Does God Belong in Public Schools?
by Kent Greenawalt
Princeton University Press, 296 pp., $29.95
IN 1925, JOHN SCOPES, a 24-year-old science teacher, violated Tennessee law by teaching his students the theory of evolution. The result was State v. John Scopes, the infamous "Monkey Trial" immortalized in the classic play and movie Inherit the Wind.
Nearly a century later, the Scopes trial still is being replayed in schoolrooms and courtrooms across the country. Today, Ground Zero in the evolution-creation conflagration has shifted to Kansas. The Kansas State Board of Education began hearings in May to consider including intelligent design in the state science standards. A nationwide coalition of scientists is boycotting the hearings. Kansas is not alone: Controversy over teaching evolution has erupted in at least 20 states.
In Alabama, Arkansas, and Georgia, the focus is on attempts to modify textbooks so that arguments for evolution are labeled clearly as "theory." And parents in Pennsylvania filed a federal lawsuit after a school board decision requiring schools to teach intelligent design. The conflict in the schools, of course, goes beyond questions about evolution. Parents in Maryland are challenging the implementation of a sex education curriculum that labeled as "myth" the belief that "homosexuality is a sin." In an initial ruling on a restraining order, the district court judge concluded that the curriculum promoted "viewpoint discrimination," and threatened the parents' First Amendment right to freedom of expression.
Into this fray wades Kent Greenawalt, a constitutional scholar at Columbia Law School, with Does God Belong in Public Schools? But oddly, for a legal scholar, he begins by asserting that the courts' role in the changing relationship between schools and religion has been "only a modest one." The driver, instead, has been cultural, particularly the secularizing effects of both the Progressives and John Dewey. Nevertheless, he provides a lengthy list of religion-related issues considered by the courts in the last four decades: moments of silence; prayer at graduation and football games; posting of the Ten Commandments; the treatment of student religious groups within schools; the teaching of evolution and creationism; the right to religious expression within schools for both teachers and students; and parental rights to withdraw students from objectionable classroom material.
Further, Greenawalt notes that "during the past two decades, the Supreme Court has revamped the law of free exercise and establishment to an extraordinary degree." Then he adds, apparently without noting the contradiction in his argument that law followed the culture, that the courts' school prayer and Bible-reading bans were "so unpopular" that many school districts simply ignored them.
It appears that, perhaps, the role of the courts in the relationship between religion and public schools has been a bit more than "modest."
One of the most significant of the church-state cases was the 1947 decision in Everson v. Board of Education, in which the Supreme Court first interpreted the Establishment Clause to include a "wall of separation between church and state." Oddly, Greenawalt spends very little time discussing this consequential, and controversial, framing of the Fourteenth Amendment. Then he dispenses with two subsequent Establishment Clause opinions, McCollum v. Board of Education and Zorach v. Clauson, both in single paragraphs without naming them, save in the footnotes. There in the footnotes we also learn that Zorach's lead attorney was one Kenneth W. Greenawalt, the author's father. The elder Greenawalt argued the case in front of the Supreme Court for a group of New York City parents who thought release time for religious instruction was unconstitutional. He lost.
That was in 1952, when Greenawalt, the author, was midway through high school--old enough to have noticed his father's appearance in front of the Supreme Court. In the acknowledgments, he thanks his wife and his brother, a high school teacher, for his "extremely valuable perspective." No dad. Here is Kent Greenawalt, these many years later, writing a book on which his father was inarguably an expert, but who makes nary an appearance except for lonely footnote 41. Perhaps this was his attempt to avoid an association with advocacy and present an even-handed academic presentation. If so, then he should have left out his fight with the Flat Earth Society.
On page 31: "A science teacher should not fail to teach that the earth is outside the physical center of the universe even if the doctrine of some religion puts the earth there." Which religion would that be, exactly? Given the amount of time this Columbia law professor gives to the notion of a flat earth, Greenawalt appears to believe this ancient worldview still lurks behind our mainstream church doors.
