The American Founders Debate the Bible\u27s Use in Schools

Sandwiched between two great religious awakenings, the American founding occurred at a time when Enlightenment thought had found a following among influential intellectual elites. The Enlightenment rationalists\u27 skepticism of the transcendent claims of orthodox Christianity—divinity of Christ, Christ\u27s virgin birth and resurrection, the Bible\u27s divine origins—conflicted with the religious beliefs of many Americans. This set the stage for skirmishes in a culture war between orthodox Christians and Enlightenment rationalists over the place of religion in public life, including a debate over the Bible\u27s use in the education of the youth. Influential political figures in the founding era, such as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, Fisher Ames, and Noah Webster, weighed in on this increasingly contentious issue. Religion figured prominently in this generation\u27s education, and yet they were divided on the propriety and utility of religion, specifically the Bible, in schools. Influenced by the rationalist critique of revealed religion, Jefferson and Webster argued for limiting the exposure of pupils to the Bible. Jefferson thought children were insufficiently mature to handle the Bible\u27s themes. Webster worried that the Bible might be profaned and trivialized by its popular use in the classrooms. Believing that religion (and morality informed by religious values) was indispensable to social order and political prosperity in a regime of self-government, Rush and Ames contended for an expansive use of the Bible in fostering civic virtue. Moreover, they thought students benefitted from the King James Bible\u27s model literary qualities. On the surface, this late-eighteen-century discussion appears very different from the twenty-first-century controversies. Current controversies are usually framed in terms of the First Amendment. Readings and instruction from the Bible—the sacred text of Christians—in public schools are alleged to constitute the establishment of Christianity in violation of the First Amendment. Moreover, the Bible\u27s use might burden the First Amendment rights of students who, for reasons of conscience, oppose Bible reading and instruction in state schools. Beneath the surface, however, the eighteenth-century debates share similarities with current controversies. Both emerged from a clash between proponents of secular, rational thought, on the one side, and religious traditionalists, on the other, who feared the coerced secularization of public life, especially schools. Late-eighteenth-century efforts to restrict the Bible\u27s use in schools arguably sprung from the rationalist or deist rejection of the Bible\u27s claim of divine origins. Rush opined that objections to the Bible\u27s use as a school book were rooted in Enlightenment and anti-Christian thought. The present fashionable practice of rejecting the bible from our schools, I suspect has originated with the deists, wrote Rush. They discover great ingenuity in this new mode of attacking Christianity. If they proceed in it, they will do more in half a century, in extirpating our religion, than Bolingbroke or Voltaire could have effected in a thousand years. The proposed paper examines a controversy in the American founding era that raised a range of issues, some of which anticipated twentieth-century prudential and constitutional challenges to religion\u27s place in education