“Study Bible in your own church for high school credit.” This was the slogan required of all entries in Dallas's 1948 citywide poster contest promoting its public school Bible course. Paul Gene Marco, a youth at Oak Cliff Church of Christ, won first place, his poster deemed worthy of the fifteen-dollar honor by the Dallas Morning News editorial cartoonist serving as the judge. The newspaper dutifully announced the results of the competition, which the Junior Chamber of Commerce had organized. The fact that the city's newspaper would identify a teenager for winning a poster contest sponsored by a prominent business group signals the enthusiasm with which Dallas's white Protestant establishment supported its twenty-five-year-old Bible course.Footnote 1
Marco was in the paper again in November 1970, this time as president of the High School Bible Teachers Association. After the course encountered criticism at a school board meeting, the Dallas Morning News had run an editorial arguing that the course was legally impeccable because it was taught at Sunday school rather than in public school facilities. Still, Marco felt the need to publish a letter further defending it. He emphasized that because it used no tax dollars and each student studied the Bible “in the context of his own religious persuasion,” the class did “not violate the letter or the spirit of the Constitution's stand on the separation of church and state.” Nonetheless, another letter published the same day disparaged the “Dallas School Board's indoctrinal [sic] Bible course.” Clearly, Dallasites disagreed over the defensibility and desirability of the course and where the line separating church and state should fall.Footnote 2
The course would not end until 1985, its elimination prompted by dwindling enrollments and curricular changes at the state level. By then, it had lasted over six decades and attracted likely over 40,000 students. At its height, it served as a model for other public school Bible programs, shipping its textbooks near and far. Those books remain in occasional use even in the twenty-first century.Footnote 3
Though Dallas was one of many communities that provided or facilitated academic Bible study through its public schools in the twentieth century, the scholarly literature generally lacks in-depth, long-term retrospective studies of individual courses.Footnote 4 What studies there are typically focus on courses that faced court cases and high-profile controversies, not the numerous ones that evaded both. To underscore the importance and impact of such programs, this article traces the origins, growth, death, and afterlife of the Dallas Bible course. It examines it within the context of local religious and civic life, the changing legal landscape, competing notions of church-state relations, and differing levels of sensitivity to religious and ethnic diversity.Footnote 5 It also uses the Dallas course as a window to observe developments in other Texan towns, as well as communities such as Gary, Indiana; Chattanooga, Tennessee; and Charlotte, North Carolina. Understanding how such courses were implemented in the past is all the more timely and relevant in light of recent developments. Since 2000, legislators have introduced bills and resolutions promoting Bible courses in over a third of the states, with six states (including Texas in 2007) passing laws encouraging their creation. In 2016 the national Republican Party platform called for more such laws.Footnote 6
Proponents of such bills often appeal back to a time when public schools offered more instruction about the Bible, but many seem unaware of the varying ways in which such courses developed, functioned, and were received within particular communities. In Dallas, the Bible program reified within public schools the status of the city's white Protestant majority as insiders and that of other groups as outsiders. Yet despite its thoroughly Protestant nature, advocates consistently characterized it as a nonsectarian program that preserved the separation of church and state. That they were able to do so for so long illustrates how deeply rooted their commitments to religious education were, how contested the ramifications of the famous church-state court cases of the mid-century were, and how crucial the recognition of geographical variation is for exploring the place of the Bible in American public education.
The vitality of such courses suggests a need to rethink scholarly reconstructions that emphasize the dearth of religious instruction in twentieth-century American public education. Such narratives often begin with the unsuccessful attempts of the 1800s to develop a nonsectarian approach to religious instruction. Common Schools proponents like Horace Mann regarded school-sponsored reading of the Bible without comment as nonsectarian, but their conception of nonsectarianism did not extend beyond a generic, non-denominational Protestantism. After decades of dissatisfaction with that approach by Catholics, Jews, freethinkers, and others, courts increasingly rejected that understanding of nonsectarianism for broader construals of it as neutrality between religious traditions or as a religion-free, and thus secular, stance. By the nineteenth century's end, schools had purged much religious content from their curricula. Even classic textbooks like the famous McGuffey Readers that had been infused with biblical language were now issued in editions pruned of their earlier theological emphases.Footnote 7
According to much conventional scholarly wisdom, plans to teach religion through the schools were in shambles by the early 1900s. Integrating religious and public education was mostly a failed project, receiving only a temporary boost from the increased religiosity prompted by World War II and the Cold War. The 1948 Supreme Court decision McCollum v. Board of Education banished religious classes from public schools, although the 1952 ruling Zorach v. Clauson allowed students to leave campus to receive sectarian instruction elsewhere. The Court's endorsement of more objective and neutral study of religion in 1963's Abington Township v. Schempp prompted educators to shift to religiously nonpartisan curricula. In that decision's wake, theologically-oriented classes generally faded away aside, perhaps, from low-profile anomalies.Footnote 8
Such arguments accurately describe what often happened in American education—often, but by no means always and everywhere. That familiar historiographical arc obscures the ways and places in which religious instruction bounced back or grew anew in the early 1900s. As Steven K. Green keenly observes, nineteenth-century secularization prompted a twentieth-century backlash of attempts to reinstate the Bible in the classroom and create new means of providing religious education.Footnote 9 As will also be seen, the successes of such efforts, uneven though they were, have been under-recognized, and the speed and thoroughness with which McCollum and Schempp curbed or dismantled them overestimated. The impact of those religious education programs is ongoing.
I. The Genesis of Bible Courses
In the early 1900s educators and religious leaders displayed creativity and passion in exploring new models of cooperation between public schools and religious institutions. The first states to endorse such cooperation were North Dakota (1912) and Colorado (1914), which developed syllabi for students studying the Bible outside of regular school hours at Sunday school or other non-campus venues. Pupils received academic credit if they earned sufficient scores on final examinations written by education officials. The English professor responsible for North Dakota's plan noted that while schools tested only “geographical, historical, and literary aspects of the Bible,” churches could insert their own “ethical and religious training,” a division of emphasis that enabled schools to “avoid all sectarianism and partisanship.” By 1915, Alabama, Vermont, Mississippi, Indiana, and Virginia had all embraced the so-called Bible Credit movement; within two more years the number of states had risen to sixteen. Their syllabi typically identified scriptural passages, stories, characters, and places for students to know.Footnote 10
Some communities wanted religious instruction integrated into the school day to a greater degree than outside study plans accomplished. Gary, Indiana created the most famous system in 1914, releasing students from regular classes to go offsite to houses of worship or religious organizations for spiritual instruction. In the decades that followed, weekday plans like Gary's largely supplanted Sunday school plans. Weekday Religious Education (WRE) spread in a variety of permutations, with instruction during school hours or afterwards, on campus or off, for credit or not, at select grade levels or for all. Religious classes during school hours were often designated “released time,” though the term came to apply both to arrangements in which students left campus and those in which religious instructors taught in school facilities. Most WRE programs were Protestant, but sometimes communities with sizable Jewish and Catholic populations, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest, developed options for those traditions, and Utah offered Latter-day Saints programs. In addition to the Bible, some courses dealt with theology, religious history, or morals.Footnote 11
Aside from the Gary Plan, probably the single most influential weekday model was the Chattanooga Plan, which by 1945 over four hundred communities had reportedly adopted. It dated to 1922, when J. P. McCallie, headmaster of a well-known boarding school, gained the city council's approval for elective Bible classes as regular on-campus courses. His proposal called for representatives of groups such as the ministerial association, the Y.M.C.A., and the Y.W.C.A. to form an interdenominational Bible Study Committee to fund the course, appoint teachers, and manage logistics. The course would use no tax dollars, and the teachers, though chosen by the committee, would answer to the school board. The Bible alone would be the textbook, and students would have to pass a test to receive credit. McCallie reports, “It was . . . determined that under no circumstances would doctrines or divisive questions, sectarian or denominational matters be introduced in the schools, but the Bible would be allowed to speak for itself and only an effort be made to get the facts of the Bible well into the hearts and minds of the children.” The city permitted non-Protestants to create comparable classes, but Universalist and Jewish attempts to do so failed (with Jews having mixed views on the whole enterprise anyway), and Catholics seem not to have tried. In contrast, Protestant courses at various grade levels drew 2,300 students in their first year alone. There was definitely an eager audience for Bible teaching in cities like Chattanooga—and Dallas.Footnote 12
II. Texas Takes up the Testaments
Texas was one of several states where Sunday school advocates took the lead in creating Bible plans. When the Texas Sunday School Association (TSSA), a Dallas-based interdenominational group, convened in March 1914, it appointed a committee headed by University of Texas education professor Frederick Eby to develop a state proposal. TSSA members who attended the International Sunday School Convention in Chicago that June could have gathered ideas from presentations on North Dakota and Colorado programs.Footnote 13
Eby himself was already familiar with those developments. He had been experimenting with North Dakota-style classes in Austin and the nearby town of Belton. The advantage of a Sunday-school-linked system, as he saw it, was that “there is no tendency toward a union of Church and State. The separation of the two organisms is maintained absolutely for the reason that the State has nothing to do with the instruction in Bible.” This premise undergirded the plan he and the TSSA published in 1915. Churches or religious organizations would teach and physically host the courses, and school districts would administer tests that focused on “the historical, geographical, literary, and moral facts of the Bible.” These emphases reflected precisely the secular rationales for studying the Bible that many late nineteenth-century Bible reading proponents had offered. Students would still receive explicitly religious instruction—but it would happen out of earshot or oversight of the schools. Thus, the TSSA believed, schools would be completely removed from “the teaching of religion as a sectarian concern.” As it explained, “Toleration and religious liberty have been achieved with difficulty; and the separation of government from sectarian propaganda is the only guarantee of their preservation.” Its blueprint was designed to uphold “the unalterable policy of our American governmental system that the affairs of Church and State shall remain separated.”Footnote 14
Philip Hamburger's emphasis on the anti-Catholic deployment of separationist language has been influential, but that concern alone does not adequately account for the reasoning of Eby and the TSSA. Their rhetoric suggests a belief that any interpretative comment on the Bible offered by school officials would inevitably and unfairly promote some theological views over others. In a state culturally dominated by Protestants, preserving interdenominational cooperation and avoiding governmental favoritism were more pressing concerns than circumscribing Catholic influence. Many Texans wanted to keep the government away from religious education (Bible reading, ironically, excepted, of course) lest it impinge on individuals’ liberty of conscience, an ideal that Robert Wuthnow has argued was pervasive in the state.Footnote 15
The Texas Supreme Court had already signaled the pertinent legal parameters. Its 1908 ruling in Church v. Bullock upheld school-sponsored Bible reading and recitation of the Lord's Prayer in Corsicana, roughly fifty miles south of Dallas. Steven L. Green points out that though other state courts that permitted such practices increasingly justified them with secular warrants, the Lone Star court followed a different tack. It paired appeals to secular goals like ethical behavior with an explicitly religious rationale: “Christianity is so interwoven with the web and woof of the State government that to sustain the contention that the Constitution prohibits reading the Bible, offering prayers, or singing songs of a religious character in any public building of the government, would produce a condition bordering upon moral anarchy.” Like Horace Mann, the court largely equated “sectarian” with “denominational.” Because Corsicana's reading of the Bible without comment was not “in the interest of, or forwarding, the views of any one denomination of people,” it was nonsectarian. Though the court made verbal nods toward Catholics and non-Christian religions, its central arguments clearly presupposed and privileged a Protestant framework.Footnote 16
The TSSA plan allowed schools to avoid denominational bias while enabling religious groups to insert whatever biases they saw fit. There is little evidence that schools immediately rushed to it, but more began to offer courses in the 1920s, as the issue of the Bible and public education gained prominence. In 1923, a Texas Department of Education committee passed a resolution supporting Bible courses, and the state legislature debated Bible reading bills in 1923, 1925, and 1929 (all of them unsuccessful). Texas's developments were paralleled in other states, many of which considered their own Bible reading bills and approved their own Bible Credit plans (for the latter, thirty-three states by 1927).Footnote 17
Dallas joined in these trends. Thomas H. Harper, pastor of Central Congregational Church, emphasized the urgent need for Bible classes in his October 30, 1921 sermon, large excerpts of which ran in the Dallas Morning News. “Formation of a higher type of character among the young people can not [sic] be accomplished until the Bible and religious education are introduced into the public schools,” he proclaimed. The Declaration of Independence's references to God, the ceremonial use of the King James Bible, and similar examples demonstrated that “the Bible and prayer have been recognized as essential in the building of a nation.” For Harper, a Bible course would impinge upon no one's religious liberty. “We do not want Church and State united and would forever fight such a union,” he assured, “but both ought to be more religious.” He soon secured endorsements from the City Federation of Women's Clubs, the Council of Federated Church Women, and the Ministerial Association.Footnote 18
Yet Bible Credit proponents appear to have been divided on where the courses should be taught. Harper wanted them in the schools themselves, but this suggestion prompted pushback from no less an ally than the TSSA. A newspaper article explained that “recent agitation to include religious instruction in the public schools” had prompted TSSA Superintendent William Nehemiah Wiggins to host Eby at a November 27 meeting at a prominent downtown church, City Temple Presbyterian. One goal of the gathering was to discuss how course formats might respect the “separation of Church and State.”Footnote 19
January 1922 brought an announcement that a committee consisting of representatives of “every faith in the city” would explore the creation of a plan “suitable to every faith.” How often that committee convened is unclear, but its pivotal meeting occurred in late October 1922. The attendees were almost entirely Protestant. They included Harper and Wiggins; ministers and lay leaders from Baptist, Methodist Episcopal, Congregational, and Christian churches; and school officials. The sole identifiable non-Protestant was David Lefkowitz, rabbi of Temple Emanu-el. His presence, however it came to pass, reflected the degree to which the city's Jewish community was integrated into many aspects of Dallas civic life and an effort at interfaith inclusivity by the course's Christian organizers.Footnote 20
Lefkowitz was one of the least likely people in the United States to approve of a Bible course in a public school. As founding chair of the Committee on Church and State for the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), he had long battled school-sponsored Bible reading. That very year CCAR had begun disseminating a new version of his 1906 essay titled Why the Bible Should Not Be Read in the Public Schools. A few months earlier, his committee had warily reported on public schools’ experiments with religious instruction at CCAR's annual conference in New Jersey. The committee had urged fellow rabbis to be “increasingly watchful” lest such courses promote sectarianism, erode religious freedom, and harm the Jewish community.Footnote 21
Reflecting on the quandary Lefkowitz would have faced in determining how to respond to Dallas's developments serves as a useful reminder of the delicate position in which Jews sometimes found themselves when they constituted a small minority in an overwhelmingly Protestant city. Though completely opposed to Bible instruction and reading in school facilities, Lefkowitz had urged his rabbinic colleagues to consider off-campus arrangements with a “statesmanlike manner” and “co-operative spirit.” He was not averse to controversy, but as a relative newcomer to Dallas (he had arrived from Dayton, Ohio only two years earlier), he was still establishing himself within the community. Too strident an approach could have complicated developing relationships with Protestant leaders. The importance of not ruffling feathers more than necessary was undoubtedly magnified by the fact that, already in his brief time in Dallas, Lefkowitz had watched the Ku Klux Klan soar at a shocking speed to the forefront of civic life. He was likely mindful of the important role strong interreligious relationships might play in countering the Klan, an endeavor in which he would prove to be central.Footnote 22
Not a single document preserves Lefkowitz's comments to the Dallas Bible committee, from which he appears to have subsequently disassociated himself. But when the group presented its plan to the school board on November 7, it claimed to have the rabbi's support, and neither subsequent board minutes nor newspaper accounts ever reported otherwise. Lefkowitz had apparently decided he could live with the official proposal, most likely because the conviction that he shared with Eby and the TSSA had prevailed: sectarian classes would not occur in school buildings. The Bible class would happen off-campus during Sunday school and other non-school hours. The line between church and state stood at the schoolhouse door.Footnote 23
The school board adopted the proposal with only minor tinkering. Any religious association could organize a class, but Sunday schools would clearly be the primary vehicle. The amount of required instruction time (the equivalent of eighty meetings of forty-five minutes apiece) meant that classes would have to supplement Sunday school with other weekly sessions or extend the length of Sunday school itself. Sponsoring churches and organizations could choose their own teachers, whose only requirement was a high school education. An oversight group that came to be known as the Bible Credit Teachers Association (BCTA) ran the course, charging students or their churches a small fee to avoid expenditure of tax dollars. Students covered both Testaments in a single yearlong course, receiving academic credit if they passed a test “held under the auspices of the Board of Education.”Footnote 24
In May 1923, a paltry batch of students consisting of six teenagers from Centenary Methodist took the inaugural examination. Enrollment remained low the next two years, but, for reasons that are unclear, it jumped from under twenty in 1925 to 240 in 1926. By the 1930s, it typically reached the 300s or even higher, with the number of participating churches likewise rising steadily.Footnote 25 Though the linkage to Sunday school would eventually put the Dallas course squarely in the minority as more and more communities started weekday classes, it clearly worked to the program's advantage. The city took special pride in its robust Sunday school attendance, with the TSSA encouraging friendly competition and the Dallas Morning News breathlessly reporting major churches’ attendance numbers.Footnote 26 Like Sunday school in general, the Bible course was proving to be a success, and Dallas liked successes.
III. Developing a Curriculum
One Saturday each May, students gathered together at a single high school to take the district's comprehensive examination. Official graders scored the tests, and the BCTA tabulated the results. Tests focused heavily on mastery of content and facility with study tools. Students had to know the names and order of biblical books, memorize verses, identify the sources of quotations, recount key stories, demonstrate familiarity with roughly fifty biblical characters, situate cities and geographical features on maps, and use a concordance.Footnote 27
The earliest classes supplemented the Bible with a recent textbook that summarized biblical books, identified famous passages, described literary aspects of the material, and discussed scriptural allusions. In 1928, however, an interdenominational committee of church and school leaders replaced it with their own resource, Bible Study Course, an expanded version of notes compiled by local high school principal E. B. Comstock. That book went through multiple editions.Footnote 28
When the Texas Department of Education created official Bible course guidelines in 1937, Dallas's Bible Study Course was the only Texas-produced textbook on its list of suggested resources. The department apparently felt that the book exemplified Texas's standard: “The Bible course must be non-sectarian. The Bible should be taught for its literary, historical, and moral values.” “Nonsectarian” had a very limited valence in this context, as all of the state's recommended resources assumed the Protestant form of the canon, downplaying or neglecting altogether the different characteristics of Roman Catholic and Jewish Bibles. The guidelines clarified that school systems could offer Bible courses in their own facilities as long as they incurred no financial costs.Footnote 29 Most schools seem to have opted for that arrangement rather than the Sunday school route. In the mid-century, a few dozen might offer courses any given year, with new classes appearing and existing ones disappearing from time to time.Footnote 30
In contrast to such fluctuations, the Dallas course grew steadily. By 1939, school officials considered it popular enough to expand from one year to two. They originally intended the first-year course to remain a broad introduction to the Protestant Bible and the second-year to focus specifically on the New Testament. What evolved instead was a yearlong course for each Testament. Revised guidelines still allowed churches to pick their own teachers, but they now included a vague requirement that teachers have training in Bible study, and they later added a preference for a college degree. The textbook was expanded into two volumes, Bible Study Course: Old Testament in 1946 and Bible Study Course: New Testament in 1947 (hereafter referred to as Old Testament and New Testament). Over the next three decades, the school district repeatedly reprinted them with little change, aside from prefatory material and appendices. The only significant revision occurred in the late 1970s or early 1980s, when teachers converted them to a worksheet format.Footnote 31
The new textbooks maintained their predecessor's emphasis on basic biblical literacy. Written primarily by laypeople for teenagers, modern biblical scholarship made little appearance aside from basic nods in some of the accompanying essays. Lessons assumed the Bible's historical accuracy and traditional authorship claims, but without any special defense of either. Most consisted of introductory information and content outlines; identification of passages to read or memorize, such as the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes; and review and discussion questions. Occasional questions might prompt theological reflection and personal application. For example, a New Testament lesson asks, “What must we do besides hear? ‘But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.’ James 1:22.”Footnote 32
The course embraced traditional Christian claims that the Old Testament, though important as a record of God's interactions with his people, Israel, was most significant as a set of predictions about Jesus. The Old Testament textbook's introduction asserted, “While there are sixty-six books in the one volume, they are unified in the person of Christ whose coming was prophesied in the first book of the Old Testament.” Its sole chapter on prophetic literature focused entirely on “Prophecies concerning the coming of Christ,” emphasizing that “one of the strongest evidences of the Bible's divine origin is the fact of fulfilled prophecy.” Similarly, the book portrayed the Psalms as replete with messianic prediction.Footnote 33
The textbooks also repeated traditional depictions of Judaism as a flawed religion. One section charted “man's progressive development in the places of worship” from “Altar” to “Tabernacle” to “Temple” to “Synagogue” to “Church,” which is “the highest step upward in man's desire to worship.” After summing up the message of the Book of Hebrews as “the superiority of the new covenant to the Law of Moses,” New Testament commented matter-of-factly that “it was difficult for the Jew to realize that the Law of Moses was fulfilled by Christ and taken out of the way.” Elsewhere it repeated negative stereotypes of the Pharisees as legalistic, and thus, rightfully, “many times the victims of Christ's bitter denunciations for their hypocritical and self-righteous attitude.”Footnote 34
The textbooks were literalistic, but they bore the marks of the fundamentalist-modernist debates more lightly than might be expected, given the intensity of that controversy in Texas. They assured students of the Bible's inspiration but included no description of the nature or mechanism of its revelation. The introduction of Old Testament passingly claimed that “the findings of modern science closely parallel the order of creation as stated in the first chapter of Genesis,” but the actual lessons on Genesis avoided questions of whether Adam and Eve had existed or how old the earth was. Dallas was a center for premillennial dispensationalism, but discussions of Daniel and Revelation managed to sidestep detailed engagement with apocalypticism, past or present. Sample tests in different editions show that they maintained their emphasis on memorization of content, though they occasionally also provided opportunities for theological expression. A 1962 examination asked, “Suppose that a person who had never heard of Christ overheard you in a conversation in which Christ was mentioned and asked: ‘Who is this Christ of whom you speak?’ What would be your answer?” But on the classic issues that divided Protestants—questions about creeds, church polity, predestination or free will, infant baptism or believer's baptism, the meaning of the Lord's Supper, and the like—the books were silent.Footnote 35
IV. The Course in the Community
When William August Flachmeier, a Lutheran minister pursuing a doctorate under Frederick Eby, contacted Dallas teachers for his dissertation research on Bible courses, many gushed about their hometown program. An East Dallas Christian Church teacher raved, “Honestly, I think it is as nearly a perfect working plan as could be had.” Fans credited the course's flexible framework for its popularity. As the 1940s forewords assured, “In both the Old Testament and the New Testament study courses an attempt has been made to avoid controversial questions by emphasizing the study of the Bible itself, thus leaving teachers and pupils free to put their own interpretations on the passages studied.” Churches could thus stay true to their own tenets while displaying “the spirit of harmony” (as the BCTA's bylaws put it) with churches of other denominations.Footnote 36
Because of the protection from doctrinal contamination that congregation-based instruction provided, Dallas never felt the need to demarcate theological boundaries for its course the way some communities did. In Chattanooga, for instance, J. P. McCallie proclaimed that the only acceptable teachers would be those “who view the Bible from the right standpoint, who believe it to be the Word of God and will teach it as such. The committee would not have higher criticism, rationalism or evolutionary teaching in the Schools. We would rather have no Bible taught at all than to have it taught in the wrong way.”Footnote 37 In contrast, while the Dallas curriculum reflected the influence of conservative theology, it did not heavy-handedly impose it. Theoretically, churches could teach Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch or the Documentary Hypothesis of higher biblical criticism; what mattered for the examination was whether students memorized the Ten Commandments.
The textbooks’ lack of denominational favoritism, emphasis on superficial aspects of the biblical text, and near complete avoidance of critical analysis made them appealing to a surprisingly wide range of Protestant churches: Assemblies of God, Baptist, Christian, Church of Christ, Congregational, Episcopalian, Full Gospel, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, and others. Fundamentalist and mainline churches alike joined in; the latter apparently felt they could overlook or rebut objectionable content and put the rest to good use. For example, the course prospered at First Baptist under the famously progressive pastor George W. Truett, and reached even greater heights under his famously conservative successor, W. A. Criswell, at least in the first half of Criswell's five-decade tenure.Footnote 38
In the late 1940s and 1950s dozens of churches taught the course each year. In May 1947, for example, 656 students from approximately eighty churches took the final. A little over a decade later, in 1958–1959, two thousand students from 150 churches enrolled. Some churches alternated Testaments each year while others offered both simultaneously, and the largest congregations might offer multiple sections of each.Footnote 39 It would not be accurate to think of such success only as a reflection of the national post-war Protestant resurgence.Footnote 40 In Dallas and many cities, Protestantism had never receded. Heightened wartime and post-war religiosity may have boosted course enrollment numbers, but their upward trajectory was a continuation of pre-war trends, not a departure from them. Those numbers were aided, of course, by Dallas's rapid growth after World War II and the baby boom.Footnote 41
Taking the course was often considered the thing to do; as one local church history reminisces, “In the ‘50's Bible Credit ruled.” It served several important functions within the lives of congregations aside from teaching Bible basics. For example, it helped give students who attended different high schools a common goal and focus, cultivating congregational identity. Some churches even honored each year's class in their worship services, publicly affirming the worthiness and value of serious Bible study. And, given the program's longevity, participation provided a common link of experience between generations.Footnote 42
Teachers gathered occasionally for business, continuing education, and worship. They initially met at the downtown Y.M.C.A. before shifting to the new Dallas Independent School District (DISD) administrative building, which was constructed in the late 1940s. An agenda for the September 25, 1952 meeting, held in the public space of DISD headquarters, notes songs, prayers, a hymn, and a devotional.Footnote 43
Community support went well beyond just participating churches. For the first three decades especially, the Dallas Morning News ran attentive articles each year with headlines like 1937's “400 Pupils in High Schools Burn Midnight Oil Getting Ready for Biblical Exams.” It regularly highlighted exceptional students with perfect test scores and churches whose overall classes performed well.Footnote 44
The business community got into the act very early.Footnote 45 In 1928, the prominent jewelry store Linz Brothers began giving students a special lapel pin if they achieved a high enough course average and final exam score. Linz Bible Award pins, later joined by Advanced Bible Award pins for the second-year course, were mementos that students proudly noted in their yearbooks and that many alumni still cherish.Footnote 46 Given the intimidating scope of the exams, earning both pins was no mean feat. Retired Duke Divinity School ethicist Stanley Hauerwas, dubbed “America's Best Theologian” by Time Magazine, remembers his own performance: “I won a Linz Pin for the New Testament, but I do not think I made the required score . . . to win one for the Old Testament.”Footnote 47
Not to be outdone by his rival across the street, nationally-known jeweler and longtime Sunday school enthusiast Arthur A. Everts began giving a trophy to the church team with the highest average test score in the mid-1930s. Both Linz Brothers and Everts Jewelers also offered other prizes for scholastic achievement, but these particular awards, given at least through the mid-1950s, were distinctive in linking public and religious (that is, Protestant) education.Footnote 48 The Junior Chamber of Commerce's poster contest, initiated by a Jaycee who taught the course, overlapped with these prizes, running from 1942 until at least 1958.Footnote 49
If some Dallas boosters imagined that they were celebrating a broadly defined Judeo-Christian tradition, they were also promoting, more specifically, the Protestantism of the Dallas establishment. Neither Jews nor Catholics ever developed comparable courses with the school district and city's imprimaturs, although they had their own religious education programs in non-school hours. Indeed, given the Texas Supreme Court's definition of “sectarian” in the 1908 case Church v. Bullock, whether Catholics could have created their own distinctive credit-bearing course if they wanted to is questionable. As for non-credit released time, the idea never took off in Dallas. In some parts of the country, organizing religious education brought Protestants, Catholics, and Jews together, but this was not the case everywhere. In Dallas, the only school-affiliated option was the Protestant one.Footnote 50
Non-Protestants thus faced the question of how to respond to the program. One option was to offer full support, as Linz Brothers did. The store was owned by a Jewish family with deep Texas roots and commitments to Dallas so strong that it created what is still the city's highest honor for civic service, the Linz Award. Its bestowal of Bible pins likely reflected some combination of general goodwill, interfaith outreach, a desire to blend in and participate with the majority culture, and business savvy. Jews also found other ways to use the program to represent their tradition positively, as when an Orthodox rabbi spoke to the BCTA in 1952.Footnote 51
Rabbi Lefkowitz monitored the Bible course from afar, using correspondence and personal meetings to communicate any concerns. When ministers began pushing in the mid-1940s for Bible classes as regular school-day courses, Lefkowitz politely, but unambiguously, drew a line in the sand. He was willing to entertain the possibility of off-campus, released-time programs, but he still considered the school buildings themselves sacrosanct. His position was similar to those of the national Anti-Defamation League (ADL), American Jewish Committee, and American Jewish Congress, organizations that were still struggling to define their positions on released time but were united in their antipathy for religious instruction on campus. “There are groups in the city and many individuals who feel very strongly opposed to anything that might seem to be an entering wedge for the sectarian teaching in the Public Schools of our city and nation,” Lefkowitz wrote to Superintendent W. T. White in 1945. “The great Baptist Church is in that group, as are the Jewish people generally and a great many people of other religious groups.” Sentiments like his carried the day, and drives to move classes into schools failed.Footnote 52
Because the first Jewish day school in Dallas did not open until 1962, Jewish children typically attended public schools. Bible program representatives later claimed with pride that synagogues had offered their Old Testament class, but apparently the only one to do so was the Orthodox congregation Tiferet Israel in the early 1950s. Ironically, this decision to participate in the majority culture would have reminded Jewish students of their minority status, given the textbook's inescapably Christian assumptions.Footnote 53 Tolerance Trios and Brotherhood Weeks had been emphasizing to Dallas the essential unity of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews since the mid-1930s, but their efforts were not sufficient to prompt course organizers to rethink key aspects of their theology.Footnote 54
Some Jews eventually became willing to publicly challenge the textbooks’ bias, perhaps a reflection of the post-war sense of Jewish confidence and stability that Bruce J. Dierenfield describes.Footnote 55 In 1960, the ADL reported that “Jewish leaders have observed that the public-school text in Old Testament authorized by the [Dallas] school system provides a Christian—not a Jewish—interpretation of Old Testament material and that the examination requires answers which are contrary to Jewish teachings.” Rabbi Arthur Gilbert at the national ADL office wrote to Superintendent White in the mid-1960s that “while Christian denominations may have no quarrel with this course as currently authorized, it is conceivable that Jews would be offended.” White reportedly dismissed his concerns.Footnote 56
Like Jews, Roman Catholics were a minority. They made up slightly more than a tenth of Dallas's Christians in the mid-1920s, and that share would not increase dramatically until immigration from Latin America rose in the 1980s, by which time the course was withering.Footnote 57 Catholic leaders largely ignored the Bible program. The diocese made no comment about it in official correspondence, pastoral letters, or the newspaper it started in 1952 (The Texas Catholic).Footnote 58 Given the lack of explicit evidence, only speculation is possible about Catholic attitudes toward the class. Some may have been troubled by its promotion of Protestantism, but the parochial school system initially insulated many Catholic teenagers from that somewhat. The class does not seem to have been a source of tensions as Catholics increasingly shifted into public schools in the 1960s. By that period, many Catholic leaders had become more concerned with secularism than Protestant bias, and may have sympathized with the program.Footnote 59 No Catholic church offered the course in its first three decades; whether that changed afterwards is not entirely clear. A 1977 newspaper article vaguely alluded to Catholic sponsorship of classes, but this seems unlikely, as such classes would not have met expectations for traditional Catholic catechetical instruction.Footnote 60
African Americans comprised the largest ethnic minority in Dallas. The program's leadership made some effort to attract black congregations, at least in the 1950s. Goals noted in undated BCTA minutes include “Suggest establishment of classes in Negro churches” and “Work with Negros.” Nonetheless, Flachmeier laments, “No permanent [African American] classes resulted.” The September 1952 BCTA meeting program shows that a “Colored Episcopal” (presumably, that is, Colored Methodist Episcopal) minister delivered a prayer, and newspaper stories from 1953 and 1959 mention the involvement of two African American churches. On the whole, however, African American participation remained minimal.Footnote 61
One reason may have been course content that was unappealing or even offensive to the sensibilities of many African Americans. Old Testament explains the “origin of the races” with the sons of Noah story (Genesis 9–10), claiming that “the descendants of Ham” became “the colored races,” an interpretation long used to justify claims of blacks’ racial inferiority. Its lengthy discussion of the Exodus experience barely acknowledges the theme of freedom from slavery, emphasizing instead the giving of the Torah. A New Testament lesson cites First Peter 2:18–25 for “directions as to conduct,” noting its call for “faithfulness of slaves; Christ their example.” But one would not have had to pore over the books to discern the whiteness of their assumed audience. The opening epigraph in Old Testament lauding the Bible's provision of “light and strength” was a quote from Robert E. Lee.Footnote 62
Gauging the extent of participation by Mexican Americans, the city's largest Latino group, is even more difficult than assessing African American involvement. Predominantly Roman Catholics, most were not prone to take the course anyway. Flachmeier notes the BCTA's desire to include them but mentions no inroads, and they are invisible in newspaper reports about the course.Footnote 63
If the course did not reach the whole city, its organizers could nonetheless brag about its wide influence. As early as 1935 the Dallas Morning News declared it “one of the most successful ever tried in connection with a public school system, with outlines of the study course being requested by other schools throughout the Nation.”Footnote 64 A Mississippi education official reported in 1952 that many of that state's approximately twenty Bible courses used the curriculum.Footnote 65 By the late 1950s, Dallas shipped two-thirds of the books it printed beyond school district lines.Footnote 66 At various points, those books were used by at least twenty other Texas school districts, both urban and rural, some of them nearby like Fort Worth, Carrollton, and Grand Prairie, and others several hours away, like Austin.Footnote 67 Not all courses that used the Dallas books were long-lived, however; those in San Antonio and Wichita Falls lasted only a few years. Other efforts to implement the Dallas Plan never got off the ground at all, as in Corsicana in the mid-1940s.Footnote 68
V. The Course and the Courts
The Bible program was flourishing in Dallas itself when the U.S. Supreme Court began handing down its epochal decisions on religion and public education. The case that opened the door to far-reaching judicial change was 1947's Everson v. Board of Education, which addressed New Jersey's use of public money to fund student busing to religious schools. The Court upheld that particular practice, but its application of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause beyond the federal level for the first time signaled that state constitutions and courts would no longer have the last word on church-state relations.Footnote 69
Everson was followed a year later by McCollum v. Board of Education, which considered the WRE program of Champaign, Illinois. Students there had been pressured to attend classes taught on campus during school hours by religious groups. The Court ruled against Champaign. It declared unconstitutional its use of “tax supported property for religious instruction,” “close cooperation between the school authorities and the religious council in promoting religious education,” and “utilization of the tax-established and tax-supported public school system to aid religious groups to spread their faith.” Nationally, many public schools paused or ended such programs after McCollum. The Court retreated somewhat from its hard line in 1952, when it affirmed the constitutionality of off-campus, released-time programs in Zorach v. Clauson. Often confused by the changing legal situation, many communities scrambled to modify their programs.Footnote 70
Dallas was not one of those communities. The Dallas Plan's elective status, off-campus teaching, and non-school hours scheduling rendered it so different from Champaign that the board of education does not appear to have even officially discussed McCollum. The Dallas Times Herald lauded that ruling as “a timely reminder that separation of church and state is one of the fundamental principles of the governmental system of the United States” while asserting its complete inapplicability to Dallas.Footnote 71
In 1963, Abington v. Schempp fundamentally redefined the Bible's place in public schools. It prohibited the practice of school-sponsored Bible reading as a fundamentally religious exercise, but simultaneously affirmed teaching about the Bible, if such instruction were done in a more neutral manner that neither aided nor opposed religion. Justice Tom C. Clark wrote for the majority:
It might well be said that one's education is not complete without a study of comparative religion or the history of religion and its relationship to the advancement of civilization. It certainly may be said that the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities. 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.Footnote 72
One cannot help but wonder how Justice Clark would have applied the criteria of “objective” and “secular” to the Dallas course. He almost certainly had been at least superficially familiar with it earlier in life. The only Texan ever appointed to the Supreme Court, Clark was a native of Dallas. He returned to his hometown after finishing law school in Austin in 1922, precisely the time when Dallas religious and education leaders were deliberating how to configure their Bible class. Clark had been raised an Episcopalian, but upon marrying Mary Jane Ramsey, he adopted her Presbyterian faith as his own. The two wed in Dallas's City Temple Presbyterian Church in 1924, and he attended there until he left Dallas thirteen years later.Footnote 73 Clark plunged deeply into church life at City Temple, serving as a trustee, deacon, and teacher of a young men's Sunday school class. A biographical cartoon from circa 1931–1932 profiling his accomplishments cited his role as Sunday school teacher alongside other activities like the Elks, Masons, Eastern Star, and Odd Fellows. He was involved enough with City Temple's religious education program that in late spring of 1931 he helped plan its annual Sunday school picnic.Footnote 74
City Temple was one of many churches that participated in the Dallas Plan. It offered the course three times while Clark was there, in 1929–1930, 1930–1931, and 1936–1937, and occasionally afterwards.Footnote 75 The church had played an important role in the process of crafting the plan, hosting the town meeting back in November 1921 where Frederick Eby spelled out how to offer religious instruction while keeping church and state separate. Eby was introduced to the crowd that evening by Judge W. F. Ramsey, a former justice of the Texas Supreme Court, a prominent banker, and a lay leader in the state Sunday School Association. The judge was also the father of Mary Jane Ramsey, whom Clark met for the first time later that year and soon began dating. Thus, Clark would likely have encountered the course, not only through his own church experiences, but also through the Ramsey family's connections to the Sunday school movement.Footnote 76
Clark moved to Washington, D.C. in 1937 to take a position with the Justice Department, and in 1945 he became U.S. Attorney General. He remained an active churchman in Washington, joining the National Presbyterian Church. Though Clark spoke warmly on occasion of his own Sunday school memories (for example, in a 1947 speech to the International Sunday School Association), he is not known to have commented publically on the legality of the Dallas program.Footnote 77 Regardless, the decision he penned would contribute to its demise—but not any time soon.
By 1963 Bible classes were declining or had already vanished in much of the country. Richard B. Dierenfield's well-known national survey, administered shortly before Schempp, found only 4.51 percent of responding school districts offering such classes, though the South was twice as likely (nine percent) to do so as other regions.Footnote 78 But in complete contrast to that trend, the Dallas course was in full bloom. Approximately 1,500 students took the May 1961 exam. For 1961–1962, interest was high enough at First Baptist alone to support twelve different classes. Five years after the ruling, as the number of religion classes continued to drop elsewhere, Dallas's remained strong, drawing more than a thousand students.Footnote 79
Many of the communities that continued offering Bible courses tried to adjust them in light of Schempp, but Dallas mostly shrugged, making no changes. A 1968 newspaper article observed that the course “continued to function without so much as a raised eyebrow.” Its supporters, after all, had always characterized it as a neutral historical and literary survey, the very approach the Court had affirmed. The forewords in the 1972 New Testament and 1976 Old Testament insisted that the course examined the Bible “from an objective standpoint” and an “historical, factual viewpoint,” claims that ignored its explicitly theological aspects.Footnote 80
Ongoing school-sponsored prayer, evolution and creationism, Bible distribution by the Gideons—all sparked conflict in Dallas in the 1970s.Footnote 81 The Bible course, however, seems to have attracted only a few public opponents, such as the detractor that prompted Marco's 1970 letter to the editor and a like-minded protester the next year. The latter critic appealed to the separation of church and state, and charged that the school board was demonstrating favoritism toward the Bible over other sacred texts. Board members supplemented the familiar argument that classes were “taught outside the school” with a pledge that a Qur'an course could be created if sufficient interest existed. The board summed up its position: “The Constitution requires a separation of church and state insofar as teaching a religious doctrine or particular religious emphasis in terms of denomination but not from the study of the Bible as literature nor the Koran.”Footnote 82
As for the American Civil Liberties Union, the Dallas chapter kept a close eye on the schools in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but its meeting agendas do not mention the course. A strong indication of the chapter's lack of concern is the fact that, in 1970, its board of directors included someone who had recently taught the class at Highland Park Methodist Church (Ron Devillier, who a few years later introduced American audiences to Monty Python's Flying Circus while working at the local public television affiliate).Footnote 83 The Central Texas Chapter of the ACLU was less sanguine, objecting in 1969 to Austin's adoption of the Dallas Plan, but to no avail.Footnote 84
Atheist activist Madalyn Murray O'Hair was livid about the Austin course. She had emerged victorious in Schempp, which incorporated her own suit against Bible reading in Baltimore. Having relocated to Austin, she was dumbfounded when her new community began giving academic credit for Sunday school. The Austin board of education “knows damn well the Dallas plan is unconstitutional,” she complained in 1970. In protest, she petitioned the district to allow courses at her home for her recently created Poor Richard's Universal Life Church. The request was apparently denied.Footnote 85
VI. The Course's Slow Demise
Even without organized opposition, the Dallas program waned as the 1970s progressed. Enrollment dropped from approximately 1,200 in 1971 to roughly 860 in 1977. Some Bible teachers grumbled of diminishing district support. “My understanding is that school officials, while they may individually be strong on giving support to the programs by enrolling their own sons and daughters in the courses, they are reluctant to speak out in any way,” observed one president of the teachers’ organization.Footnote 86
In the meantime, lower federal court cases crept closer toward the course. Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971), which dealt with public reimbursement of parochial schools’ expenses, outlined a framework for assessing whether a governmental entity violated the Establishment Clause. The so-called “Lemon test” had three prongs. The first two had roots in the argumentation of Schempp: assessing whether a government action or policy was motivated by a religious purpose and whether it had a religious effect. The third considered whether that action or policy created excessive entanglement between government and religion. The test became deeply influential in subsequent litigation on religion and education.Footnote 87
A pre-Lemon ruling in Virginia (1970) and post-Lemon decisions in Tennessee (1979–1980) and Alabama (1981) all found fault with Bible courses that used public funds or the machinery of the school system to inculcate Protestant beliefs.Footnote 88 The Tennessee case, Wiley v. Franklin, dealt with the famed Chattanooga program that had been founded a year before Dallas's. There a private group, the Public School Bible Study Committee, still selected the teachers, provided funding, and offered an evangelical course based on an outline of focal passages. Course defenders maintained that it “let the Bible speak for itself,” presented the material “without interpretation,” displayed no “slant toward any denomination,” and promoted “no sectarian doctrines or church rituals or creeds,” echoing the phraseology of nineteenth-century Common School proponents. The court rejected these arguments, insisting that nonsectarianism extended beyond “the avoidance of denominational, sectarian, doctrinal or ritualistic differences or other areas of controversy within the Christian faith.” The judge directed Chattanooga schools to revise the course into a secular form, and a new version soon emerged that was purportedly more neutral.Footnote 89
Chattanooga's most successful imitator, a course taught in Charlotte, North Carolina, since 1925, collapsed a few years later. Its organizers defended its constitutionality on the grounds that it was “entirely voluntary and wholly non-sectarian and non-denominational,” despite their policy that “the course was to be taught as the Word of God from the Christian viewpoint.” The school district shut it down in 1984 after receiving pointed inquires from the ACLU and People for the American Way.Footnote 90
How would the Dallas course have fared if seriously challenged like Chattanooga's or Charlotte's? Defenders might have invoked their traditional rhetoric of objectivity, with course opponents countering that its theological content and church setting proved that religious edification had always been its primary purpose and effect. On the question of entanglement, the district could have highlighted its relegation of teaching to outside groups, reliance on off-campus facilities and non-school time, and minimal use of public resources. Complainants could have pointed out that the district itself published the theologically infused textbooks, administered final exams in its own facilities, and awarded academic credit.
In any case, no one ever filed a suit. Instead, what led most directly to the course's cessation was educational reform. In 1981, the Texas legislature mandated the complete overhaul of the state's public school curriculum. The new curriculum that appeared three years later included only courses deemed by the state to be educationally essential, a cut that electives like Bible and driver's education did not make. Schools could still offer Bible for local credit, but it would not count toward state graduation requirements.Footnote 91
Some communities with established courses, like Amarillo and Corpus Christi, chose the local credit option, offering the courses without interruption.Footnote 92 But for the Dallas school board, the new standards meant that the course no longer deserved the district's energy. In August 1984, board member Mary Rutledge introduced the motion to terminate it. Although her own church, Cliff Temple Baptist, had taught it since 1928, she saw it as an idea for which the time had passed. “We are just going to stop printing the material, now the church can keep a master copy and keep teaching the course as long as they want; the kids just won't get credit for it,” she reasoned. The motion passed unanimously. The passionate, but polite, protests of Bible teachers were not enough to save the program, making 1984–1985 its last school year.Footnote 93
Neither board minutes nor newspaper accounts record worries about lawsuits, church-state relations, or religious inclusivity. Still, when Linus Wright, DISD superintendent at the time, looked back at the decision nearly thirty years later, he recalled being very aware that court rulings were putting the course on increasingly shaky legal ground. Nonetheless, he remembered no actual criticism of it. Also contacted three decades later, Rutledge observed that shrinking enrollments had made the program more and more irrelevant anyway. “There had generally been a decline in the number of students who were taking the class,” she rightly recalled. In the course's penultimate year, roughly three hundred students from about fifteen Dallas churches took the final, a far cry from its heyday. Suburban courses seem to have mostly already faded away.Footnote 94
One might have expected the rise of the Christian Right in the 1970s and 1980s to bolster course numbers, but that did not happen. In fact, for at least one church, the opposite occurred. By the 1970s, First Baptist's W. A. Criswell had become convinced that public schools were lost to secularism. Bible Credit apparently was not enough to redeem them. If Christians were to receive a genuinely godly education, Criswell argued, they would have to go elsewhere. First Baptist opened its own school in 1972, and Criswell urged church members who were able to move their children from public schools to do so. Such shifts would have cut into enrollments for the church's own public school Bible course.Footnote 95
Why else did interest in the program dry up? One could postulate several factors, such as changing priorities among churches, shifting teenage sensibilities, and 1970s skepticism towards the establishment. Unfortunately, the meager number of surviving course-related documents do not allow for the testing of such theories. What is indisputable, however, is this: the course's plunge in enrollment occurred in the midst of drastic demographic changes in the school district. That conjunction of developments begs for further exploration.
The Bible program had never expanded beyond its original whiteness; Superintendent Wright, board member Rutledge, long-term course leaders, and former students are unanimous on this point. Any number of reasons might explain why African Americans and Latinos remained largely uninvolved: preoccupation with more pressing needs in their communities, insufficient outreach from course organizers, unappealing curricular elements, and wariness toward a religious establishment with a very mixed record on civil rights. A retrospective comment by an African American civic leader attests to the course's lack of imprint on that community: “Interestingly enough, the period of time in question spans a time during which my grandfather, great-uncles, uncle, father and I all served as pastors in Dallas and I know nothing of the [Bible] curriculum.”Footnote 96
For most of the course's run, whites were the overwhelming majority in DISD. As late as 1970, they still constituted fifty-nine percent of its students, in large part due to foot dragging on integration in the 1960s. But 1970 brought a federal lawsuit demanding a faster pace, and 1971 a Supreme Court ruling approving forced busing. Whites quickly began abandoning the district by the thousands. By 1980, they made up only 30.4 percent of the students, and their share continued to plummet afterwards. By the early 1980s, African American students constituted the largest ethnic group, and Latinos would soon supplant Anglos as second largest. White flight drained the Bible program of much of its traditional pool of potential students. Many who might have taken the course instead left for private schools or the suburbs. The dwindling of this constituency probably made it politically easier for the board to terminate the course.Footnote 97
VII. Concluding Reflections on an Unfinished Course
Critics of twenty-first century Bible courses have sometimes warned that they ran the risk of turning public schools into Sunday schools. Dallas did something like the reverse, putting Sunday schools partly at the service of public schools. Ironically, this strategy was intended not to blur the line separating church and state, but rather to protect it. The architects of the Dallas Plan believed that having churches teach students on Sunday mornings and other non-school hours would keep government hands out of religion.
From the beginning, school and church leaders alike agreed their program must be nonsectarian, but they equated nonsectarianism with generic Protestantism, opting for older understandings rooted in the Common School movement. Their direct cues for that position came from the Texas Supreme Court in Church v. Bullock, but one cannot attribute it to that ruling alone. Communities far outside the purview of that decision held similar views, as Chattanooga illustrates. The trend toward broader understandings of nonsectarianism as religious neutrality or secularism, evident in the arguments of intellectuals, educators, lawyers, and judges in the late nineteenth century, had not always made much headway on the ground in the early twentieth.
Far from eradicating religious instruction from their school systems in the 1900s, Dallas and many other communities found new ways to integrate, or at least coordinate, the projects of religious education and public education. This was not a universal phenomenon and it did not reverse the twentieth century's larger trajectory toward the secularization of public education. It was, however, a movement that found more expression and vitality in many parts of the country than has been acknowledged in much recent historiography. Some Bible courses continued without change for a considerable time after the mid-century Supreme Court decisions, their backers unable to recognize, or unwilling to admit, their Protestant presuppositions. Examples like Dallas and Chattanooga illustrate how the post-Schempp process of excluding religiously-inspired courses from public education has been uneven, at times gradual, and often complicated by very different understandings of religious bias and church-state relations.
Indeed, the extent to which Chattanooga succeeded in reorienting its course after Wiley v. Franklin remains open to debate. A group known as “Bible in the Schools” took over course logistics and funding responsibilities, and teachers became employees of the school district. In 2016, the organization's website underscored that “no religious proselytizing, sectarianism, or denominational recruitment is permitted.” Its curriculum, however, appeared to focus on the Protestant form of the canon and utilized a “Bible as history” approach highly amenable to evangelical sensibilities.Footnote 98 If the contemporary Chattanooga course does reflect religious bias, it is hardly unique, as studies of courses in Texas and Florida have shown.Footnote 99
The Dallas Bible textbooks continue to bear witness to the unfinished legacy of Schempp. They are now published by David Barton, a famous Texas-based activist who is working to restore America to what he sees as its Christian heritage. Barton's Founders’ Bible holds the Dallas books up as an exemplar of a supposed pre-Schempp Golden Age before the Supreme Court contravened George Washington's wishes by removing “the religion of Jesus Christ” from public education.Footnote 100 Homeschooling websites promote them as an outstanding, tested-by-time resource, available for under five dollars apiece.Footnote 101 They still find their way into the occasional public school classroom. In 2005–2006, the Lindale, Texas, course leaned heavily on them, teaching that Christianity had surpassed Judaism as “the highest step upward in man's desire to worship.” Similarly, in 2011–2012 and 2012–2013, the Church of Christ minister teaching the class in Sonora, Texas, asked students questions from the books that assumed Christian convictions, like “What change shall be made in our bodies at the resurrection?” and “How does God keep our hearts and minds?” He insisted his pedagogy was constitutional. “The textbook is just asking what the Bible says,” he told a reporter; “I leave any interpretation up to the students.” Its content frozen in the 1940s, the influence of the Dallas course lives on, nurtured by the same implicit notions of nonsectarianism and Protestant normativity that gave birth to it nearly a century ago.Footnote 102
