Religious Education: Confronting an issue as old as public schools.
Our seemingly interminable argument about education now seems to have boiled down to the debate over school vouchers—both left and right having more-or-less accepted the idea that we must have “standards,” i.e., force-feed our children standardized tests until they collapse over their desks in boredom. And with George W. Bush’s recent initiatives to both provide vouchers and to aid “faith-based” organizations, the battle has reverted to an even older national argument. When it comes to public schools, just how far should the establishment clause of the Constitution go in separating church and state?
For all the heat generated by this issue, it is doubtful that many on either side know its peculiar and contradictory history. That is, the fact that the American public school system was begun with the express idea of providing religious instruction to all pupils. Or that our nation’s fine, Catholic parochial school system came about in good part to escape forced school prayer.
The nineteenth-century conflict over religion in the schools came to a head in New York City—as so many conflicts do. And then as now, it was part of a wider battle over not just what our schools would teach, but what our nation would be. By 1840, New York was one of many states to offer a free primary or “common” school education. And as was the case in all public school systems of the time, this included a “nondenominational” course of religious instruction.
Of course, “nondenominational” meant something different in 1840 than it usually does today. Usually, students recited a few basic prayers, sang a few hymns, and read the more uncontroversial passages from the Bible without commentary or interpretation. This was the result of careful compromise between the myriad Protestant faiths that had long competed for American souls.
“On the one hand, the common school stressed the reading of the Bible and general Christian morality,” Vincent P. Lannie writes in his lively history, Public History and Parochial Education. “While, on the other hand, denominational Sunday schools taught specific sectarian tenets which completed the child’s moral and religious instruction.”
Amazing as it may seem today, no one filed a class-action suit. But there was still one little problem. Even in the America of 1840, not everyone was a Protestant. In New York City alone, there were now some 200,000 Roman Catholics—or some one-third of the city’s population—and they had some serious objections to “nonsectarianism.”
For starters, the Bible that “everyone” had agreed on was the King James Version—a formidable literary work, but one that the Vatican did not recognize. To read it was therefore considered heresy—as was the singing of Protestant hymns, and the recitation of Protestant prayers. Catholic parents were advised to keep their children out of the public schools, lest their immortal souls be endangered, and many did—while agonizing over having to watch their children grow up in places like the terrible Five Point slums without any formal education. Nor did it much please the new bishop of New York, “Dagger John” Hughes. Hughes was himself a remarkable immigrant story, a self-made man who had come to the United States from Ireland at the age of 20, in order to live in a country “in which no stigma of inferiority would be impressed on my brow, simply because I professed one creed or another.” He had worked his way through the Mount St. Mary’s seminary in Maryland as a gardener, hired on by the Reverend John Dubois, then president of the seminary. It was a measure of both his ability and his determination that less than twenty years later he would succeed Dubois as bishop of New York.
Practical, energetic, intelligent, uncompromising, and sardonically humorous, Hughes would be a ferocious defender of both his flock and his faith. One of the first problems he tackled was what to do about the schools, though here he found himself in a quandary. He would have preferred to build a separate, parochial school system for all of New York’s Catholics—but his desperately poor, immigrant parishioners were as yet unable to afford such a thing. In the meantime, their tax dollars went to funding public schools that promulgated Protestant teachings, in however mild a form.
Fortunately, the church was not alone in perceiving an injustice here. Even as he took up the reins of his bishopric, Hughes found an unexpected and powerful ally up in Albany.
William Seward was not yet forty years old, a first-term governor produced by Thurlow Weed’s autocratic political machine. Yet he already possessed the independent mettle that would make him one of the nation’s greatest statesmen—along with his own, fierce faith in human dignity and the vision of a tolerant, democratic America.
Seward believed that since America had offered itself as a refuge for the “oppressed of every nation,” it was only right that “we should evince wisdom equal to such generosity by qualifying their children for the high responsibilities of citizenship.”
Furthermore, he proposed to do something about it. In his annual message to the legislature in 1840, Seward proposed for immigrant children, “the establishment of schools in which they may be instructed by teachers speaking the same language with themselves and professing the same faith.”
Seward’s speech was a bombshell—and an breathtaking political risk. New York City’s Catholics took it as an invitation to petition the Public School Society, which administered the common school fund in New York City, for some small share of public monies to support their own, existing eight schools.
Pandemonium ensued. The Catholic petition set off a vituperative public debate, particularly in the city’s boisterous public press. The reaction of the Protestant establishment generally bordered on the hysterical. They professed to be shocked that Catholics objected to the reading of “the Bible,” and insisted that they were petitioning for special privileges that would bring down the whole public school system. As proof, they pointed to ensuing petitions from the Scotch Presbyterians, and New York’s then tiny Jewish community, for similar consideration. It was bad enough that the pope’s scheming minions might get taxpayer dollarsÑbut Scotch Presbyterians!
Hughes replied to all this by issuing a magisterial address that began with the assertion, “We are Americans and American citizens”—a common and significant salutation in Catholic speeches of the time—and followed with an impassioned plea for equal justice:
“We hold, therefore, the same idea of our rights that you hold of yours. We wish not to diminish yours, but only to secure and enjoy our own.” Hughes went on to concede that if the schools could be truly neutral on the issue of religion, the church would have no objection—but referring to common school history books that routinely depicted Catholics as duplicitous and intolerant, suggested that such a neutrality was “impossible.” He concluded by tying the Catholic cause to the whole American tradition of civil liberty, warning that should the rights of Catholics be trampled on, “the experiment may be repeated to-morrow on some other.”
On October 29, 1840, the debate came to a grand climax before the Common Council in City Hall. The galleries were packed with New Yorkers eager to hear Bishop Hughes, speaking alone for the Catholic side, take on a bevy of lawyers and clergyman representing the Public School Society and the Protestant establishment. This was political drama of the highest order, and it would be nice to report that after some spellbinding oratory, the forces of tolerance and moderation carried the day.
Alas, this was not a Steven Spielberg movie, but a time when Americans actually liked to go listen to people speak for entertertainment. Hughes opened the meeting with a three-and-a-half-hour address, and closed it with an equally long rebuttal. In between, the Protestant clergy and lawyers lambasted nearly all things Catholic for another day-and-a-half, allowing for adjournments so for activities like eating and sleeping.
For all the verbiage expended, both sides did little more than repeat their previous arguments or insults. Soon thereafter, the Common Council backed the Public School Society, and denied funds for the Catholic schools and a few days after that, Seward barely managed to win re-election despite a national Whig landslide. It soon became clear that his bold stand had cost him many more Protestant, nativist supporters, than it had gained him Irish-Catholic votes from the Democrats.
But the governor was not dismayed, maintaining that, “If any man, whether Whig or otherwise, will withhold his favor from me [over this issue]…then let that favor be withheld.” He soon came up with a new proposal, whereby all public education funds would be distributed by the state to individual city wards—which would then decide strictly on their own just what sort of religion would be taught in local schools.
This early attempt at decentralization came to dominate New York politics over the following three years, with more than one public meeting exploding into sectarian violence. Following the city elections of 1842, a Protestant mob attacked Hughes’ residence, smashing doors and windows, and were only prevented from doing worse by the hasty intervention of the police, the militia, and a group of Irish women who formed a human chain around the Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral to keep “sinners off.”
Ironically, when the Democrats swept the state elections that fall, passage of Seward’s bill was all but assured. But a key dilemma remained. What would happen to those who found themselves in a ward dominated by a different faith? Didn’t they still have some constitutional rights as individuals?
The compromise that passed the legislature went a long way toward the basic shape of the public school today. A crucial amendment to the bill mandated that no sectarian religious instruction was to be offered. All public schools would now educate students in the three ‘r’s, and leave religion to the churches, plain and simple.
The amended bill was triumphantly signed into law by Governor Seward…and pleased no one. Whigs and nativists swept the city elections in 1843—and promptly ruled that reading the King James Bible in class was not “sectarian.” This would largely remain the case for another hundred years or so, until the Supreme Court’s ruling banning organized prayer in the schools.
It also served to confirm the contention of John Hughes—soon elevated to archbishop—that a truly neutral public school system was an impossibility. Out of necessity, he permitted Catholic children to attend public schools but refocused all his efforts on building up a parochial system. By 1862, two years before his death, New York Catholic schools had enrolled some 15,000 pupils, and Hughes would be known as “the father of Catholic education” in America.
No doubt, modern advocates and opponents of vouchers alike will draw what lessons they like from this nineteenth-century debate. Supporters will heed Hughes’ arguments that even supposed “nonsectarianism” is really sectarian, and back the right of parents to give their children whatever education they deem fit, without an added financial burden. Opponents will point to the divisiveness inherent in attempts to hand over public monies for religious instruction.
Indeed, perhaps the most intriguing—and exasperating—thing about the school debate is its ability to entangle political allegiances. Should supporters of school prayer continue to back a common prayer for all in public schools—or support vouchers, and many different prayers? Will multiculturalists really support funding for schools run by the Nation of Islam—or the Aryan Nation?
Yet there may be a deeper moral here, beneath William Seward’s very different, pragmatic approaches, made only three years apart and both to very much the same end. Giving public money to Catholic schools, or banning religious instruction in public schools altogether—what Seward sought above all was universal education, which he deemed necessary to forge a just and democratic society. Or, as he said in referring in particular to the education of immigrant Americans, “I solicit their education less from sympathy, than because the welfare of the state demands it, and cannot dispense with it.”
No matter what we decide on the proper boundaries of church and state, it seems difficult to believe that we can today—anymore than we could in 1840—dispense with a healthy and accessible public school system, and still maintain ourselves as a strong and united nation.