Students of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, with its double-edged prohibition of any religious “establishment,” on the one hand, and its guarantee of the “free exercise” of religion on the other, return again and again to two landmark cases from the 1940s. In the first, Everson v. Board of Education (1947), the Supreme Court permitted the expenditure of public funds to provide transportation for children in New Jersey who attended religious schools, not just for those who went to the public schools. Such funding did not represent government preference for any particular church. A year later, in McCollum v. Board of Education, the Court reversed direction, striking down an Illinois law that allowed representatives of different faiths to come into the public schools and provide religious instruction to those students whose parents voluntarily signed up for it. This program did indeed seem to favor some churches over others, and it therefore constituted an impermissible form of establishment. In both decisions, the Court made much of Thomas Jefferson's famous letter to the Baptist church of Danbury, Connecticut, in 1802, a letter that contained his reference to “a wall of separation between Church & State.” It may be unwise to construct an enduring constitutional principle on an off-hand metaphor, but the idea of the “wall” has been firmly fixed in American legal and popular thinking ever since.

The great virtue of Kathleen Holscher's Religious Lessons is that it looks at a case, more or less contemporary with Everson and McCollum, that never made it all the way to the Supreme Court, but that also wrestled with the meaning of the First Amendment. Zellers v. Huff was heard in a local court in New Mexico in the fall of 1948, and it turned on the peculiar arrangements that the state had made in organizing and staffing its schools. In the half-century after the territory's acquisition in the Mexican-American War, New Mexico had been singularly inept at organizing its public schools. Not until the 1890s was a system of tax-supported schools put into effect, and even then funding was spotty and hardly generous. Catholic sisters of several different orders had stepped into this breach. They opened their own church-related schools and, in some remote towns (which could not get teachers otherwise), they taught in the public schools as well. In places where the population was overwhelmingly Hispanic and Catholic, this caused little stir—kids were learning the three Rs, regardless of the constitutional niceties, and that seemed the most important thing—but where the population was more diverse, many began to wonder whether this arrangement was proper. One such place was the town of Dixon, north of Santa Fe near the Colorado border. There, Lydia and George Zellers, devout Presbyterians, objected to the sister-teachers in their public school, and they initiated the case that eventually declared it impermissible for nuns to serve in that capacity. The case never went beyond the state to the Supreme Court, but the ruling confirmed the more general constitutional direction that was being set in Washington. Precisely because the Zellers case has remained largely unknown, Holscher has done a genuine historical service by recovering it.

The whole affair took on added significance when it was seized on as a test case by a new national organization, Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State. The POAU (the common abbreviation) had been formed just a year before to patrol Jefferson's wall, and it was particularly watchful for any breaches demonstrating what it took to be unwonted Catholic influence in civic affairs. Immediately recognizing the public relations potential of the Zellers case to promote its larger program, the organization dubbed the public schools where the sisters taught “captured schools”—captured, that is, by the vast international conspiracy supposedly headquartered at the Vatican. The scary word stuck. Self-appointed investigating committees visited the schools in question and, while some members distracted the sisters’ attention, others snapped incriminating photographs. This might lead to high (or low) comedy. One photo produced at the trial purported to show a cross above the school door; it was apparently simply the support beam for a light fixture. The traditional habits of their orders, which all the sisters wore, came to be a central issue in the case. Even if sisters were teaching arithmetic or spelling, their very appearance gave the school an inescapably religious cast, the plaintiffs argued. The judge agreed, and within a year of the ruling all sisters had withdrawn from the public schools of the state.

Holscher reconstructs this story from an impressive array of sources, including the trial transcripts, supplemented by a number of interviews with participants, some of whom are still alive. The writing is serviceable, though the author, while even-handed, does not always resist the temptation to over-dramatize. One sister's appearance on the witness stand is compared to Jesus before Pilate (183), while the Zellers run into “a wall of Catholic fury” (167) for bringing the case; some locals did stop patronizing the little general store they ran, but that hardly seems like either a wall or very much fury. This aside, the book will be useful to students of both religious and legal history. As usual, the apparent simple clarity of the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law. . . .”) is neither apparent nor simple. Only in response to specific cases do we all find out what the words really mean.