The Bible, the School, and the Constitution: The Clash That Shaped Modern Church-State Doctrine

Abstract

Until recently, partisans in contemporary battles over vouchers for attendance at Catholic schools have dominated popular historical scholarship on religion and public education. A simplistic ethnocultural conflict framework, in which nineteenth-century anti-Catholicism drove the development of nonsectarian public schooling, has prevailed. Hence, Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas could inaccurately declare in his 2000 Mitchell v. Helms opinion that nonsectarian public education was “born of bigotry.” While it appeared to liberals that Thomas was making things up, his decision was reasonable for someone who merely read the most popular secondary books on the topic. During the last two decades several groups of scholars have been developing a more nuanced and defensible view. Historians of education have examined the social history of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century religion and education; historians of religion have challenged monolithic views of Catholicism and Protestantism; cultural historians have exploded our understandings of nativism and immigration; and legal historians have retraced the changing meaning of church-state separation. Steven K. Green has been a leading thinker in the group of legal historians, and his recent book is the most authoritative legal history of nineteenth-century church-state-school relations to date.