Since the Supreme Court has ruled that any advancement of religion in the public schools or their textbooks violates the First Amendment, then how can the public schools get by with teaching the religion of Humanism? That is the question with which the Federal court in Alabama is now wrestling in the case called Smith et al v. Board of School Commissioners of Mobile County.
The plaintiffs in the case, some 600 parents of public school children in and around Mobile, made such a compelling and logical argument that the State of Alabama and the Mobile Board of School Commissioners stipulated in a consent decree that “Humanism is a religion for both the Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.” They stipulated further that “the advancement of Humanism in public school textbooks violates the First Amendment.”
These consent decrees rely on a string of Supreme Court decisions banning prayer and advocacy of religion from public schools, especially the 1985 case, Wallace v. Jaffree, which prohibited even voluntary silent prayer.
The Alabama State Board of Education has not yet agreed to the consent decree. Regardless of whether it does or not, the case appears to be headed for the Supreme Court because the American Civil Liberties Union and People for the American Way have injected themselves into the case on the other side.
People for the American Way recently ran a four-page paid advertisement in U.S.A. TODAY describing its activities, one of which is to underwrite the legal expenses to battle against the 600 parents in this Mobile case. PAW is trying to describe the case as one in which “ultrafundamentalists” are trying to “censor” books they don’t like.
But that’s not the issue. The crux of the case is simply a demand that the First Amendment treat all religions alike. If Christianity and Judaism are disdained in public schools, Humanism should get the cold shoulder, too.
The second part of the case is a censorship issue, but not the way People for the American Way describes it. The plaintiff parents object to the existing censorship of established facts about religion and religious institutions in American history.
The consent decree already agreed to by Alabama and the Mobile School Commissioners also stipulates that the “demonstrated censorship of the existence, history, contributions, and roles of Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism constitutes unconstitutional discrimination against religion in violation of the First Amendment.”
This part of the case is based on the impressive documentation developed by Dr. Paul Vitz under a grant from the National Institute of Education, which is incorporated into the case. His scholarship proved that important facts about the historical contributions and role of religion in our society, from colonial days to the present, were systematically excluded from social studies textbooks.
It is already established U.S. law that students have a constitutional right to be supplied with history books that include historical facts about blacks and civil rights. Do not Christians likewise have a constitutional right to be provided with history books that tell historical facts about the tremendous role which religion played in our country’s heritage?
The Mobile case has caught the Humanists on the horns of a dilemma. In the 1961 case of Torcaso v. Watkins, the court struck down a Maryland law that required a declaration of belief in God before being commissioned as a notary. In order to reach this holding, the Court had to equate religions that deny a belief in God with those that affirm a belief in God. The Torcaso decision specifically stated that “Secular Humanism” is among “religions in this country which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God.”
That was true then, and it is just as true today. Humanism proclaims faith in man rather than God, asserts that the universe is “self-existing and not created,” that man is the product of evolution, that the “joy of living” and the “satisfactions of life” are the supreme goal of man, and that ethics comes from “human experience,” not from God.
It seems only reasonable that, if the schools are not permitted to teach the reverse of these dogmas, then they should not be permitted to teach the dogmas of Humanism. The scales of justice should be even-handed if we are to be a government of laws, not of men.
