Teaching God's Word
In the early days of the U.S. colonies and republic, children's education was explicitly structured around religious education. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, the basic curriculum was mostly secularized, but the Bible still had a place in the school day as a source for moral formation. For much of the early history of the U.S., public education was reflexively Protestant and Christian, reflecting the unspoken norms of U.S. identity. Influxes of non-Protestant immigrants in the nineteenth century, particularly into urban centers, changed the assumptions underlying educational norms. Eventually, the moralizing role of the Bible in U.S. education was questioned and, in landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision, eliminated completely. At the same time, the historical role of the Bible in U.S. education took on new relevance.
The influx of Roman Catholic immigrants in the nineteenth century led to the first major conflicts over the reading of the Bible in public schools. The question (mixed up in other issues of nativism, anti-Catholicism, and racial prejudice) ostensibly concerned which translation of the Bible to read in public schools: the King James Version, favored by Protestants, of the Douay-Rheims version, used by Roman Catholics. Roman Catholic officials bristled at their young charges being exposed to the King James and began insisting, in the 1840s, that Bible readings be removed altogether. In the 1840s, this conflict was one piece leading to riots and church-burnings in the city of Philadelphia (the so-called "Philadelphia Bible Riots" of 1844). From 1869-1872 a metaphorical "war" was waged in Ohio following the decision of the Cincinnati School Board (in an effort to recruit Catholic families into public schools) to remove mandatory morning readings from the King James Bible from public schools. Public outrage led to a case before the Ohio Supreme Court which voted, in 1872, to uphold the ban on Bible reading on a grounds of Constitutional freedom of religion. This early attempt to secularize public education by removing devotional Bible reading from schools was an outlier (and emerged not out abstract religious principals but out of conflict between Christian denominations), but was a bellwether of what would come a century later.
Generally, public schools retained mandatory Bible reading, although were more open to diverse Christian perspectives. (The rise of robust Roman Catholic parochial school systems in urban centers also relieved the pressure from the Catholic flank to remove the King James Version from the classroom.) In 1913, the state of Pennsylvania enacted a statue requiring the reading of "at least ten verses from the Holy Bible... without comment" at the beginning of the public school day. Any teacher responsible for such reading (the "teacher in charge") who neglected this duty was subject to dismissal. While at first blush this statute might look like it is instituting the reading of the Bible in schools, it is actually limiting an existing practice: by noting that the reading should take place "without comment," the regulation seeks to remove any sectarian (that is, denominational) commentary or influence from the teacher doing the reading. The Bible should speak for itself.
When the state updated the Public School Code in 1949, this regulation was incorporated without change.
In 1959, however, the statute was revised: the threat of dismissal of the responsible teacher was removed and instead students were excused from executing the reading or having to be present for the reading as long as they had a "written request" from their "parent or guardian."
What had changed over these forty-five years was the "natural" role of the Protestant, Christian Bible as part of publicly funded and structured education. In the early twentieth century, the shifting demographics following decades of immigration and national expansion had made a diverse public school population more sensitive to the varied (but still primarily Christian) viewpoints in the classroom: thus, the "Holy Bible" should be read without comment. By the 1950s, the educational culture had shifted once more. Throughout the 1940s the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that the U.S. Constitution prevailed over state constitutions and local municipal regulations; thus, the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment (so-called separation of church and state) applied in state-run public schools. The revision of the Pennsylvania statute was an early attempt to address this new legal reality.
It was ultimately insufficient, however. While the U.S. Supreme Court had taken only small steps in removing devotional Christian practice from public schools (in cases on religious education held on school grounds, or after school hours) a landmark case in 1963, Abington v. Schempp, transformed the relationship between the Christian Bible and public education.
Ellory Schempp (who later spelled his name Ellery) was in high school when he first objected to the compulsory reading of the "ten Bible verses." He argued that simply providing an exemption for some students didn't address the core problem: the promotion of Christianity in the public schools against the intention of the Establishment Clause. The Schempps enlisted the help of the ACLU to file a federal lawsuit which eventually rose to the U.S. Supreme Court (where it was joined with a similar lawsuit filed by Madalyn Murray on behalf of her son against Baltimore public schools). The Court ruled in favor of the Schempps.
The ruling had two results when it comes to the Bible and public education: first, it removed devotional biblical readings from official school activities (along with other specific religious practices, like reciting the Lord's Prayer); second, it opened up explicit space for the secular (i.e., non-religious) study of the Bible as a cultural, literary, or historical artifact. The Supreme Court noted: "Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment." Following this ruling many state-run universities for the first time began offering religious studies degrees.
While the Supreme Court's ruling was unequivocal, it was not necessarily taken up with enthusiasm in the public schools of the United States, where various forms of Christian devotion have remained entrenched. It may even be that the Supreme Court's allowance for "secular" study of the Bible has in fact left open a kind of back door to devotional bible study in public schools, particularly in some southern states. In the wake of the rise of the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition in the 1980s and 1990s, various nonprofit groups have offered up "biblical curricula" that combine historical and literary lessons on the Bible with thinly veiled evangelical Christian theology. In 1993 the nonprofit National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools was founded by a North Carolina paralegal with the goal of reinstating the Bible in public schools as a pillar of U.S. life.
On its website (which does not seem to have been updated since 2011), the Council claims to have had its "elective" curriculum adopted in "3500 schools in 41 states." An evaluation of the curriculum by biblical studies professor Mark Chancey, conducted for the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund, found it was probably not as widely taught as the Council claimed, but that nevertheless its curriculum, and other similarly sponsored bible study courses, "are taught as religious and devotional classes that promote one faith perspective over all others." Several years later Chancey evaluated another bible study curriculum, this one promoted by the Green family (founders of the Museum of the Bible), and found that, once more, the pretext of a secular biblical studies course was being used to smuggle in one-sided evangelical theology that might otherwise not pass constitutional muster.
The U.S. schoolhouse has been, and continues to be, one of the front lines of the ongoing battles framed as "culture wars": what defines "Americanness," and how is it instilled in the rising generation of new citizens? Education has never been solely about conveying information or engaging in abstract inquiry: it has always been viewed as the site of moral, political, and social formation. The Bible persists as a powerful emblem of that formation and its struggles.