They want to inject religion into education. Here’s why you must fight for secularism | Opinion

Efforts to inject religion into your child’s education are continuing to gain steam in Idaho.

As Ryan Suppe of Idaho Education News highlighted last week, a new lawsuit filed by a church that had been using a public charter school as a meeting place has joined ongoing attempts at the Legislature to repeal a section of the Idaho Constitution called the Blaine Amendment, which prohibits the use of public funds for religious purposes, particularly religious schools.

Those efforts are being fueled by a disingenuous argument that should be dispensed with: that the Blaine Amendment embodies anti-religious bigotry.

Like all good lies, this one has a basis in fact, but it uses that factual veneer to conceal rather than reveal the truth. And the truth is that the modern secular education system, established through slow advances in the 20th century, is under attack by groups that want to insert religion — their religion, not yours — into your child’s education.

The Blaine Amendment

The Blaine Amendment movement was born of religious bigotry, there’s no doubt about that. But it’s worth remembering what kind of discrimination it was and how it functioned.

In the 1870s, when the national Blaine Amendment movement gained steam, state schools were de facto Protestant schools. Protestant bibles were used as religious texts and teachers led students in Protestant prayers, obvious discrimination against many largely Catholic immigrant communities then arriving from Ireland, Italy and other countries.

Many of these communities established their own private schools. The Blaine Amendment, pushed by anti-immigrant forces, attempted to ensure that no private Catholic schools would ever get the kind of public support that the implicitly Protestant public schools did.

That’s the kind of thing that happens when you mix religion and state. The dominant religion seeks to suppress the less dominant ones using state power. And that’s the kind of bigotry the Blaine Amendment embodied.

While the effort to put the Blaine Amendment in the U.S. Constitution was narrowly defeated, many states subsequently put some version of it into their constitutions, including Idaho in 1890.

The emergency of secular schooling

But history didn’t end in 1900.

Throughout the 20th century, a new kind of public schooling emerged, led by a series of U.S. Supreme Court rulings that prohibited states from establishing official religion through the school system.

• In McCollum v. Board of Education in 1948, the Supreme Court found it was unconstitutional for public schools to provide religious instruction.

• In Engle v. Vitale in 1962, the Supreme Court ended the practice of schools composing official prayers that students had to recite each day.

• In Stone v. Graham in 1980, the court ruled that states couldn’t require the Ten Commandments to be posted in schools.

These and similar rulings crafted what we’ve built in the school system today: the modern secular public school system which neither promotes nor degenerates any religious or anti-religious belief, a system where a Baptist, a Hindu and an atheist can all learn the same math while all freely following their own religious beliefs.

It’s not the anti-religious bigotry of the 19th century but the 20th-century legacy of religious freedom that’s currently under attack across the country. Efforts to repeal Idaho’s Blaine Amendment and promote vouchers for religious schools are part of a broad effort at dismantling secular school systems, of returning enforced prayer and the bible-as-textbook into Idaho’s school system.

What would Blaine repeal look like?

Many want to return to a world where enforced Christian prayer is a central part of educational instruction for most students and where many of the other institutions of government are used to promote Christianity. That is, they want to recreate the kind of world that gave rise to the Blaine Amendment movement.

But that’s not what will happen today. There’s simply too much case law finding that if states grant support to one religion, they have to grant it to all comers.

Putting up public displays of the Ten Commandments and nativity scenes necessitates allowing equal display of satanic and, hilariously, Jedi-based displays during the holidays.

A representative of Idaho’s most prominent Satanic organization testified during the legislative session that it intends to create publicly funded schools if Idaho begins funding religious schools.

This isn’t actually as bad as it may sound; the Satanic Temple isn’t dedicated to doing evil things or worshiping the devil. But the basic worry they intended to provoke is well-founded: If we start down the road of funding religious instruction, you’re going to have to fund schools run by bizarre cults and religious organizations with views you genuinely believe are evil.

You will almost certainly have to fund schools that teach young girls that women are inferior to and meant to be subservient to men, for example. The state should not take your money and use it for such a rotten purpose.

And that’s why modern secularism is worth fighting for, whether you are religious or not. Secularism preserves both freedom of religious practice and freedom from prescribed religion.

It prevents students from being forced to say prayers they don’t believe in and allows them to say whatever prayers they want.

It allows them to form private religious organizations and prevents anyone from being forced to join them.

It restricts teachers — public servants who implement state education policy — to a focus on education rather than proselytizing.

Abandoning the relatively new tradition of secularism in American education in favor of a return to religious education would mean what it’s always meant: a return to religious discrimination. It’s an attempt to reinstate the kind of religious chauvinism that fueled the original Blaine Amendment, not an effort to combat it.

Bryan Clark is an opinion writer for the Idaho Statesman.