extrusion of religion from the schools. Even those parents who have a religious interest only too easily tend to overlook their own failure and the failure of the church in their readiness to blame everything on the school. This must be admitted, and yet it remains a fact that to large numbers of our citizens the present pattern seems increasingly questionable. For it operates to make the schools into instruments acting toward and sanctioning the rejection of religion, whereas we Americans are, as the Supreme Court put it in its opinion on the recent New York releasedtime case, “a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.” Need we recall that while the propaganda of atheism is protected under the Constitution, non- or anti-religion has never enjoyed and does not now enjoy the same public status as religion? Anyone who doubts this might try proposing that the federal government commission atheist or “humanist” chaplains on a par with Jewish and Christian! The public school system, in effect, reverses this relation, and makes non- or anti-religion the established “religion” in public education. No wonder that dissatisfaction with the public school has been growing.
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Operating under a concept of the separation of church and state more rigid and absolute than even that held by doctrinaire Protestants, most Jewish community leaders have paid little heed to these realities of the situation. A few, however, particularly among the Orthodox, have attempted something positive. Feeling it undesirable or impossible to change the character of the public schools, and realizing the feebleness of most after-school religious education, they have undertaken to set up religious day schools. The movement is not yet very extensive. In 1945, there were perhaps 75 such schools throughout the country; today, there may be over 150, almost all operating on the elementary or pre-elementary levels; attendance has increased rather more than proportionately. Some Jewish religious leaders outside the Orthodox camp have endorsed the idea, but lay opinion seems generally opposed. Significant too is the line taken by some of its religious advocates in justifying it. In a recent article defending Jewish day schools, the Orthodox author was very much concerned to point out that after all Jewish day schools were utterly different from analogous Catholic institutions because the latter, the Catholic schools, employed their own religiously oriented textbooks, while the Jewish schools used the regulation public school texts and curricula, merely adding a program of “Jewish knowledge.” Note how the “separation of church and state” is now duplicated within the Jewish school: all subjects of everyday, worldly concern, presumably not only mathematics, but also history, the social sciences, literature, and the humanities, are taught from the same textbooks and in the same secular spirit as in the public schools; to this is added some “Jewish instruction,” which must in the nature of the case be peripheral and irrelevant. So far has the spirit of secularism permeated Jewish thinking, even that which considers itself strongly religious.
It is worthwhile to pause at this point. I think no informed observer will care to deny that of all comparable groups in this country Jewish community leaders, including leaders in the synagogue, appear most secular-minded in their public attitude on matters of church and state. In what other American religious community, for example, could the proposal be advanced by respected religious leadersœ out-Blansharding Blanshardœthat American democracy be made the vehicle of a “common American faith” to be inculcated in the public schools with all the paraphernalia of a religious cult? Yet that is substantially the idea that a number of influential Jewish religious leaders have been advocating for years. By and large, those who speak for the American Jewish community, whether they be rabbis or laymen, religious individuals or men and women avowedly secular-minded, judging by their public expressions, seem to share the basic secularist presupposition that religion is a “private matter”œin the minimizing sense of “merely private”œand therefore peripheral to the vital areas of social life and culture, which latter are held to have nonreligious foundations. Jewish religion, if it is affirmed at all, is affirmed as something to be added to the common life, not as something that pervades and is inextricably involved in every aspect of it. Separation of church and state is thus at bottom advocated as only one phase of the separation of religion from life.
How has this come about? How could this isolation of religion from life have arisen in a group with whom religion has traditionally been conceived as coterminous with life? Basically, it seems to me, it is due to the conviction, widely held though rarely articulated, that because the Western Jew achieved emancipation with the secularization of society, he can preserve his free and equal status only so long as culture and society remain secular. Let but religion regain a central place in the everyday life of the community, and the Jew, because he is outside the bounds of the dominant religion, will once again be relegated to the margins of society, displaced, disfranchised culturally if not politically, shorn of rights and opportunities. And it is well to note that by “religion” in this context, it is Christianity that is meant, and by Christianity primarily Catholicism. The Catholic Church still remains in Jewish eyes the standard form of Christianity and the prime symbol of Christian persecution. Deep down, it is Catholic domination that is feared. Such are the anxieties that beset many American Jews, and it cannot be denied that they have much justification. Religion has so often with good conscience been turned into an instrument of exclusive privilege that one can well understand the feeling of those who believe that democracy requires the eviction of religion from public life and the thorough secularization of society.
Yet in the long run such a view is shortsighted and self-defeating. Jewish survival is ultimately conceivable only in religious terms; and when its raison d’être is whittled down to a few “supplemental” factors, survival itself loses much of its meaning. Furthermore, a thoroughly “de-religionized” society would make Jewish existence impossible. But a “de-religionized” society is itself for long impossible. Ultimately, man finds the autonomy which secularism offers him an intolerable burden, and he tends to throw it off in favor of some new heteronomy of race or nation, of party or state, that the idolatrous substitute faiths of the time hold out to him. In such idolatrous cultures, the Jew is inevitably the chosen victim; the lesson of history and contemporary experience seems clear on this head. The way of the Jew in the world is not and never will be easy; it will certainly not be made any the easier by his throwing in his lot with an increasingly total secularism, which both invites and is helpless to withstand the demonic idolatries of our time. The American Jew must have sufficient confidence in the capacity of democracy to preserve its pluralistic libertarian character without any absolute wall of separation between religion and public life. After all, the Jew is no less free in Britain, where church and state are more closely linked.
The fear felt by Jewish leaders of the possible consequences of a restoration of religion to a vital place in public life is what throws them into an alliance with the secularists and helps make their own thinking SO thoroughly secular. They feel the problem primarily in terms of the Jew’s status as member of a minority group. The minority-group defensiveness, which we noted in contemporary Protestantism, is of course far more intense among Jews; indeed, it may probably be said to be the most influential determinant of the policy and activities of many leading Jewish groups in this country. Public assistance to religious schools, it is felt, would mean overwhelmingly aid to Christian, primarily Catholic schools, with Jewish schools sharing to a relatively insignificant extent. Released or dismissed time, in most communities, would mean the invidious isolation of a handful of Jewish children amidst large numbers of their Protestant and Catholic schoolmates.2 Reading the Bible would necessarily mean reading the “Christian” Bible, that is, the King James version, even if only Old Testament passages were read.3 And so on. In every case, the “intrusion” of religion into public life, it is feared, would result in situations in which Jews would find themselves at some disadvantagegreater isolation, higher “visibility,” an accentuation of minority status. Uneasy memories of past persecution and oppression are stirred up. The most elementary defensive strategy would seem to dictate keeping religion out of public life at all costs; hence the passionate attachment of American Jews to the secularist-Protestant interpretation of the principle of separation of church and state. It is a question, however, whether defensive strategy is, after all, the highest wisdom of Jewish existence and survival.
Another factor in the situation must be mentioned, as it applies to both Protestants and Jews. It is perhaps best formulated in the brilliant mot of Peter Viereck: “Catholic-baiting is the anti-Semitism of the liberals.” How true this is anyone can see by scanning the week’s supply of “liberal” literature. For some such “liberals,” Catholicbaiting is a clever device of anti-anti-Communism. Of course, Communism is a menace, they tell us, butœ the “of course- but ” sequence is characteristicœ but there is “also” the Vatican, the “center of world reaction.” To many more, anti-Catholicism is simply a syllogism of liberal logic, hallowed by decades of liberal tradition; after all, didn’t the Pope “endorse” fascism, and isn’t McCarthy a Catholic? It matters little that the facts are quite otherwise, that the Catholic labor and social program in America, for example, is as advanced as anything the country can show; that the Catholic Church is one of the most important forces fighting Communist totalitarianism on a world scale; and that the attempt to equate the two as like perils to American democracy on the ground that both alike are authoritarian systems is dangerous nonsense and could lead to disaster, should it ever come to influence national policy. Stereotyped “liberal” slogans seem far more appealing than the most obvious facts can ever be, especially when they permit one to work off one’s fears, prejudices, and aggressions in an approved fashion. How else account for the great popularity of Mr. Blanshard’s extremist Communism, Democracy, and Catholic Power, among so many “liberal” Jews and Protestants?
And so, through a combination of historical memories and fears, the negativism of minority-group defensiveness, and the insidious operations of the “liberal” equivalent of anti-Semitism, it has come about that Jewish intervention in the current controversies over church and state has only too often tended to strengthen the forces of secularism and to intensify the friction between Catholics and Protestants. Here we would do well to heed Rabbi Bernstein: “Do not take any satisfaction from the current Catholic-Protestant frictions. … A poisoned atmosphere of divisiveness and distrust will engulf us.” (Time, May 5, 1952.)
III
The interests of religion, of democracy, and of sound community relations without which American democracy cannot survive, demand a rethinking of the whole situation. America is predominantly a land of minorities; that is its uniqueness, its strength, but to a degree also its weakness. Some way must be found in which these minorities within the national community may each freely pursue its own particular concerns without impairing the over-all unity of American life. Because American minoritiesœand in a real sense, the Protestants too constitute a minority, as well as Catholics and Jewsœare many of them religious in character, or at least religiously tinged, the problem immediately becomes one of the relation of church and state. It is in this area that we need our most serious and creative rethinking.
On the basis of my own observation, and the many discussions I have had with men and women of all creeds directly involved in the interfaith situation, I may perhaps venture some suggestions.
American Catholics must come to realize the deep suspicion with which their every move is regarded by a large segment of the American people, and admit, at least to themselves, that there is considerable historical justification for such suspicion. They should complete and clarify the reorientation on matters of church and state that is currently under way in authoritative Catholic circles in this country and is reflected in the sharp rebuke recently administered by American Jesuits to Cardinal Segura of Seville on the occasion of the latter’s attack on religious freedom. There is a new Catholic attitude, and it would be well if the public knew more about it. The Catholic Church in America would also be well advised to moderate its demands in the field of education, to curb exhibitions of ecclesiastical power in politics, and in general to do what it can to avoid inflaming the non-Catholic mind, today in an extremely nervous state.
American Protestants should make a fresh effort to overcome the defensive psychology that seems to dominate them. Such negativism is good neither for them nor for the country as a whole. They should cease making Rome the inverse criterion of everything they think or do, and above all they should rid themselves of the defeatism that has led them to surrender large areasof public life, including education in and out of the public school, to secularism. Surely Protestantism has more to offer than an intransigent determination to prevent Catholic parochial school children from using public buses.
American Jews, even more than Protestants, must rid themselves of the narrow and crippling minority-group defensiveness. Just because Jews in this country occupy such a curious “third” position between Protestants and Catholics, their responsibilities are great. We must rethink the problem of church and state, of religion and life, as it affects the Jew and as it affects the entire nation. We must be ready to abandon ancient fears and prejudices if they no longer conform to reality, and we must be ready to strike out boldly in new directions required by the times. There is no need forœindeed there is every need to abandonœthe anxious search for injuries and grievances which has characterized so much of the Jewish “defense” psychology. On the question of aid to religious schools, I do not believe we have much to fear from any of the proposals thus far suggested. On the question of teaching religion in the public schools, I have yet to see a plan that seems to me wise or practicable, and perhaps there is none. But these questions will continue to be raised by many citizens seriously concerned with the problem, and we owe it to ourselves and to them to give fair and sober thought and discussion to their point of view, without attempting to throw it out of court in advance. Should not our community leadership more openly reflect the genuine religious interest of Jews and their concern over the religioethical education of their children, which has always been strong, however confused by the felt pressures and demands (often misunderstood) of the new American environmentœa concern that every observer reports at high and rising tide in the present decade? That the question of public and private schools, and of church and state in education, can be discussed from the Jewish point of view in a sober, constructive, unprejudiced manner may be seen from Hayim Greenberg’s exploratory article last year in the Yiddisher Kemfer. We urgently need more of such thinking.
Finally all of us, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and secularists too, must realize the seriousness of the present tensions and our responsibility to do everything in our power to allay them, certainly not to exacerbate them.
Milton Konvitz is one of our best-known champions of a more rigid interpretation of the principle of the separation of church and state; he probably would not agree with much of what I have said in this article. But I think all of us might take to heart his warning, published in Congress Weekly of March 3, 1952, about the dangers of religious controversy:
Whatever strengthens this principle [of the separation between church and state] serves the interests of American democracy; but one ought to feel grave concern over the cost Americans are paying for the achievement of this valueœfor little by litde, as the wall of separation between church and state is being built up, there goes up also a wall of separation between Catholic and Protestant. While one wall strengthens the structure of American democracy, the other wall creates prejudice, misunderstanding, suspicion, and even enmityœreligious conflict which can ultimately poison the wellsprings of American democracy.
The conflict, as one sees it developing slowly but surely before our eyes, bodes ill for our society. The situation is one that calls for heart-searching and the highest reaches of statesmanship. . . . Ways must be found to maintain the separation between church and state which would not intesify religious divisions. . . . Only statesmanship and charity will lead to the discovery of such ways.
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1 It is significant that nearly a majority of the schools (1,410) are Lutheran. Seventh Day Adventists run a close second with 919. The great denominations of a pietistic castœMethodists and Baptistsœare almost unrepresented: 15 schools are listed for the latter, none for the former.
2 It has even been contended that religious instruction in public schools might be psychologically harmful to children of minority groups. However, Dr. Samuel H. Flowerman of Teachers College, Columbia, reporting on the results of a detailed study to a conference on religion in public education arranged by the Reform rabbinical association, stated that “he believed the effects were not harmful except when parents passed on an anxiety about it to their children.”
3 Thus it is that the People of the Book so often find themselves in the false position of appearing to be “against the Bible.”
