The Lively Experiment by Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda Foreword by Jon Butler

Author:Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda Foreword by Jon Butler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: undefined
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Summarizing the trend of the previous decades, a 1912 Columbia Teachers College study stated that “over the century there has been a gradual but widespread elimination of religious and church influences from public education.” In every state, the study continued, “religious instruction was either entirely eliminated or else reduced to the barest and most formal elements.” The study attributed this transformation to two factors. The first was a “conviction that a republic can securely rest only on an educated citizenship.” The second was “a sacred regard by the state for the religious opinion of the individual citizen.” Thus, by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, separation of church and state was increasingly being identified as promoting the secularization of the culture, to the dismay of conservative Protestants. Even though Catholic officials also eschewed the growing secularism of the time, they were now the beneficiaries of church-state separation, at least with respect to the decline of Protestant religious exercises in the public schools. Meanwhile, educators and liberal Protestants and Jews came to embrace this more expansive understanding of church-state separation.[28]

This broader view of nineteenth-century history demonstrates that separation of church and state, in a sense, was an equal-opportunity offender. For Catholics, it meant that the government would not fund religious education. For Protestants, it increasingly meant that the public schools had to stop affirming Protestant values and become secular. To be sure, separationism was never used as a cudgel for attacking the legitimacy of evangelical Protestantism, as nativist groups did against Catholics during the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, Catholic officials softened their condemnation of church-state separation, although most still argued that the no-funding rule promoted a form of discrimination against Catholic schools. At the same time, evangelical Protestants found themselves increasingly at odds with the courts’ application of the principle to other contexts, such as religious exercises in the public schools and government-sponsored religious displays. Today, most criticism of separationism comes from conservative Protestants who argue that it has diluted the culture’s religious values.

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