Divided, We Stand
America's long struggle to balance church and state isn't getting any easier
Although Americans became even more religiously diverse and zealous over the next few decades, there were only minor struggles about the place of religion in public life. That all began to change when the first public schools were founded in the 1820s. Americans were forced to confront the question of what kind of religious principles should inform the moral instruction of children in these schools. The solution was nonsectarianism: the teaching of a set of principles thought to be shared by all Christian sects. In practice, this consisted largely of reading the Bible without imposing any kind of doctrine.
Fair share. But reading the King James Version of the Bible seemed unmistakably Protestant to the Catholic minority, whose numbers topped 1 million by the mid-19th century. And as they founded their own schools, Catholics argued that they deserved state funding as much as the allegedly nonsectarian schools did. Meeting with repeated rejection from state legislatures and the growing hostility of immigrant-bashing nativists, most Catholics eventually made peace with official public-school nonsectarianism, viewing it as a necessary step toward assimilation.
Ultimately, though, the strongest challenge to America's cautious embrace of religion in its public life would come not from groups who objected to its Protestant coloring. It would come, instead, from the champions of an ideological form of secularism, which combined scientific skepticism with stringent views on the incompatibility of religion with liberal values such as tolerance and pluralism. Its adherents would increasingly claim, often through the courts, that the only acceptable views in the public sphere--whether in the educating of young minds or in the making or interpreting of laws--were secularist views.
Giving special impetus to the rise of this ideology was the haunting memory of the Civil War. The fact that combatants on both sides used religion to justify their pro- or antislavery positions made a number of prominent intellectuals, including William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and John Dewey, determined to find a philosophy that, as Louis Menand writes in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Metaphysical Club, would "make it harder for people to be driven to violence by their beliefs." Known as pragmatists, they sought to create a society that was more tolerant of divergent convictions. "It wasn't part of their project to secularize the public sphere," says Menand. "They were addressing the fanaticism that, at its worst, religion can cause. Pragmatists thought that even if beliefs were absolute, we have to think about them in a pragmatic way--through debate and testing."
Scientific faith. But the nuance of the pragmatists' position was almost impossible to sustain. The spread of Darwin's ideas boosted a quasi-religious faith among intellectuals in the power of science to explain everything. At the same time, explains Julie Reuben in The Making of the Modern University, some of the most prestigious universities, long the source of the country's spiritual education, were seeking to banish religious dogmatism from the curriculum in favor of professional academic disciplines, themselves imbued with the values of scientific objectivity. Some university presidents believed their institutions could have a moral influence without their religious ties, but by the 1930s most of the nation's leading universities had essentially banished religion to the extracurricular areas of student life. The more-educated Americans gravitated toward the more-liberal aspects of their religious traditions, if they remained churchgoers at all, and slowly a rift opened between them and many less advantaged Americans.
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