In many countries around the world, teaching about religion in public schools is normal and generally uncontroversial. For instance, in Germany, all public schools are required by law to offer courses about religion and all students are required to take either classes in religion or classes in philosophy and ethics. In Greece, students are required to take classes in Eastern Orthodoxy, although parents are permitted to opt their students out of these classes if they choose.
In the United States, though, very few public schools offer classes that are solely devoted to religion and most people incorrectly believe that public schools are not even allowed to teach classes about religion at all. In reality, public schools in the United States are allowed to teach about religion, but there are limitations on how they are allowed to teach about it.
Religion is only allowed to be taught in public schools in the United States if it is taught in an academic, non-sectarian manner. Schools are not allowed to encourage students to follow any religion or discourage them from following any religion; they are only allowed to teach students the facts.
The Supreme Court on religion in schools
In the early twentieth century, it was common for public schools in the United States to have official school prayers, for them to require students to read and memorize passages from the Bible in a devotional manner, and for them to require students to memorize passages of Christian religious poetry. This all changed as the result of two landmark Supreme Court cases in the early 1960s.
The Supreme Court ruled in the 1962 case Engel v. Vitale that it is unconstitutional for public school teachers to lead students in prayer or otherwise encourage students to pray. Likewise, the Supreme Court ruled in the 1963 case Abington School District v. Schempp that it is unconstitutional for public school teachers to assign their students to read verses from the Bible from a devotional perspective.
The Supreme Court’s reasoning for these decisions is that public school teachers are official representatives of the United States government. The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” According to the Supreme Court, this means that public school teachers cannot encourage students to follow any religion or engage in any religious practices.
ABOVE: Image of a newspaper article from 1962 about the case of Abington School District v. Schempp, which later went on to become a landmark Supreme Court decision
What you can teach students about religion in schools
Public schools are, however, allowed to teach about religion; they just can’t teach students about religion in a way that encourages those students to practice the religion or religions they are being taught about.
As an example of this, let’s talk about the Bible. There is a popular belief that it is illegal to teach the Bible in public schools, but this is actually a misconception. Believe it or not, it is actually completely legal for a public school in the United States to have an entire class solely devoted to the Bible—but only if that class teaches the Bible from a secular academic standpoint.
There are two main ways of teaching about the Bible. Most people in the United States are familiar with the devotional approach, which starts out with the basic assumptions that God exists, that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, and that people should base their lives on the Bible’s teachings. This is the way that most people are taught about the Bible in Sunday school.
There is another approach, however: the academic approach, which sees the Bible not as the inerrant word of God, but rather as a collection of ancient texts, which are not necessarily completely historically reliable. The Supreme Court ruled in Abington School District v. Schempp that public schools can teach about the Bible, as long as it is “presented objectively as part of a secular program of education.”
ABOVE: Photograph of a Sunday school class for girls at a Baptist church in Kentucky in 1946. Sunday school classes teach the Bible from a devotional perspective, not from an academic perspective.
In other words, you can teach the Bible in a public school, but only if you teach it from an academic perspective. This means that, constitutionally, you could assign your students to read the entire Bible as part of a literature class or a world religions class, but you couldn’t teach them that it is the word of God, that it is infallible, or that they should base their lives on its teachings.
Instead, you would have to teach them about the historical contexts in which the individual books that make up the Bible were written, about the different (and often conflicting) messages that various Biblical authors present, about how these books are interpreted by different groups of Jews and Christians around the world, and about how the Bible has impacted cultures around the world (not necessarily always in positive ways).
You would also have to teach them that there are different versions and translations of the Bible, that we don’t always know exactly what the original authors of the books that make up the Bible wrote, and that the Bible as we have it today is rife with blatant contradictions and demonstrable inaccuracies.
Of course, the Supreme Court’s decision also means that, if you teach students about the Bible in a public school, you aren’t allowed to disparage it, say that people who believe in it are stupid, or tell students that they shouldn’t use it as a moral guide, because this would be going too far in the opposite direction.
ABOVE: The Fall of Man, painted between 1628 and 1629 by the Dutch Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens. Adam and Eve are mythical figures, not real people.
The necessity of teaching (at least some things) about religion in public schools
It is perfectly legal for public schools to teach students about religion, as long as they do it from a secular academic standpoint. In fact, at least in some cases, it is necessary for public schools to teach students about religion. Most notably, it is necessary to teach students about religions in history class. History and religion are inextricably intertwined and it is impossible to understand history without knowing about religion.
For instance, it is impossible to understand western history if you don’t know anything about traditional Greek polytheism, traditional Roman polytheism, Judaism, Christianity, traditional Germanic polytheism, or Islam. All of these religions are interrelated in all sorts of complicated ways and they have all fundamentally shaped not only western history, but the culture of the United States as we know it.
Similarly, it is impossible to understand Indian history without having at least some basic knowledge of Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, and Sikhism, since all these religions have had huge impacts on Indian history. If you try to teach any kind of history without saying anything at all about religion, you’re going to end up egregiously misrepresenting the history you are trying to teach.
Of course, teaching students about religions in history class means you also have to teach them about how religions are diverse and constantly changing. Mainline Protestantism today is significantly more liberal than it was 150 years ago. Meanwhile, Evangelical Protestantism as we know it today didn’t even exist three hundred years ago. Even the teachings of the Catholic Church today aren’t identical to the teachings of the Catholic Church six hundred years ago.
ABOVE: Late third-century AD Christian mosaic from the necropolis underneath St. Peter’s Basilica showing Jesus with the iconography of the Roman sun god Sol. (As I discuss in this article from March 2020, in late antiquity, Christians often portrayed Jesus using the iconographies of traditional polytheistic deities.)
Germany and Greece are not particularly good counterexamples, because they have no formal separation of church and state.
Many European countries don’t have formal separation of church and state. For instance, Britain doesn’t have formal separation of church and state either. Queen Elizabeth I is both the queen of Britain and the supreme governor of the Church of England. Meanwhile, there are twenty-six bishops of the Church of England, known as the “Lords Spiritual,” who get automatic seats in the House of Lords.
Most of the world’s literature is also incomprehensible to readers who know nothing of the religious tradition that it came out of. Certainly, a reader who doesn’t recognize Biblical concepts and quotations is going to miss a great deal in reading literature written in English.
To teach that the Bible is “rife with blatant contradictions and demonstrable inaccuracies,” however, is to favor a specifically secularist view; that is, to buy into one particular interpretation. Teaching secularism is as unconstitutional as teaching as any other religious view, although it’s usually safer.
I agree that the Bible has had tremendous influence on modern English literature. A person who tries to read modern English literature without knowing anything about the Bible is certainly going to miss out on an awful lot.
I do have to disagree about your claim that teaching that the Bible contains contradictions is teaching a secularist view, however, because it is demonstrably true that the Bible contradicts itself. For instance, how did Judas Iscariot die? According to the Gospel of Matthew 27:1-10, when Judas heard that Jesus was going to be crucified, he tried to return the thirty pieces of silver he had been paid for his betrayal to the chief priests, but they wouldn’t accept it because it was blood money, so he threw the money on the floor of the Temple and hanged himself. Then the priests used the money to buy field, which became known as “the Field of Blood” because it had been bought with blood money.
The Book of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles 1:15-19, on the other hand, gives a completely different version of the story. It says that Judas used the money he had been paid for his treachery to buy a field. Then, as he was walking through the field, he tripped and fell headlong and burst open in the midst and his guts spilled out. Then the field became known as “the Field of Blood” because Judas bled all over it.
Obviously, Judas can only have died once, so he can’t have died both ways. Apologists have tried to come up with excuses, such as that, maybe, Judas hanged himself on a tree in the field, then, after Judas had been dead for a while, the rope he had used to hang himself rotted and his body fell down from the tree and burst open on the ground. The problem is that this is a story that isn’t found in either of the gospels; this is a new story that apologists have simply made up.
No one who was trying to describe the death of a man who had committed suicide by hanging would do this by saying that he fell “headlong,” burst open in the midst, and his guts spilled out. Moreover, if the gospel-writer were trying to say that this happened after Judas hanged himself, he would describe Judas hanging himself and then say that his body fell and burst open afterwards; he wouldn’t just say that he fell and his guts spilled out without even mentioning that he hanged himself first.
There are hundreds of other examples like this one that I could cite. I like to use this particular example, though, because it is just so clear-cut. A person cannot die in two different ways.
Meanwhile, it is possible to accept that the Bible contradicts itself while also believing that it is the Word of God; a person can believe that some things recorded in the Bible are not true in the historical sense, but that they reveal higher, spiritual truths in some manner.
Re the 1st amendment why does the USA allow “In God We Trust” on their currency and ” God Save America” in public declarations. Is that not also unconstitutional?
Surprisingly, no. The phrase “In God We Trust” is allowed because of a rather esoteric legal concept known as “ceremonial deism.” Essentially, this concept holds that the religious references associated with the United States government are permissible so long as they are traditional and widely used, not a form of worship or prayer, not specific to any one religion, and “minimally” religious.
Thus, the Supreme Court has ruled that the motto “In God We Trust,” the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, the phrase “So help me God” in the Oath of Office, the Ohio state motto “With God, all things are possible,” the implicit reference to a deity in the motto “Annuit cœptis,” and religious references in traditional patriotic songs such “God Bless America” are all perfectly constitutional.
Does this idea really make sense? Not really. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court has endorsed it, so it remains the law of the land.
I’ve told you before, there’s no such thing as “bioleninism.” And what you call “praise for the underclass” is something that moral human beings call “caring for those who are less fortunate.”
The true reason our public schools do not teach religion is precisely due to the primary implication of the 1962 ruling: religious conservatives DO NOT want religion taught in a secular, academic matter.
They would rather there be no teaching of religion at all than to expose students to the actual history of Christianity or to study the Bible as a literary work.