Religious Education in the U.S

Abstract

Religious schools have existed in what later became the United States since the Spanish missionary schools, and later they expanded under the influence of English Protestant settlers and missionaries. While they were supplanted in terms of numbers by the onset of the public school in the nineteenth century, religious schools continue to serve nearly ten percent of American K-12 students. They provide an alternative educational resource for millions of American parents who either wish to reinforce the values they teach their children at home, or offer their children what they perceive to be a more challenging academic program. Evangelical Christian schools are the fastest growing segment of religious schools in the United States, though parochial (or Catholic) schools continue to educate the largest number of students. Islamic schools are becoming more popular for Muslim immigrant parents, while Hebrew schools have long been a way for Jews in America to preserve their cultural and religious identity.

Overview

The term religious education has several definitions. In some American circles, the term is used as a synonym for Sunday school or some other youth-oriented instruction that takes place at a religious service and typically involves lessons based upon Bible stories. This variety of religious education has existed in some form or other since the nineteenth century, when the idea was imported from England and adopted by Protestants and Catholics. One nineteenth century writer commented that Sunday school had been "well known, and in high esteem in our cities and chief country towns" in the United States since the beginning of that century ("Historical Sketch," 1865, p. 3). By 1911, there were over 15 million students enrolled in Sunday school (Herzog, Schaff & Hauck, 1911, p. 155). Americans have always had the reputation of being more institutionally religious than their European counterparts, with a self-reported weekly church attendance of about 40 percent (Robinson, 2007).

Rather than viewing religious education as something that for many American children takes place at a house of worship, we will look at it through the lens of the schools that have been established by religious organizations as replacements for public schools. The goal of the religious education undertaken at these schools, broadly speaking, is to encourage spiritual or moral development as well as intellectual development. For the more liberal religious schools, this training involves a study of global religious traditions as part of the search for a path to the individual student's greater self-understanding and compassion for others. For those schools founded by more conservative or fundamentalist sects, spiritual instruction is education designed to save students' souls.

A Brief History of Religious Education. Religious education is not unique to the United States, or even a new phenomenon. As Europe suffered—culturally, intellectually, psychologically and spiritually—from the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century A.D., entering what later became known as the Dark Ages, virtually the only institution left to maintain law and order was the Catholic Church. As the Church confronted Germanic tribes and other "barbarians," they confronted two problems that they ended up solving simultaneously: illiteracy and superstition. They did so by setting up schools, often as adjuncts to cathedrals, to educate the people of Europe while also, in the process, evangelizing them.

As the Dark Ages gave way to the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church was the primary educator in Europe, a distinction it held for many centuries. Even as education became more nationalized and more secular in its focus during the Renaissance, the Catholic Church and later Protestant groups continued to operate schools as part of what they saw as a divine mandate to spread the gospel message of salvation. For example, "The Schools of Christian Doctrine taught the fundamentals of Catholicism, and reading and writing, to a very large number of boys and girls in sixteenth-century Italy" (Grendler, 1984).

Religious Education Comes to the United States. Religious education in the United States began as an extension of such evangelistic efforts. It can be traced back to the work undertaken by Spanish Catholic missionaries who, beginning in the late sixteenth century, sought to bring literacy and the gospel message to those living in the Spanish colonies that would later become Florida, Texas, and California. As English Protestant colonists began to arrive on the eastern shores of North America, they brought with them the cultural and religious practices of their homeland. For many of the first generations of colonial Americans, who were less influenced by the rationalism of the Enlightenment than the generation of Franklin and Jefferson, education was a way to train the mind to see the world from the perspective of Providence.

These devout men and women were fueled by the conviction of the Protestant Reformers that an individual's choice to accept or reject the offer of eternal salvation presupposed that he or she knew what they were deciding. That meant they would need to learn to read so that the words of Holy Scripture could pierce and then soften their hearts. Often the reading lessons would be supplemented with other subjects like math and science, that would reinforce notions of beauty and order that redounded to God's glory.

Some examples of these early connections between religion and American education can be found in Delaware's first schools, which were either run by religious organizations, such as the Quakers, or were private, with public schools established later in the eighteenth century after the importance of public education was stressed in the 1792 state constitution (Dexter, 1906, pp. 58-59).

In Maryland, "Catholic missionary and parochial schools have played an important part in the educational history of the state; the first of the former, for the Indians, having been established as early as 1677" (Dexter, 1906, p. 65); other types of private schools flourished throughout the eighteenth century, despite the colonial government's attempt to encourage the creation of public county schools. Meanwhile, in North Carolina public-private partnerships created schools funded by the state but operated by churches and missionary societies (Dexter, 1906, p. 68). In Georgia, the Moravian missionaries and later the evangelist George Whitfield founded charity schools for the poor, but legislative action helped public education gain a solid foothold in the decades between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War (Dexter, 1906, pp. 71-72).

Religious Education in America's Changing Cultural Milieu. As the United States seized upon the idea of "manifest destiny" and began to push further and further west, religious schools played a key role in bringing literacy to the frontier:

Historically, both the Protestant and the Catholic churches were pioneers in the educational enlightenment of the West, their educational work originating in the field of missionary endeavor throughout the unsettled territories. Early missionary effort was first associated with the education of the Indian and the negro [sic], and later on instruction was offered to the white children in the near-by pastorate. For a number of years a large part of the instruction was of elementary grade, but, as the population of the territories or states increased, the churches soon began to enrol[l] secondary pupils within the schools (Benson, 1931, p. 782).

Because the United States was primarily a Protestant country up through the beginning of the nineteenth century, the public schools that were established to provide a free education to all children often provided some religious education as well. But as the United States became more religiously diverse, public schools came to understand that it was not politically or socially expedient to promote one set of theological beliefs over any other. Still, as millions of immigrants from Catholic countries such as Ireland, Italy, and Poland poured into the country in the 1830s and 1840s, the Catholic Church still perceived the public schools as Protestant enough to create separate Catholic schools for the children of Catholic immigrants.

Ironically, some Protestant parents were becoming convinced that the public schools were not Protestant enough. While some of these churchgoers blamed the state for a lack of spiritual concern about the children in their care, other religious writers, including one looking back from the vantage point of the early twentieth century, diagnosed the problem as one that was created entirely by Protestants themselves:

The fact that the Bible is generally excluded from the public schools of the United States, where formerly it was used as a book of devotion and instruction, is not to be attributed to a growing disregard for religion, or for the Hebrew Scriptures. This situation has been created by the friends of the Bible rather than by its enemies; for if the friends of the Bible could have agreed among themselves as to how the Bible should be taught in the schools, their influence would have secured the continuance of such instruction. But it came to pass that the Bible was used in the schools, not only for general religious and ethical instruction, but also for the inculcation of sectarian and theological ideas. ("The Bible and the Common Schools," 1902, p. 243)

Growing Public School Secularism. The public schools' shift away from a Bible-based curriculum and attendant biblical worldview was simply too much for some religious parents at the dawn of the twentieth century to bear. For them the public schools were a lost cause; they were living in a world where too many of their brethren had cut their faith to fit the conclusions of higher biblical criticism, Darwinism, and other intellectual fashions of the day. There had been far too much compromise with a godless and unbelieving world, these parents believed, and thus it was important to get back to the fundamentals of the faith. In 1917, a series of booklets called The Fundamentals appeared that articulated these often-unspoken convictions and gave the world the term fundamentalist.

What drove the creation of Protestant religious schools was the conviction, still prevalent today, that "church and school are one: the school is simply the academic expression of the church and no less integral to the church" (Peshkin, 1986, p. 33). Some religious schools were founded by evangelists, including by D. L. Moody at the end of the nineteenth century (Wells, 1972), while others were established and maintained by denominations upholding a very specific interpretation of the Bible, or by religious minority groups such as Jews and Muslims seeking to maintain their religious identity in a nation with a strong Christian heritage.

Owing in large part to the tremendous influx of immigration from Ireland, Italy, Poland, and other predominately Catholic countries in the nineteenth century, Catholic schools became the most popular private or religious schools in America. In 1934, for example, "over 90 percent of the enrol[l]ment in all private elementary schools is in the Catholic schools and approximately 4 percent is in the Lutheran. The nonsectarian private schools enrol[l] slightly less than 3 percent of the elementary children educated in non-state schools" (Reavis & Eggert, 1940, p. 311).

The Present & Future of Religious Education in America. According to the biennial Private School Universe Survey (PSS) conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics at the US Department of Education, in the fall of 2013, 69 percent of 33,619 private schools were either Catholic or otherwise religious (National Center for Education Statistics, 2016). Evangelical schools became more popular in the last decades of the twentieth century:

"Christian schools"—private day schools with a conservative Christian orientation—have experienced tremendous growth. They have been the fastest-growing sector of American education over the last thirty years. In the 1990s some 1.5 million students, representing at least 25 percent of all children enrolled in private schools, attended about 11,000 Christian schools (National Center for Education Statistics, 1995) (Wagner, 1997).

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, denominationalism had become less prevalent among conservative Christian schools, and entrance requirements often involved parents subscribing to a broadly Evangelical statement of faith (Wagner, 1997). Some of this was due to increased competition among public, private and charter schools. In other cases, however, it was because Evangelical students themselves identified more with a "mere Christianity" (Lewis, 1943) derived from the Apostle's Creed than the theological distinctives of a particular Christian denomination.

Further Insights

What Religious Schools Are Students Attending?. As seen in the table, Roman Catholic private schools, with 1,928,388 students, represent the largest group of religious schools in the United States. Christian schools of unspecified denomination come in second, representing 607,130 students, and Baptist schools come in third, with 203,984 students enrolled in 2011–12.

Viewpoints

Religious Schools & America's "Culture Wars". Even though public schools enroll a large percentage of school children in the United States, many parents continue to send their children to religious schools. For some this decision is based on the superior academic reputation that many religious schools enjoy. Whether this reputation is deserved is another question. One study from Bob Jones University (BJU), a fundamentalist Christian school, of BJU freshmen who had been educated in public schools, Christian schools and home schools, showed "no significant differences among our groups on the several critical thinking skills, including deductive and inductive reasoning skills" (Sutton & de Oliveira, 1995, p. 10).

For others, the decision to send their children to a religious school is based on the perception that religious schools offer more structure and discipline. Still others, particularly those parents who are more devout, send their children to religious schools because they have fundamental disagreements with a public school system they believe tolerates and even promotes liberal views on sexuality (Smith, 1998, pp. 22-23).

Not without reasons have some looked at the public school-religious school divide as yet one more manifestation of America's so-called culture wars (Hunter, 1991). America's Christian conservatives joined together in the late 1970s to form groups such as the Moral Majority, which sought to work through the political process to defend what they described as traditional family values from the assaults of secularists in government and society. They are credited with the electoral victories of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. Many of those who support religious schools also helped give birth to this evangelical Christian renaissance and usher in an era of American politics where religion was the byword.

Religion in Public Schools. All religious education in the United States is private education, and attempts to reintroduce religious concepts into public education have failed in the courts. Against these attempts, the US Supreme Court in the twentieth century has upheld the principle of the "separation of church and state," a phrase President Thomas Jefferson used in an 1802 letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut.

In addition, the nation's highest court has also given more attention to the notion of governmental neutrality implied in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment: "no law respecting an establishment of religion." In Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971), the US Supreme Court reflected more deeply on the requirements for state or federal neutrality regarding religion, and they articulated a three-step litmus test for any law:

First, the statute must have a secular legislative purpose; second, its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion … finally, the statute must not foster "an excessive government entanglement with religion." (Lemon v. Kurtzman 1971)

If a state law fails any one of these three criteria, then it is ipso facto unconstitutional because it violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

Writing for the majority in Lemon, Chief Justice Berger noted, "The Constitution decrees that religion must be a private matter for the individual, the family, and the institutions of private choice, and that while some involvement and entanglement are inevitable, lines must be drawn" (Lemon v. Kurtzman, 1971).

The Lemon test has been refined in subsequent Supreme Court decisions, but its basic principles are still binding. For example, in 2005 Judge John E. Jones III ruled in Kitzmiller v. Dover that a Dover, Pennsylvania, school board policy mandating the teaching of "intelligent design" in public school biology classes was unconstitutional because, as its advocates admitted, it was based on religion and not science, and therefore it failed the Lemon test.

Of course, if private religious schools wish to teach "intelligent design" (cf. Lentini, 2007), they are protected by the Free Exercise Clause of the same First Amendment that bars religious concepts from being taught in public schools. The controversy arises only when local, state, or the federal government passes legislation requiring that the same religious concepts be taught in public schools.

At the same time, in light of the religious tensions stirred up in part by the Islamic extremists who attacked the United States on September 11, there have been calls to educate all young people in the religious beliefs of others. The hope is that greater understanding will lead to greater tolerance and peaceful coexistence. Interestingly, and for slightly different reasons, leading atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett has argued that public school students need to learn a lot more about religion:

Let's get more education about religion into our schools, not less. We should teach our children creeds and customs, prohibitions and rituals, the texts and music, and when we cover the history of religion, we should include both the positive . . . and the negative.

No religion should be favored, and none ignored. And as we discover more and more about the biological and psychological bases of religious practices and attitudes, these discoveries should be added to the curriculum, the same way we update our education about science, health, and current events. This should all be part of the mandated curriculum for both public schools and for home-schooling. (Dennett, 2006, pp. 327-328)

Terms & Concepts

Christian School: Often operated by Christian religious organizations or various Protestant Christian denominations, these schools tend to emphasize conservative social values and a biblical world view in addition to academic excellence

Evangelical Christians: A subset of Protestant Christians who believe that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, that they should share their faith with others, and that religion should have an important role in public affairs. Unlike fundamentalist Christians, who choose to remain apart from nonbelievers, evangelical Christians welcome fruitful dialogue with nonbelievers and tend to work together with nonbelievers on matters of common interest.

Hebrew School: Jewish schools that emphasize Jewish social values and history, including knowledge of the Torah, while also stressing academic excellence

Islamic School: Operated by or with the support of mosques, these schools stress Islamic cultural and religious values, including mastery of the Qur'an and the Hadith (the sayings of Muhammad)

Missionary Schools: Schools operated by Protestant and Christian missionaries, often as the first or only schools operating in a frontier or poverty-stricken environment.

Parochial Schools: Private schools operated by the Catholic Church that stress the moral and ethical development of the child along with their intellectual development. They were started in the 1840s in response to what Catholic perceived to be the Protestant nature of the American public school system, but now they accept students of any religious background

Private Schools: A type of school that does not admit all students who apply, is not funded by taxpayers, and operates with a minimal amount of state or federal regulation and oversight

Public School: A type of school funded by public funds collected through taxes. Public schools are legally obligated to accept all students seeking an education. Some public schools serve students in their community, while others serve students from a wider geographical region

Sunday School: A Protestant Christian instruction time for children attending weekly worship services. Catholics refer to Sunday school as Confraternity of Christian Doctrine (CCD) or Catechism.

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Suggested Reading

America Magazine (2013, May 27). A New Thing. America. p. 5. Retrieved December 12, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database Education Resource Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=87687172

Feinberg, W. (2006). For goodness sake: Religious schools and education for democratic citizenry. New York: Routledge.

Foundations of Christian school education. (2003). Colorado Springs, CO: Association of Christian Schools International.

Gearon, L. (2013). The Counter terrorist classroom: religion, education, and security. Religious Education, 108, 129–147. Retrieved December 12, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database Education Resource Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=86729244

Geiger, M. W. (2016). Emerging responsibilities, emerging persons: Reflective and relational religious education in three Episcopal high schools. Religious Education, 111(1), 10–29. Retrieved December 19, 2016 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=112999502&site=ehost-live&scope=site

Green, J. (2006). Christ-centered, diverse, and academically excellent. American Educational History Journal, 33, 89–95. Retrieved September 29, 2007 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=21294139&site=ehost-live.

Kienel, P.A. (1998). A history of Christian school education. Colorado Springs, CO: Association of Christian Schools International.

Kyle, E. J. (2013). Re-envisioning religious education in light of persons with “disabilities”. Religious education, 108, 515–528. Retrieved October 2, 2014 from EBSCO Online Database Education Resource Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=91930997

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Schweber, S. (2006, May). Fundamentally 9/11: The fashioning of collective memory in a Christian school. American Journal of Education, 112, 392–417. Retrieved September 29, 2007 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Search Premier. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=21170891&site=ehost-live.

Wertheimer, L. K. (2015) Faith ed: Teaching about religion in an age of intolerance. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Wilson, D. (2001). Excused absence: Should Christian kids leave public schools? Moscow, ID: Canon Press.