The Separation of Education and State

A New York Times article, “How Christian Were the Founders?” reveals some alarming trends of the Texas Board of Education to direct the curriculum toward religion. The thing that makes the annual meeting of this particular state board significant is that according to the Times article, the Texas board is the most influential in the country – and also one of the most socially conservative.

Image credit: The New York Times, Montage by Carin Goldberg

The article is somewhat lengthy, but worth reading in its entirety for some of its frightening details. (It gets a little bogged down in concretes, pitting one side of the argument against the other, but I suppose that aligns with its journalistic intent.) One of the prominent figures in the article is Don McLeroy, a current Texas Board of Education member and former chairman who was removed from that top position for his aggressive attempt to insert creationism into the classroom:

[McLeroy] identifies himself as a young-earth creationist who believes that the earth was created in six days, as the book of Genesis has it, less than 10,000 years ago . . . ‘Textbooks are mostly the product of the liberal establishment, and they’re written with the idea that our religion and our liberty are in conflict,’ he said. ‘But Christianity has had a deep impact on our system. The men who wrote the Constitution were Christians who knew the Bible. Our idea of individual rights comes from the Bible. The Western development of the free-market system owes a lot to biblical principles.

For McLeroy, separation of church and state is a myth perpetrated by secular liberals. ‘There are two basic facts about man, he said. ‘He was created in the image of God, and he is fallen. You can’t appreciate the founding of our country without realizing that the founders understood that. For our kids to not know our history, that could kill a society.’[Note 2, emphasis mine.]

I don’t want to spend time in this post refuting the several items I disagree with in that quote because there is another point I wish to focus on. In other writings, I’ve addressed the fundamental incompatibility between faith and individual rights (and its derivatives, including capitalism). And notwithstanding isolated quotes (like Madison’s, “If men were angels . . .”), the notion that the life-embracing, Enlightenment principles of America are based in essence upon a “fallen man” point of view is absurd.

The main point I wish to make is that although I sympathize with this Times author’s implicit warning of the incursion of religion into public schools, I see no indication that he grasps the fact that makes it truly lethal: that it is imposed by the state. One gets the impression from the article, particularly from its first few paragraphs, that as long as the Texas Board signs off on text books praising Ted Kennedy instead of William F. Buckley, Jr., or Jimmy Carter instead of Ronald Reagan, then it is perfectly acceptable for the state to ram its monolithic message down students’ throats. The author is irked only because it is not his views that are being declared as the official ones.

The article cites some economic reasons why the Texas Board is particularly influential; they have a huge educational budget, buying and distributing some 48 million textbooks per year. The problem here, however, is not economic power but political power.

If private schools demand that creationism be taught alongside actual science, or that history books be re-written to indicate that America was founded upon Christian values, they have every right to do so. I vehemently disagree with such nonsense, of course, and I sharply criticize it. But private schools that teach creationism (or for that matter, leftist dogma like multiculturalism and quasi-religious environmentalist orthodoxy), however ubiquitous they could become on a free market, cannot block out competing ideas by force. Only governments can do that.

For the very same reason that there must be a separation of church and state, there ought to be a separation of education and state. Governments should not be controlling what children think.[Note 3.] Everything a government does is by its nature compulsory. The more consolidated and federalized public education becomes, the more it uses force to present a single message to students. The very presence of public schools disrupts the potential market of private schools, displacing - and in some cases, eliminating - the ability of competitors to offer other ideas.

Of course, the free market cannot guarantee that schools will teach objective history and science. But what the free market does guarantee is that objective facts will not be silenced or smothered by force.

NOTES

1. Image credit, The New York Times, http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/02/14/magazine/14texbooks-span/14texbooks-1-articleLarge.jpg.

2. Russell Shorto, “How Christian Were the Founders?” The New York Times, 11 Feb 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/magazine/14texbooks-t.html?tntemail1=y&emc=tnt&pagewanted=all.

3. An excellent resource on this topic is the ARC web page, Separation of Education and State (http://principlesofafreesociety.com/separation-of-education-and-state/).

Note to the Republican Platform Committee

Inspired by Paul Hsieh’s note to the Colorado Republican Party, “Why The Republicans Have Lost My Vote,” I jotted down some of my own thoughts on the matter below.  The point made by Dr. Hsieh that is particularly crucial is that wherever Republicans are ousted from offices in November, they must be made to understand that they lost because they were too religious.  Above all, they must not think that they lost for the opposite reason - that they were not religious enough.

For this reason, it necessary to communicate these ideas to them before and after the elections.

The text below is fine for a blog post, but is too long for my activist purposes.  I submitted heavily edited versions to the Republican Platform Committee and the Massachusetts GOP.  Though these versions were briefer, I believe they retained the essence of this message: the Republicans are too religious, they are violating the proper purpose of government, and they can win back my vote by rejecting, in word and action, the injection of religion into politics.

______________

For all of my adult life - from the Reagan years until the 2000 election - I voted exclusively for Republicans because they were (at least nominally) the party that respected and defended freedom.  While Democrats intruded into every aspect of our lives with their “progressive” paternalism and cradle-to-grave welfare programs, Republicans advocated a limited government devoted to preserving the rights of its citizens.

However, in the last decades, the Republicans have betrayed their freedom-loving supporters as they have steadily turned their backs on the founding principles of America.  

For one thing, they can no longer pretend to be the defenders of individual rights and laissez faire capitalism.  Indeed, under the cover of an undeserved “pro-business” reputation, Republicans have gone on a spending spree and imposed a regulatory assault on the free market that Democrats would hardly have dared mount.  A Republican president signed the campaign finance reform bill, the Medicare prescription drug bill, and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act; Republican governors lead the way in compulsory medical insurance and capitulation to environmentalists.  In this betrayal, the Republicans have become approximately as bad as the Democrats, so this alone would not necessarily have driven me away from voting for Republicans.  

But there is one respect in which the Republicans have become far more dangerous than Democrats: their embrace of religion.

The proper purpose of a government is to defend each citizen’s right to his life, property, thoughts, and choices, as long as he does not physically harm others.  Any attempt to impose religious views on its citizens converts a government into a menace, a violator of rights.  I cannot blame honest Americans for being disgusted with the moral relativism of the political left, but it is not the purpose of a proper government to impose religious values.  

Contrary to some religious conservatives’ view that America was founded upon “Judeo-Christian values,” the strict separation of church and state was emphatically insisted upon by our Founding Fathers, who viewed rights as natural and inalienable, not as privileges granted by either god or government.  Furthermore, this principle is amply reinforced by logic and by history.  Simply being secular does not ensure that a government is good, of course, but being religious makes it impossible.

Observe the inroads that religious conservatives have made in America today, driven by Evangelical Christians.  We have “faith-based initiatives” that fund religious organizations with taxpayer money.  A woman’s right to abort her fetus - or even to use birth control - is under varied and repeated attack from all angles, motivated by religious considerations.  Religionists are trying to use legislation to smuggle creationist theology under the scientific-sounding moniker of “intelligent design” into classrooms, and are now aligned with environmentalists to submit to the duty of being “stewards of God’s earth.”  Almost daily, we see new attempts to inject religion into government activities - from stem-cell research to school prayer to “gay marriage” to religious symbology in government buildings - a trend that is steadily eroding the freedoms that were so dearly earned by our forefathers.

The issue of religion is now the single characteristic that distinguishes the two major parties.  Democrats are enemies of Americans’ freedom to be sure, but they are generally disorganized, inconsistent, and pragmatic - and the far left is too nihilistic to receive much serious mainstream support.  In contrast, religious Republicans tend to be highly organized and motivated; they are intelligent, moralistic, and crusading enemies of America’s freedom.  A righteous antagonist is far more dangerous than an apathetic one.

For many Republicans today, the government is an institution that has one primary function: to impose their faith-based views... by force.  I cannot and will not continue to support such fervent hostility to America and Americans.

The Republicans must reverse this trend toward religion and recover the proper and sole purpose of government: to protect individual rights.  They must both explicitly declare support for the separation of church and state, and act to defend this principle.

If they do this, they will not only win back my vote, but will save America.