Neutral in name only

As America’s 250th anniversary approaches, the presidential Religious Liberty Commission continues its important work. In hearings over the summer and fall, the commissioners heard testimony about the challenges to free exercise in educational institutions, and in the final hearings before the end of the year the focus will turn to the military.

We often hear that education, marked by a secular approach with respect to questions of ultimate value, ought to be the baseline for liberal democracies. The idea is that avoiding topics that tend to divide people along religious and worldview lines will reduce friction and the likelihood of conflicts. Moreover, this secularist view assumes that the government provision of education means that the education must be functionally agnostic with respect to objective claims about morality—and even (sometimes) reality itself, as in the cases of gender and sexuality.

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer represented this kind of view in his dissent in the case of Carson v. Makin: “People in our country adhere to a vast array of beliefs, ideals, and philosophies. And with greater religious diversity comes greater risk of religiously based strife, and social division.” The solution, according to Breyer, is to construe the religion clauses of the First Amendment as excluding these varieties of religious belief from government activity, including government school instruction. Breyer invokes Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that “‘to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical.”

But as political philosopher Melissa Moschella rightly observes, “What Breyer fails to notice, however, is that the selective funding of state-run schools actually does precisely what Jefferson believes to be ‘sinful and tyrannical.’” Rather than tamping down the likelihood of potential conflict between those holding to “a vast array of beliefs, ideals, and philosophies,” the secularist approach to public education actually increases the stakes and foments conflict, not between adherents of different religious views but instead between secularists and non-secularists. These non-secularists include Christians, certainly, but also adherents to all kinds of faith (and no faith at all) who do not think that a government-imposed secular orthodoxy leads to a public square that truly respects religious liberty and freedom of conscience.

This secularist error is on full display in the American educational system today, and examples abounded in the testimony at the Religious Liberty Commission hearings on religious liberty and education. Testimony at the hearings included a number of students, including fifth-grader Shea Encinas, who was “forced to participate in an activity with his kindergarten buddy involving the book, My Shadow is Pink, conflicting with his and his family’s religious beliefs.” A middle schooler, Hannah Allen, “was told that she and her friends could not pray in the lunchroom and would have to ‘move behind a curtain or meet alone outside.’” Other cases that come up over and over again include restrictions of Christian songs at school talent shows and religious imagery and text decorating student parking spaces.

As commissioner and CEO of First Liberty Kelly Shackelford contends, “Government and school officials violating the religious freedoms of children is inexcusable.” Indeed, said Shackelford, such testimonies before the commission “highlight the need to make sure these violations don’t continue against other children and the urgency of ensuring the religious freedoms of our students—now and into the future.”

It has become increasingly clear that privileging secularist schools and disfavoring private initiative catalyzes conflict rather than reducing it. This is something that the Netherlands discovered more than a century ago, as the Reformed theologian and statesman Abraham Kuyper led an effort to create a fair and level playing-field for people of all religions and worldviews. This is an approach that still functions today, and as former secretary of education Betsy DeVos argued, can work as a model for the American system. During his tenure as prime minister, Kuyper discussed parity of educational support across confessional and religious lines: “I refuse to endorse for one minute the view that some citizens can claim more rights than others.”

But it isn’t fair for government schools to promote a secular worldview. It also isn’t sustainable in a free and flourishing society, and it’s ultimately incompatible with the American ideals of religious liberty. Recent cases including Kennedy v. Bremerton School District and Carson v. Makin have begun to show the flaws in both secularist logic and social theory. And as the testimony at the Religious Liberty Commission hearings demonstrate, religious liberty must be fully respected in both law and practice when it comes to our schools. This is something we must continue to prioritize and advocate for as we commemorate America’s 250th birthday.