Most Congressional bills or amendments that pass one House but are not voted on in the other House die quietly without further controversy. An exception to this rule is an amendment to the education
bill proposed by Congressman John Conlan which would have prevented the expenditure of Federal funds in the public schools for the purpose of promoting the religion of Secular Humanism. This amendment passed by 222 to 174 in the House, and then died in the Senate.
The Humanist Magazine has suddenly become very exercised about the Conlan bill, as well as about other efforts by religious parents to stop what they believe is the teaching of Secular Humanism in the public schools.
Humanism is best defined by the humanists themselves. The Second Humanist Manifesto, published in 1973 and signed by many leading educators, states: “As in 1933, humanists still believe that traditional
theism, especially faith in the prayer-hearing God, assumed to love and care for persons, to hear and understand their prayers, and to be able to do something about them, is an unproved and outmoded faith . . . . We find insufficient evidence for belief in the existence of a supernatural; it is either meaningless or irrelevant to the question of the survival and fulfillment of the human race . . . . We can discover no divine purpose or providence for the human species.”
It is a historical fact that our Founding Fathers did not intend the First Amendment to prohibit all religious teachings except Secular Humanism from the schools. When the Constitution was written, religious instruction in school was considered an essential part of education.
Even in 1892, long after the public school system came into existence, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declared in the Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States that our history provides a “mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation.” It was not until the second half of the twentieth century that the Supreme Court forbade religious education, Bible reading, and prayers from the public schools.
It is probable that what the majority of Supreme Court Justices thought they were doing by these decisions was to guarantee neutrality as between those who believe in God and those who do not believe in God. In 1961 in Torcaso v. Watkins, for example, the Supreme Court declared that neither the Federal Government nor any state can “aid those religions based on a belief in the existence of God as against those religions founded on different beliefs.” The Court then went on to specify that “among religions in this country which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God are Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism and others.”
The trouble is that nature abhors a vacuum, and when all pro-God religious teaching was prohibited, the gap was filled in many schools by the affirmative teaching of Secular Humanism. The First Humanist Manifesto, published in 1933, has had great status with many educators because it was endorsed by the father of progressive education, John Dewey.
Parents are now fighting back. Many are organizing private schools. In Ohio alone, nearly a hundred new Christian schools have started.
Even in the public schools, the parents can probably prevail. Since the Supreme Court has declared Secular Humanism to be a “religion,” the same First Amendment that bars pro-God religious teaching must necessarily bar all anti-God religious teaching.
