Contents

LIFE'S EDITORIAL POSITION March 15th, 1963
MADALYN MURRAY O'HAIR'S RESPONSE April 12th, 1963
LIFE'S EDITORIAL STAND April 12th, 1963
LIFE'S EDITORIAL POSITION

THE BIBLE--BETTER IN SCHOOL THAN IN COURT

It is America's custom to hand its toughest issues to the Supreme Court, thus ensuring the Court's recurrent unpopularity. Such an issue was the subject of oral argument before the justices last fortnight. They were asked, by a Pennsylvania Unitarian and a Maryland atheist, to outlaw the reading of the Bible and the saying of the Lord's Prayer in the public schools of those two states. When the decision comes down it could have even more seismic political effects than last year's famous New York School Prayer decision (LIFE July 13). As one or two justices have indicated, it is a good time for the Court to re-examine the premises on which it has been deciding cases of this kind up to now.

In the New York case the Court outlawed a prayer written by the Board of Regents. Justice Black saying for the majority that "it is no part of the business of government to compose official prayers." The Regents' prayer had little to recommend it but its innocuous nonsectarianism, though millions of Americans were shocked to learn that any prayer could be unconstitutional. The Bible and the Lord's Prayer have quite a different place in the national conscience. Yet the constitutional issue is much the same.

The constitutional issue is the alleged conflict between religious devotions under public auspices and the First Amendment, which says that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." The authors of that amendment would have seen no such conflict in these cases. Congress has made no law establishing a religion, certainly not in the sense in which the Congregational Church was the legally established church of Massachusetts, for example, as late as 1834. The exercise of religion in all states, including Pennsylvania and Maryland, is freer by any test today than it was when the Bill of Rights was passed. Until the 1830s our publicly supported schools were almost exclusively run by clergymen, with a heavy dose of religion. As the public school system matured, Horrace Mann prescribed Bible readings for them as necessary for a rounded education. (The Catholics with their different view of the Bible, appealed to the courts against this practice in vain.) Since then the public schools have become more and more secular, their purpose having shifted from the salvation of souls to the literacy of the electorate. In addition, the 14th Amendment (1868) made the religious prohibitions of the Bill of Rights applicable to states as well as to the government. that is why the role of religion in the public schools has become a modern political issue and can claim to be a constitutional one as well.

Since 1930 the Court has so treated it in a series of decisions: Cochran, Barnette, Everson, McCollum, Doremus, Zorach, Engel. Yet instead of clarifying the issue, these decisions have muddied it, leaving school boards and citizens in mounting perplexity. Free textbooks and bus rides for parochial school students are O.K.; religious instruction for public school students is O.K. but not on school property, and not compulsory, or maybe not if the lack of compulsion embarrasses the student. The father of the Unitarian students in Pennsylvania case refused them their option to leave class during the Bible reading because he didn't want them to be considered "oddballs." (Had the early Unitarians been the conformist, could they have captured Harvard?) The precedents are by now so confining that the Pennsylvania school board lawyer felt obliged to argue as though the Bible were not a religious book, just a source of morality! He thus "denigrated" the Bible (said Justice Goldberg) without explaining how morality, even if it is proper state business, can have other than a religious source.

Such is the morass into which the Court has led us. One could scarcely be surprised if it should now make a break for the opposite shore--that of complete secularization, a literal wall of separation" between public property and piety of any kind. Justice Douglas, in the New York prayer case, made it clear that he even regards the Marshal's words in his own court--"God save the United States"--as unconstitutional. This logic could lead to the outlawing of "In God We Trust" on our coins and a similar phrase in THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER.

What could be the result of this radical break with the American past? It might have one salutary result: to force some parents to take more care for their children's religious education at home and church. Complacent Protestant parents could no longer feel that the public schools (in one lawyer's words) are a -kind of Protestant institution to which others are cordially invited." Yet their description scarcely fits the vague, brief and vestigial echoes of their Protestant origins which some students hear in our public schools today.

The Court is not obliged to decree complete secularization in our schools. In a ringing address in Utah last fortnight, Dean Griswold of the Harvard Law School denounced the New York decision as a species of legal "absolutism" which "is more likely to lead us into darkness than to light." He and others have found at least three grounds on which the Court could have reached a different decision-and still can. First. school devotions may be none of the Court's business, since there is no real compulsion or the nonreligious minority, who by making a federal case of it are seeking rather to limit the majority's religious freedom than to protect their own. Second, some matters are best left to states and communities anyway; education is certainly one of these; and to divorce education from religion altogether is to stultify both. But third, the U.S. system of religious freedom has never meant that the government must be hostile or even indifferent to religion.

Religion in America," said Tocqueville, "takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must be regarded as the first of their political institutions . . . Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. Washington, Jefferson, Adams and most of the founding fathers, whether Christian or deist, said much the same. So has the Supreme Court. But, says Justice Douglas, "If a religious leaven is to be worked into the affairs of our people, it is to be done by individuals and groups, not by the government." To which the State of Pennsylvania replies: if you outlaw the Bible from our schools, the government is working a religious leaven out of our affairs where the people have put it and want it. The government would thus declare itself not neutral but hostile to religion.

Said the Maryland Court of Appeals: "Neither the first nor the 14th amendment was intended to stifle all rapport between religion and government." If absolute logic stifles that report, millions of Americans are going to find themselves in a different America from the one they have believed in. Unless the Court in its next decisions in this area, can throw a blinding new philosophical light on this problem, satisfactory to parents, educators and civil libertarians alike, it had best let the school boards work it out themselves as they have been conscientiously trying to do.

Like the school desegregation decisions of 1954, this is basically a political decision that must take account of custom and belief as well as justice and legal precedent. But the 1954 decisions, unpopular though they were in many quarters, have been generally supported by the moral sense or the nation. The complete secularization of public schools would be not merely unpopular--the Court always has to risk that--but it would offend the nation's natural piety and sense of its own past.

reprinted from LIFE, March 15th, 1963.

MADALYN MURRAY'S RESPONSE

"I am the Maryland Atheist"

Sirs:

I am a principal in one of the cases now pending before the Supreme Court concerning reading of the Bible and prayer recitation in the public schools.

The atheist's position (I am that Maryland atheist you mentioned) is one arrived at after considerable study, cogitation and inner search. It is a position which is founded in science, in reason and in a love for fellow man rather than in a love for God.

We find the Bible to be nauseating, historically inaccurate, replete with the ravings of madmen. We find God to be sadistic, brutal, and a representation of hatred, vengeance. We find the Lord's Prayer to be that muttered by worms groveling for meager existence in a traumatic, paranoid world.

This is not appropriate untouchable dicta to be forced on adult or child. The business of the public schools, where attendance is compulsory, is to prepare children to face the problems on earth, not to prepare for heaven--which is a delusional dream of the unsophisticated minds of the ill-educated clergy.

Fortunately, we atheists can seek remedy through our Constitution, which was written by deists (not Christians) who had enough of religion and wanted to grow toward freedom from it, not enslavement in it.

Madalyn Murray
Baltimore, Md.

reprinted from LIFE, April 13, 1963

LIFE'S EDITORIAL STAND

THE EDITOR'S STAND

Life agrees that separation of church and state is the best possible method of keeping peace in a religiously pluralistic society. But the separation need not be absolute. Our government is simply forbidden to legislate "respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." This allows ample room for official religious observances such as Thanksgiving Day. We agree with Justice Douglas' statement: "We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being," and "when the state encourages religious instruction . . . it follows the best of our tradition." Such observances are a far cry from "an establishment of religion." As for the free exercise of religion, children who object to hearing the Bible read in school are free to absent themselves. It seems to us therefore that no constitutional right is being invaded and that the Supreme Court should not be asked to upset these old school customs.

reprinted from LIFE, April 13, 1963