Don't Take God Out of Schools

A popular myth for the Christian Right is the idea that atheists forced God, prayer, and Bible reading out of public schools, leading to social, moral, and educational disasters which continue to plague America. By promoting such beliefs, the Christian Right encourages people to think that atheists are a threat to religious liberty as well as social order, that America is worse off than it once was, and that proper Christianity is the solution to everything troubling us.

Every aspect of this myth is wrong. First, God, prayer, and Bible reading were not removed from public schools. All three are still there, but under the auspices of the private actions of individual students. What was removed were state-written and state-mandated prayers, state-mandated reading of state-chosen Bibles, and official endorsements of particular conceptions of God. These changes were unequivocal victories for the religious liberties of children and parents.

Second, atheists were not responsible -- they were involved in some of the lawsuits, but so were Christians. If the atheists' cases had never existed, the results would have been the same. Finally, the problems attributed to these changes cannot be blamed on them. There is some correlation in time between the changes and some social problems, but there were many social changes occurring at the same time.

Perhaps the most important was racial integration. Not long before courts forced public schools to stop choosing and mandating prayers or Bible readings, they also forced schools to end long-standing racial segregation. Many of the people who complained loudest about the end to religious indoctrination in public schools had already been on the forefront of complaints about the end to racial segregation.

The correlation between social problems and racial integration is at least as strong as that between those problems and the elimination of state-mandated prayers. Why don't conservatives blame integration and argue for a return to segregation? If they don't believe that a causal connection exists here, then they cannot claim that one exists between the religion cases and social problems.

The above image was created from a World War I poster about the need to feed motherless, fatherless, and starving children in war-torn France. I have replaced the text with the claim that the destruction in the background is because of the secularist removal of God from schools and that this is something America should avoid.