In 2025, lawsuits have slowed efforts to bring Christianity into public schools in two Southern states. The Oklahoma Supreme Court blocked the state’s education department from using public funds to purchase Bibles for required reading assignments. In New Orleans, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals is rehearing arguments against a Louisiana law requiring public schools to permanently display a government-approved, Protestant version of the Ten Commandments in every classroom. (A three-judge panel found the Ten Commandments law unconstitutional in 2024 before the Fifth Circuit decided to retry the case en banc). These rulings will keep the Christian Bible out of classrooms temporarily, but they will not stop political candidates from using religious rhetoric when they criticize public education in campaigns to capitalize on Americans’ hopes and fears in terms of their children and their futures. Leslie Beth Ribovich provides important historical context to the evolution of such religious rhetoric through public education debates in the 1950s and 1960s in her new book, Without a Prayer: Religion and Race in New York City Public Schools.

Ribovich argues that the only way to understand debates about public education is to think of religion and race as two inseparable, continuous dynamics that “undergirded the moral formation of New York City students and educators.” (177) She illustrates this by identifying the two top stories in a Public Schools of New York Staff Bulletin from 1963. One story announces that the city would follow two recent Supreme Court rulings which found school prayer unconstitutional in public schools, while the other mapped out the city’s plan for racial integration. Ribovich supports her argument by examining racialized language in several city debates over the role of religion and prayer in classrooms – and also by identifying religious rhetoric in competing plans for racial integration of schools and curriculum.

While the national media seemed preoccupied with the question of racially integrating public schools after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Ribovich focuses on Engel v. Vitale, because that 1962 Supreme Court case rejected the constitutionality of a school prayer drafted by the New York State Board of Regents. Her first two chapters are largely close readings of the Regents’ statement in 1951 and several revisions by the New York City Board of Education later that decade. Analyzing these documents allows Ribovich to broaden her definition of religious rhetoric from explicit declarations of God to more general ideas of moral and spiritual values in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Although New York City, along with 90 percent of the state’s school boards, did not require students to recite the Regents’ controversial prayer, it carefully crafted a statement in which the nation’s “Founding Fathers replaced God as the source of moral and spiritual values.” (39) Ribovich is right to identify the centrality of religion in these competing statements of moral formation, but that emphasis obscures the school board’s emphasis on patriotic imagery at the height of the Second Red Scare. Her close reading of each statement of moral and spiritual values prevents further analysis of the school board’s investigation of “more than 1,100 teachers whom they suspected of being Communist in the 1950s.” (32) This witch hunt, which led to the firing of hundreds of teachers, deserves further scrutiny – particularly in light of current efforts to remove current professors from university classrooms under accusations of anti-Semitism in 2025.

Ribovich is right to acknowledge the absence of Black New Yorkers from debates over the statements of moral formation throughout the 1950s. Her strongest chapter emphasizes Black agency and reframes our understanding of the 1968 teacher strike in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Ocean Hill and Brownsville. In his famous ethnography Canarsie, Jonathan Rieder uses the strike, which protested the firing of 19 teachers, to show how working-class Jews in East Brooklyn became disenchanted with political liberalism in the years after 1968. In contrast, Ribovich shifts attention away from the Jewish teachers on strike and focuses on “community control,” the idea that allowed Black parents in Ocean Hill and Brownsville to replace white educators with teachers of their own race – ultimately leading to the incorporation of Pan-Africanism and Black Liberation Theology in neighborhood classrooms. This was a short-lived experiment that stopped soon after the teacher strikes in 1968, but Ribovich insists that “community control was not a failed story about race; it was a successful story about religion… [it] may not have achieved Black and Puerto Rican communities’ original goals for integration – educational equity across racial groups – but community control did disrupt rather than preserve the Judeo-Christian norm.” (150)

Ribovich may be right that scholars should analyze religious and racialized rhetoric as intertwined ideas in historical examinations of “any host of regions, time periods, or institutions.” (180) But this reviewer believes that her decision to examine New York City in the 1950s and 1960s was significant because those parochial debates over school prayer and school integration allowed her to make original insights about these overlapping issues. There is also opportunity for further study of these dynamics, particularly regarding the 1964 boycott when more than 450,000 children walked out to protest the continued segregation of New York City schools – the largest demonstration during the Civil Rights Movement. Like the 1968 teacher strike in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, the 1964 student boycott provides future scholars a case study to examine the interplay between religious and racialized language in America’s public education debates.