In The Bible, the School, and the Constitution, Steven K. Green reminds his readers that “modern church-state doctrine” in the United States is largely a product of concerns about schoolchildren. While not all of the controversies involving religion and politics in America have centered on schooling, at least since the 1940s, the relation between religion and schools has aroused intense energy and emotions (Fisher Reference Fisher2005, 580–581). Occasional Americans may worry about tax exemptions for churches, placing Christmas displays on public property, having “In God We Trust” on coins, or paying for chaplains in the armed forces, but more significant numbers of us seem to become exorcised over such matters as whether public schools should lead public, organized prayer or whether tax dollars should go to support private, religious schools. This fact has long been true, as Green's book reminds us. This book also offers the salutary reminder that inter-religious violence has historically not been confined to Europe and Asia.

More than 20 years ago, Steven K. Green published an excellent article on the Blaine Amendment, arguing that the debate over adding the Blaine Amendment to the Constitution in 1876 is not dispositive of the question whether the 14th Amendment (particularly its Privileges or Immunities Clause) was originally intended to “incorporate” the first eight amendments to the Constitution — i.e., apply them as restrictions on state governments (Green Reference Green1992). The Blaine Amendment (debated in Congress mostly during the summer of 1876), said inter alia, “No State shall make any law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” (Green 2012, 189–190; 194). The final version of the Amendment in Congress included an arguably anti-Catholic clause that explicitly banned the turning over of taxes or public school funds to sectarian establishments, a practice that by the 1860s had become relatively prevalent, especially for Catholic orphanages and asylums, in eastern and midwest cities containing significant numbers of Catholics. It also contained a provision saying that Bible reading in public schools was not banned by the Amendment. This clause plainly had an anti-Catholic thrust, because schools with Protestant majorities would read the Protestant Bible.

Although the goal of Green's Reference Green1992 article was to engage in the scholarly debate over incorporation doctrine,Footnote ¹ scholarly reaction to that article focused instead on its revelations of anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant animus behind the Blaine Amendment. That reaction motivated Green to write The Bible, the School, and the Constitution, which traces the school question back to the days before public schooling prevailed in the United States and follows it up through the celebrated cases of 1947–1963 that set the basic contours of modern church-state doctrine: Everson, McCollum, Engel, and Schempp.

By 1750, Green argues, there was in New England and a few seaboard cities an established system of “district schools” for primary grades. These charged tuition rates to parents who could afford it, gave rate exemptions to the poor, and were supported by local taxes. The local minister often was the teacher. Additionally, more affluent parents employed tutors or paid for private, religiously affiliated school, and the indigent were served by several religiously sponsored charity schools in Philadelphia and New York. Irrespective of school, 18th-century primary education was for religion; literacy would enable children to read and study the Bible and other religious texts, so that they could become virtuous Christians (12–13).

As cities became more heterogeneous, adding a variety of Protestant denominations, the goal of making education “non-sectarian” gradually emerged. As Ellis West notes, in The Religion Clauses of the First Amendment, Madison's effort in the First Congress to deal with local religious heterogeneity by inserting the injunction that “No State shall violate the equal rights of conscience” into the Bill of Rights, did not get beyond the House of Representatives (90–95). Only with the increased popularity of the goal of providing free, public, governmentally-provided education for all citizens (for the sake of good citizenship) did the appropriateness of non-sectarian education become widely apparent. And even then, with the notable exception of Thomas Jefferson, education leaders agreed that education, albeit non-sectarian, must remain not only religious but explicitly Christian (Green 2012, 15). Christianity would produce virtue and thereby good citizenship. In Massachusetts, in the late 1830s, Horace Mann pioneered a reform of non-sectarian Christian public education by removing its devotional aspects: students would no longer recite catechisms, say the Lord's Prayer, and sing hymns, but would through reading of the King James Bible receive inculcation in general Christian values. His views gradually spread within the northern United States. Defenders of more explicitly devotional education gradually yielded to the argument that such practices were intrinsically divisive among the Protestant sects and should give way to the more important goal of creating civic bonds among the citizenry via a common, publicly funded education. This transition from publicly subsidized sectarian Christian education to publicly funded non-sectarian Christian education took place peacefully from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century. Much of Green's book traces in detail the pedagogical arguments that were deployed during this transition.

What was not peaceful was the conflict between Protestants and Catholics over the “School Question” during the half-century that preceded the (ultimately failed) attempt to adopt the Blaine Amendment. Immigration to the United States rose sharply after 1820, bringing a steep increase in the number of Catholic Americans (largely from Ireland and Germany, along with significant Jewish immigration from the latter). By 1829, Catholic leaders were beginning to protest the pro-Protestant and anti-Catholic tone of both schoolbooks and Bible-reading practices whether with or without school prayer (Green 2012, 34).

Protestant responses varied. Some cities simply removed the prior practice of teacher comment upon the Bible reading and non-denominational prayer, with the thinking that it was this commentary that amounted to sectarian doctrine. Some excused Catholic children from the exercises. Some allowed Catholic students to opt for reading the Douay (Catholic) Bible while other children read the King James version. Cities with historically significant concentrations of Catholics, such as Detroit and St. Louis, avoided adopting school prayer and Bible reading. In Detroit, three years of protests from Protestant parents moved the city to adopt Bible reading with an option for Catholic children to choose the Douay version in 1845. In 1844, a Philadelphia school board decision to excuse Catholics from Bible reading produced violent rioting over a nine week period that resulted in 30 deaths and the destruction of several Catholic churches. Protestant judges and juries appear at times to have been merciless toward Catholic schoolchildren. The Maine Supreme Court in 1854 upheld expulsion of a 15-year-old Catholic girl who (with her father's support) refused to read from the King James Bible. In 1859, in Boston, a Catholic grammar school boy at his father's instructions refused to recite the Protestant version of the Ten Commandments, and for this received 30 minutes of being caned, which produced wounds and swelling. His father lost his criminal complaint for assault and battery.

After the Civil War, a case from Cincinnati (another city with a sizable Catholic population) that garnered extended national attention produced a new judicial doctrine from the Ohio Supreme court: that Bible reading was intrinsically sectarian, that Christianity was not part of the common law of the United States, and that public schools were free (irrespective of language in the Ohio Constitution and Northwest Ordinance that “religion, morality and knowledge [are] essential for good government”) to cease Bible reading and prayer exercises. This 1873 decision intimated that these practices might even violate constitutional principles, and proved a turning point; the popularity and ubiquity of these public school practices declined thereafter (Green 2012, Ch. 3).

One finishes Steven Green's book with the sense that efforts to recapture the original understanding of the principles embodied in the First Amendment religion clauses are particularly wrongheaded because the American public mind was genuinely in a state of flux on this subject, in large part because the audience that was “America” drastically changed its composition over the course of the nation's first century.. The United States evolved from a homogeneously Protestant country made up of towns that tended to be dominated by one or another Protestant denomination to a country with increasingly significant portions of Catholics and Jews and different varieties of Protestants within most towns. Understandings of the meaning of religious freedom and of “establishment of religion” evolved accordingly.

Ellis West's The Religion Clauses of the First Amendment addresses scholars who would dodge the complexity of these evolving state and local level patterns by claiming that the religion clauses of the First Amendment had no other meaning than to keep the federal government out of the business of legislating on religion, whether in favor of it (with “law[s] respecting [its] establishment”) or against it (by laws “restricting [its] free exercise”). The book presents an extended critique of claims by scholars such as Steven Smith, who claim that “The [religion clauses] were … simply an assignment of jurisdiction over matters of religion to the states — no more, no less” (3). West makes an overwhelmingly persuasive case that this widespread scholarly assertion is highly dubious. No one in the founding period stated it to be the meaning of the clauses. There is much evidence that the clauses instead expressed a normative commitment to freedom of religion — freedom from coercion by government toward a religion and freedom for the exercise of one's own religion.

After a rather arcane chapter exploring various senses of the term “normative” in support of his claim that the clauses have normative thrust, West turns in Chapter Two to criticize arguments made by proponents of a jurisdictional interpretation. Chapter Three begins the meat of the book: it looks at evidence in Antifederalist statements about the need for religion clauses, and early versions of them proposed during ratification debates. Chapter Four explores similar evidence in the Congressional drafting of and debates on the religion clauses. Chapter Five debunks the assertion, by advocates of the jurisdictional reading, that there was no consensus on religious freedom among the framers such that they could have agreed on a substantive content for the religion clauses. Chapter Six covers interpretations of the First Amendment religion clauses by officials of the federal government, ratifiers, clergy, and legal commentators between1790 and 1830. West compiles an overwhelming body of evidence; it persuades the reader that the jurisdictional account is incomplete. Of course, the First Amendment was a restriction on Congress, not on the state governments, but it expressed a normative viewpoint about the value of religious freedom, a viewpoint that prevailed at the state level as well. Even in the handful of New England states where towns taxed residents to support a local church, the residents of these states did not consider what they were doing to be an “establishment of religion” in the sense that England had an “established religion.”

West's account, while utterly persuasive as critique, does make at least one exaggerated claim. In Chapter Six, he endorses Carl Esbeck's view that by 1789 most Americans had abandoned the view that their state governments needed to “material[ly] support” religion “to insure religion's salutary effect on public morality and civic virtue” (130). Green's book demonstrates, to the contrary, that precisely this view was repeatedly articulated in controversies over religious exercises in public schools for most decades of the nineteenth century. Not until the 1870s did the American public begins to widely accept the idea that it was acceptable to drop Bible reading and/or non-denominational prayer from public school. Until then, the dominant view had been that public schools needed to inculcate religiosity (albeit non-denominational) for the sake of civic virtue.

The third in this recent trilogy of books on religion and politics, Roger Trigg's Equality, Freedom and Religion, does not limit itself to the American situation; instead it spans the globe, although cases for the United Kingdom and from former British Empire countries figure prominently in it. Its account is less persuasive than the other two books. Trigg is interested first in establishing that religious freedom specifically, as distinguished from “freedom of conscience,” is properly a universal human right because religious thinking and/or religious belief is intrinsic to human nature. Convinced that he has established this fact in his first chapter's review of (a few) scientific studies (18–25), Trigg goes on in the second chapter to establish that the very idea of equal human dignity that gives rise to the idea of universal human rights is grounded in theology, specifically Locke's version of Christianity. Most of the book then argues that the plethora of modern court cases (especially from the European Court of Human Rights but also from the United States and elsewhere) that have prioritized human equality at the expense of religious conscience are wrongheaded. Although this study offers examples of the need to protect more than one faith, he is especially concerned about cases that have failed to honor the rights of Catholic individuals' or institutions' opposition to homosexuality as expressed through policies on adoption or on foster parenting. The governmental concern to give equal rights to homosexual persons, he believes, has inappropriately been elevated above the obligation to respect the religious consciences of these Catholic individuals and institutions. He fears that in undermining religion, public policy will eventually undermine the very grounding of the belief in human rights.

The strength of the book is in the interesting presentation of the debates among judges in difficult religion cases from around the world. Had he limited himself more narrowly to presenting these thoughtful judicial arguments on both sides of the issues, he could have produced a far more engaging book.