Paying the Words Extra: Religious Discourse in the Supreme Court of the United States.

Neutrality has become a complicated word. This was not always true. In 1947, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black confidently asserted that the government's primary duty with respect to religious belief was to avoid passing laws which "aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another." Another justice used the phrase "strict and lofty neutrality as to religion." The issue at hand, whether taxpayers should provide children attending Catholic schools with bus transportation, did spark great controversy, but the principle outlined by the Court, that governmental bodies must remain neutral with regard to religion, quickly became legal orthodoxy.

Warren Nord's thoughtful analysis of religion's role in public education reflects an emerging dispute over exactly what the term "neutral" entails. Nord persuasively argues that educators in public institutions exclude religious points of view. At times this exclusion means ignoring the ways in which religion continues to shape human behavior and history. More frequently, teachers, textbook authors, and administrators assume religion's irrelevance. They proclaim that humans are wholly self-interested beings (in economics courses), that evolution is purposeless (in biology courses), and that students must decide, by themselves, what positions to hold on such controversial matters as sexual behavior or drug use. All of these claims, Nord points out, exist in some tension with the normative judgments made each week in many churches and synagogues. The cumulative result is an implicit endorsement of unbelief, a message to students that religious faiths merely reflect personal, seemingly irrational, choices.

Nord's basic thrust will be familiar to Commonweal readers. Stephen Carter's treatment of law and religion, The Culture of Disbelief, asked liberals not to close the door to religiously inspired arguments in the public realm; George Marsden has recently argued that universities need to consider religious points of view in a genuinely multicultural curriculum. Nord's contribution to this literature is a remarkably clear account of the secularization of modern intellectual life. In just a few chapters, Nord ranges from Descartes to the modern university, distilling a vast philosophical and historical literature.

What also makes Religion and American Education distinctive is its reformist zeal. (Relatively few treatments of Kant and Hegel also include content analyses of home economics textbooks used in North Carolina schools.) Nord proposes a required course in religion for all high school students. Students would read texts from the major religious traditions, become aware of religious approaches to knowledge, and use theology as a backdrop for analysis of contemporary problems. Children in elementary school would develop "religious literacy," while colleges would place the study of religion near the center of a liberal arts education.

These proposals are not unreasonable. Nord's tone throughout the book is measured, and he evenhandedly evaluates objections to his curricular reforms. Even so, Nord's conviction that "religion" courses will counter the secularization of American education reflects a teacher's instinctive turn toward course syllabi when confronted with a social problem. American schools are increasingly diverse. Pity the instructor charged with surveying even the "major" religious traditions represented in her classroom, leaping from Augustine to the Qur' an to the Plains Indians to Joseph Smith, all between January and June, and in the hope that Thursday's class will not be canceled for a pep rally. The cacophony of contradictory voices present in any such course would seem to reenforce, not dispel, the notion of any religious tradition as one in a series of name brands. The considerable virtue of such classes is their ability to reduce ignorance, but only churches and synagogues themselves--through liturgy, religious education, and other means--can present faith traditions as ways of life, not simply sets of propositions.

Frustration with contemporary notions of neutrality also marks Winnifred Fallers Sullivan's interpretation of a 1983 Supreme Court decision, Lynch v. Donnelly. The Court's majority opinion, authored by Chief Justice Warren Burger, permitted city officials in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to construct a Christmas creche in the hope of luring holiday shoppers downtown. A creche in modern America, Burger maintained, merely acknowledged a secular holiday. Aid to religion was "indirect, remote, and incidental." Justice Sandra Day O'Connor agreed with the result but offered her own reasoning, while Justice William Brennan's bitter dissent termed the creche a "distinctively sectarian" symbol, one that unacceptably breached the wall separating church from state.

For Sullivan, these differing opinions prove that "the separation of church and state... is, as conceived in the language and culture of the writers of the Constitution, impossible." Warren Burger looks at a creche and sees a generic holiday symbol. William Brennan finds a marker of the Incarnation. Judges thus become theologians, and public discussion of religion speeds toward unresolvable shouting matches.

Sullivan's diagnosis is astute, as is her careful reading of each justice's opinion. Her remedy is less clear. More than any particular result she advocates a sort of legal anthropology, with judges self-consciously attempting to view religion in the eye of the particular beholder, not treating it as a static phenomenon. Easier said, one might add, than done, especially if legal opinions are to avoid resembling term papers in history of religion courses. Sullivan's own mock effort in Lynch v. Donnelly, for example, concludes with the less than ringing charge that "government [should] resist any religious expression that reifies a particular interpretation of what religion is...." That is, the creche must go.

Like Nord, however, Sullivan shrewdly identifies a fault line running through much of contemporary American society and intellectual life. Fifty years ago, most judges and educators agreed that religion, whatever it was, needed to be barred from public institutions. Metaphorical walls were understood to separate church from state. As young people spend more time in school, however, and as federal courts become involved in a greater range of questions, it becomes evident that segregation of religion, and religion alone, is itself a theological position. That some analysts could contemplate vouchers for parents whose children attend private schools, but draw the line at vouchers for parents whose children attend private, religious schools seems to prove the point. Neither Sullivan nor Nord thinks government should promote prayer in the schools, or build nativity scenes. (And Nord expresses reservations about school-voucher programs.) What they do request is a more sophisticated conversation about these matters, a conversation that both authors do a good deal to advance.