Empirical Research
Personal Faith and Public Religious Neutrality: A Brief History of the Separation of Church and State for School Leaders
By Max Engel, Peter Miller
May 14, 2008 - 9:41:05 AM

We are often told “keep the faith” or “have faith” but rarely are we told what that means. Psychologist and educational philosopher Sharon Daloz Parks states that faith is the way we make meaning from our life’s experiences: faith results when “human beings… compose a sense of the ultimate reality and then stake [their] lives on that sense of things” (Parks, 2000, p. 20). Faith is both a dynamic force as well as a stabilizing and grounding entity; it organizes how the world is perceived, acted upon, and interpreted; faith is not synonymous with religion, belief, or spirituality. Obviously something keeps us together – how else would we persevere in our life’s work? While faith is not synonymous with a religion or church, many find a religious faith tradition meaningful and sustaining in their vocation as school leaders. Successful school leaders are those who maintain their personal faith as private individuals while recognizing the religious neutrality that is appropriate for their role in the school’s public setting. This brief article sketches salient points of the history and present dynamics of Church and state interaction played out in public schools.

Contrary to popular belief, the phrase “Wall of separation between Church and state” does not appear in the Constitution; Thomas Jefferson used it in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802. The First Amendment of the United State’s Constitution does proclaim: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech…” The Tenth Amendment states that anything not delegated to the Federal government or prohibited to the states is to be under the jurisdiction of the states. Education then fell to states who legislated their own policies and laws regarding schools. These policies were often tightly aligned with the broad Protestant cultural hegemony featuring biblical stories, daily prayer, memorization of the commandments, and a biblical history of the world. After the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment asserted that states could not “make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States… nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” This amendment gave citizens the protection of the Federal Government and the Constitution against the states and the public schools. However, it was not until the mid-twentieth century that the disputes over the role of religion in the schools, reflecting the changing religious, cultural, and social dynamics, reached the Supreme Court.

The First Amendment is commonly broken into the “Establishment Clause” that limits the government’s, and by extension the school’s, legal right to set policies favoring or inhibiting religion and the “Free Exercise Clause” that is interpreted to allow the practice of one’s religion in the United States as well as freedom of speech. The meaning and relationship of these two clauses are debated regarding the role of religion in public schools. Many significant questions about the role of religion in schools are disputed: creationism (or intelligent design) as opposed to evolution, the question of moral teaching, and the role of holiday observances, but topics related to prayer and Bible reading in classrooms and at extracurricular activities most aptly reflect the larger culture climate and the perspective of the Courts.

The 1947 case Everson v. Board of Education of the Township of Ewing was the first time the Supreme Court interpreted the First Amendment requiring the separation of Church and State and the Fourteenth Amendment as applied to the states and public schools (Hamburger, 2002, p. 454). Eventually, the three-part “Lemon Test” evolved to determine whether a government policy violates the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses of the Constitution. David McKenzie (2003) summarizes the Lemon Test: first, it determines what the intended or primary effect of the policy is. Secondly, this effect must neither advance nor inhibit religion. Thirdly, the policy must not excessively entangle church and state. It seemed that all vestiges of religion were about to be removed from public schools with prayer ( Engel v. Vitale; 1962), Bible reading ( Abington School District v. Schempp; 1963), and moments of silence because they implicitly endorsed religion ( Wallace v. Jaffee; 1985) all deemed unconstitutional.

The first time prayer at school events such as graduation were brought before the Court, Lee v. Weisman (1992), the Court ruled it was unconstitutional because school officials were involved in establishing criteria for the prayers and selecting the persons. However, recent rulings on prayer at school events seem to muddle the understanding. Though prayer before a school football game was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the case of Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe (2000), the 11^th District Court reaffirmed in Adler v. Duval County School Board (2001) the legality of a student-led opening or closing message at graduation, even with the precedent of the Santa Fe ruling, on the grounds that students decided if a message – not a “prayer” – would be given, which student would give the message, and what the message would contain. In general, student initiated and student-led prayers have been allowed by the Courts in recent precedent. What school officials do, such as coaches with their teams during student-led prayer in the locker room before a game, is still being determined in the fall of 2007 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the third circuit.

David McKenzie (2003) suggests recent interpretations of the First Amendment are more “accommodating” to religion than the cases cited earlier. With their 1990 ruling in Board of Education of Westside Community Schools v. Mergens the Supreme Court upheld the 1984 Equal Access Act that required high schools to have a “limited public forum” where organizations with “religious, political, philosophical, or other content” can meet similar to any other extracurricular student group, though schools and their employees may not “promote, lead, or participate” in the meetings. In addition, in 1995 President Clinton issued the document “Memorandum on Religious Expression in Public Schools” communicating that the First Amendment allowed for more religious expression in schools than many had previously interpreted. School officials must be completely neutral in their positions, but the Bible as literature and comparative religions can be taught in public schools, students have the right to express their religious beliefs in their work and on their clothing, students may have prayer and faith-related clubs that use school facilities after school, and students may be excused from lessons that are inconsistent with their religious beliefs. The Bush administration in 2003 issued “Guidance on Constitutionally Protected Prayer in Public Elementary and Secondary Schools” that connects Federal funding, in part through the No Child Left Behind Act, to compliance by the schools in not limiting “constitutionally protected prayer in public schools.” It can be concluded that neutral to religion is not the same as devoid of religion.

It has been claimed that “secular” is inherently opposed to religion and therefore forbidden by the Free Exercise Clause ( Grove v. Mead School District, 1985). The Courts have rejected this assertion, but it still remains for school officials to establish a religion-neutral environment that does not endorse nor inhibit religion, which would be forbidden by the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution, while not obstructing the religion and free speech of private individuals, which is protected by the Free Exercise clause.

School leaders as public figures have an obligation to religious neutrality for the diverse public forum in which they serve. Yet as private citizens, faith – and for some a faith rooted in a religious tradition – is what sustains, coheres, and energizes them to be effective school leaders. A wide-eyed awareness of these responsibilities and tensions seems to be a strong first step in effective school leadership.

References:

Daloz Parks, S. (2000). Big Questions, Worthy Dreams: Mentoring Young Adults in the Search

for Meaning, Purpose, and Faith. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Inc.

Hamburger, P. (2002). Separation of Church and State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.

McKenzie, D. (2003). Separation and accommodation in the public schools. Educational

Horizons, 82 (1), 21 – 43.