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Religion in Schools

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Published: Mar 19, 2024

Words: 695 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

Introduction, benefits of religion in schools, drawbacks of religion in schools, balancing inclusion and education.

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Argumentative Essay Samples on Religion in Public Schools: To Teach or Not to Teach?

In this article, the basic requirements for this type of writing are presented so that you could write a good argumentative essay on religion in public schools. Moreover, some examples of essays are given on whether students should study religion in public schools or not. Pay attention to every detail and create your own essay on the same topic “Religion in Public Schools: To Teach or Not to Teach?”

Table of Contents

3 Basic Rules for Argumentative Essay Writing

It is obvious that an argumentative essay has the same structure as a paper of any other type. So, there is a necessity to write:

An introduction in which a student should point out the main topic of a paper based on the thesis statement. Look at how to write argumentative thesis statements .
The body (three paragraphs as a must, then consider what can be added more) where it is necessary to prove your thesis with strong arguments and explain them in details. Get to know how to evaluate the validity and strength of arguments .
A conclusion is aimed at summarizing all the above mentioned briefly to convince the reader of the significance of reading this essay to the end. Study the guide on writing conclusions to argumentative essays .

10 Main Arguments to Write an Essay on Religion

As your argumentative essay is to be built on a set of reasons that show that you’re right, it is better to think about them in advance. You can brainstorm on your own if it is worth to teach religion in public schools or not. Alternatively, you can take into account the following ideas:

Top 5 Pros of Teaching Religion in Public Schools

Children learning religious practices and beliefs and aware of their deferences are more tolerant towards people around;
Schoolchildren learning religion apply more critical thinking in matters of morality. They learn to comprehend their actions not only from the perspective of their own advantages but also from the point of view of moral norms.
Modern society has an urgent need to cultivate moral values, tolerance, mutual understanding, and respect for each other in the younger generation.
The classes in Religion cover most topics that are ignored in many families.
Studying more subjects broadens the schoolchildren’s outlook.

Top 5 Cons of Teaching Religion in Public Schools

Teaching religion at school is an attempt to impose a religious outlook on the child, but not on critical scientific thinking.
In a civilized state, there is no imposition of dogmas of any religion. Most modern people have a habit of believing inwardly, individually.
Teachers may not be able to teach the basics of a particular religion; they may have other faiths. In this case, it is necessary to preserve the secular nature of the subject and to separate their own faith from theoretical information.
Textbooks can be compiled in the preaching and anti-scientific style and absolutely do not meet the goals.
Fierce disputes arising during the classes in Religion can provoke hatred and animosity among students that can be manifested in aggression.

2 Argumentative Essay Samples on Religion – Should Students Study It or Not?

As we have already said, the main aim of argumentative essay writing is to confirm a certain point of view. Since this opinion is by definition controversial, we decided to show you how to state that that religion should be taught in schools in the first essay sample, and refute this opinion in the second example. To ensure you succeed in this academic endeavor, consider using professional help and ask experts to do my project for me . This approach not only provides you with a strong foundation but also enhances the credibility of your argument.

1. Religion Should Be Taught in Public Schools

The times when education was religious are in the past. As a result, today, we have a selfish and individualized society, where everyone protects himself. Religion should be taught in school, as this is the only way to return to society the forgotten moral standards and true values.

Religion is a way to show our differences through our unity. People practice different religions, but they have the same moral ideas. It is a way to unite groups of people globally, based on common values, even if religious groups are different.

Learning religion is a way to know the world. In Finland, children from primary school study religion practiced in their family or ethics, and this is one of the most popular subjects.

Since not many parents talk to children about God and religion, the school can fill this gap. Thus, schooling will become more complex. This is an opportunity to give not only academic knowledge but also to grow a human from a person.

In conclusion, it should be said that it is necessary to prepare for the teaching of religion in schools – to teach teachers to translate the true values and compile textbooks correctly. With this approach, religion has the opportunity to become one of the most important and favorite subjects.

2. Religion Should NOT Be Taught in Public Schools

In most countries, religion is separated from education. This is a balanced decision, as a civilized society implies the ability of each person to make an individual choice and believe in their values. Religion should not be studied in school because it is contrary to the views of most modern societies and can lead to enmity between young people and their groups.

We live in the 21st century, when the understanding of religiosity is critically rethought – now it is not identified with spirituality. Religiousness is part of spirituality. And spirituality is very broad; it is often called the whole life of a person. Therefore, each person should develop spirituality independently, without forcible influence and even not under the influence of certain religious norms.

Religion is an inner sense of belonging to certain values. When we start broadcasting it outside, where there are various other thoughts, then the person becomes vulnerable. And it does not develop self-confidence but adds disagreement in adolescence.

If the school focuses on the ethics of a particular religion, then the topic of bullying in schools will continue. Because now the child can be offended on a religious basis. And from a social point of view, it is necessary to unite society, and not to develop enmity.

As a result, the school can give basic knowledge of the religions of the world, point out their differences, and make a comparison of the traditions of these peoples. For deeper understanding, students might benefit from engaging with a capstone project writing service , which can help them explore these concepts through well-researched papers. This should be an objective presentation of the picture, without priorities and deviations. Then the children of all religious denominations will feel at ease in the classroom. As for religious ethics, it is better to develop an understanding of basic human values that are universal.

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Religion in Schools: Is There a Place for It? Pros and Cons

Why should religion be taught in schools? If you’re writing an argumentative or persuasive essay on pros and cons of religion in schools, this sample is for you.

Introduction

Religious studies help to raise morally decent citizens, religious studies promote religious freedom, religious studies help in explaining the mysteries of life, reasons why religion should not be taught in schools.

The discussion of religious studies in schools is a subject that has elicited contention in academic circles. Scholars are divided on whether or not religious studies should be taught in schools. The subject matter has also brought out controversy among curriculum developers. The main issue of contention revolves around establishing the boundary between religion and state.

Religious studies are critical in raising morally upright citizens in a nation. Although it is possible to reject the move to offer religious studies in schools based on the claim that parents should instill morals in their children at home, it is crucial to realize that many contemporary parents are usually busy to the extent that getting time to share moral stories with their kids is almost impossible. Hence, with this foundation, the paper argues that there is a place for religious studies in schools today and that the benefits of studying religion outweigh the demerits.

Why Should Religion Be Taught in Schools?

The main argument in favor of teaching religion in schools is that it helps to instill good morals in people. It also promotes faith as religious freedom and helps explain complicated life issues not addressed by other disciplines.

According to Cochran (2014), the study of religion should be encouraged from the entry-level since it assists in character molding. It is important to note that religious studies instill good morals in people. Examples of these morals include honesty, faithfulness, hard work, respect, and dignity.

All religious studies promote these virtues, including Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. Religion also helps to prevent vices among young people in society today. The witnessed violence among young people may be attributed to a lack of religious teachings. Video games contribute to aggressive behavior in kids of age between 9 and 12 years (Ellithorpe et al., 2015).

Religion discourages vices such as early pregnancies among young people, most of whom are in school. As part of their work, tutors of religious studies discourage drug and substance abuse among learners, thus encouraging them to be productive citizens in a country. Since religion prohibits sexual relationships before marriage, it plays an essential role in eradicating sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV and AIDS, among others.

Furthermore, religious studies teachers address the issue of the sanctity of family and the need to promote faithfulness in marriage. Hence, as future parents, students who lack such understanding from school may fail to know the aspects that must be imparted to their kids.

According to Cochran (2014), religious studies help to develop learners’ character, values, and beliefs. Hence, failing to offer lessons that instill these concepts in school may result in a violent and undisciplined generation lacking meaningful focus.

According to Cheadle and Schwadel (2012), religion helps to promote ethics among learners. Such ethical elements help to nurture students to become all-rounded citizens. The religious principles in a school setting form the basis of professional work ethics in many organizations today. It also promotes good interpersonal relationships by making people appreciate diversity and/or create the need for peaceful co-existence.

These attributes can only be acquired through the study of religion in schools, where they are instilled from the formative stages of growth and development (Cheadle & Schwadel, 2012). It is also important to note that many careers today have their foundation in religion. Religion comes in handy in the career development of disciplines such as law, medicine, philosophy, psychology, and counseling, among others.

These disciplines have their foundation established on the morals and ethics of religion as presented in the various schooling levels. Moreover, people majoring in religious studies can grow to become professionals in various areas, such as teachers, counselors, and religious leaders.

They can also run religious organizations and ministries, facilitate proper international relations, and/or work in the media and non-governmental organizations. Governmental organizations such as public schools, the police force, and the military typically have a chaplain.

Such a role can only be developed after studying religion and developing an interest in the career. According to Jeynes (2012), schools that teach religion achieve the highest level of performance compared to those that discourage religious studies. The implication here is that religious studies significantly impact career advancement.

Religion also helps in acquiring essential life skills. Such skills are acquired after learning about religious personalities who demonstrated great faith, perseverance, and commitment. Students with such skills will also try to emulate such persons and hence grow to become responsible citizens.

It is also important to note that moral uprightness is acquired by instilling the fear of God in students’ lives. Such fear helps learners to acquire knowledge and wisdom. However, it is apparent that schools are the best placed to impart this understanding through religious studies.

As Russo (2016) reveals, the freedom of religion is a guaranteed fundamental human right in most progressive constitutions. Therefore, religious studies give students a better understanding of their religions. It is important to note that religious studies teach the basic pillars of every belief.

For example, through religion, students learn essential aspects such as the believers’ creed and the five pillars of Islam. Therefore, teaching religion gives one the freedom of choice in relation to worship.

It is also important to note that the best democracies in the world have their countries founded on the belief in a Supreme Being or deity. From these establishments, it becomes crucial to instill morals among learners by teaching them religious studies in schools.

Furthermore, Duemmler and Nagel (2013) reveal how religion helps learners to understand the cultural diversity of the world’s populations since different regions practice diverse religious beliefs. Understanding the varied beliefs will promote peaceful co-existence while allowing for better diplomatic negotiations among nations.

It is important to note that religion has a lot of influence on how people live, do their businesses, and/or relate with one another. Therefore, this situation makes religious studies a crucial aspect of schools since it helps prepare students to work in any part of the world.

In other words, religion plays an important role in helping students understand the world’s history. It may also help a student explain the patterns of politics, trade, and law. Religion forms the foundation of these major areas, which eventually directly impact people’s way of life. Equipping students with religious knowledge helps them understand and appreciate the role of faith in shaping the world.

According to Kunzman (2012), the worsening levels of education can easily be attributed to strict regulations on religious studies in schools. This restriction has led to deteriorating standards of education, as well as moral decay in society.

Religion helps explain the complicated issues of life that are not addressed in other disciplines. Some mysteries include life after death, miraculous occurrences, eternal living, hell, and heaven. Science and other disciplines do not explain these things, yet they are essential religious items.

Therefore, addressing these aspects gives learners a broader view of the matters of life. Furthermore, in line with Vermeer’s (2012) views, religious studies help to enhance learners’ critical thinking. It expands the scope of students since it goes beyond issues that happen in the present world.

Religion also reveals future events in the form of prophecy, helping learners have an insight into events to come. Hence, it is crucial to include religious studies in the school curriculum to boost students’ level and scope of thinking.

Religion answers many learners’ curiosity questions. For this reason, elements from religious studies dominate discussions on social and mainstream media. Therefore, such studies cannot be wished away. Religion dramatically influences people’s cultural activities and beliefs, making it an important subject of study in schools.

According to Banton (2013), religious studies form part of the social structure of a society. Hence, omitting the study of religion in school means denying learners a crucial element they need in their life.

It is crucial to note that religious education comes with some drawbacks when presented in a school setting. One disadvantage is that the subject excludes the interests of nonreligious groups. It also disregards cultural diversity and the personal beliefs of students.

According to Kurtzleben (2017), nonreligious groups such as atheists have interests and freedom that should be respected in schools. Religious studies are based on the belief in supernatural beings that are not recognized in atheism. Therefore, the teaching and practicing of religion in schools may make atheists and other nonreligious groups feel socially excluded and discriminated against.

Furthermore, religion may not consider every individual’s cultural diversity and beliefs (Kurtzleben, 2017). Nonreligious groups that form a minority may also feel harassed and discriminated against by the teaching of religion in schools. Furthermore, the study of religion contradicts some teachings of science.

For instance, while science teaching in schools will make learners believe and uphold the evolution theory, religious studies teach the opposite to the same learners. Hence, opponents of teaching religion in schools assert that it confuses the learner.

For instance, according to Gaylor (2014), it is advisable to teach atheism in schools as well for all learners to be well-represented. The evolution theory believes people are transformed over time through several stages and advancements.

I support religious studies in schools since the learner has more to gain than lose from religious subjects. Religious studies help in molding and shaping the world’s culture. However, it is important to allow students to choose whether they want to study religion since it has a bearing on their careers, as previously highlighted.

In my opinion, religious studies should not be made compulsory but optional. In so doing, it will ensure that the interests of religious and nonreligious students are respected and that nobody will feel discriminated against.

From the discussions above, it comes out clearly that religious studies should form part of the school curriculum. However, it is essential to underscore that the studies should provide an understanding of various cultures in the world to facilitate the integration of communities.

The peaceful integration and co-existence of the world’s population guarantee proper political relations. The study of religion in schools should not be aimed and converting individuals. Instead, it should help people to appreciate diversity. Carrying out religious studies appropriately in schools may help to stop many religious wars and persecutions that the world is witnessing today.

Banton, M. (2013). Anthropological approaches to the study of religion . London, England: Routledge.

Cheadle, J. E., & Schwadel, P. (2012). The ‘friendship dynamics of religion,’ or the ‘religious dynamics of friendship’? A social network analysis of adolescents who attend small schools. Social Science Research , 41 (5), 1198-1212.

Cochran, C. E. (2014). Religion in public and private life . London, England: Routledge.

Duemmler, K & Nagel, A. (2013). Duemmler, Kerstin; Nagel, Alexander-Kenneth: Governing religious diversity: Top-down and bottom-up initiatives in Germany and Switzerland. Integrative Psychological & Behavioral Science , 47 (2), 265-83

Ellithorpe, M., Cruz, C., Velez, J., Ewoldsen, D., & Bogert, A. (2015). Moral license in video games: When being right can mean doing wrong. CyberPsychology, Behavior & Social Networking, 18 (4), 203-207.

Gaylor, A. (2014). The Dangers of Religious Instruction in Public Schools .

Jeynes, W. H. (2012). A meta-analysis on the effects and contributions of public, public charter, and religious schools on student outcomes. Peabody Journal of Education , 87 (3), 305-335.

Kunzman, R. (2012). Grappling with the good: Talking about religion and morality in public schools . Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Kurtzleben, D. (2017). Nonreligious Americans Remain Far Underrepresented In Congress .

Russo, C. (2016). Religious freedom in faith-based educational institutions in the wake of Obergefell v. Hodges: Believers beware. Brigham Young University Education & Law Journal, 1 (2), 263-308.

Vermeer, P. (2012). Meta-concepts, thinking skills and religious education. British Journal of Religious Education , 34 (3), 333-347.

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Religion in the Public Schools

More than 55 years after the Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling striking down school-sponsored prayer, Americans continue to fight over the place of religion in public schools. Questions about religion in the classroom no longer make quite as many headlines as they once did, but the issue remains an important battleground in the broader conflict over religion’s role in public life.

Some Americans are troubled by what they see as an effort on the part of federal courts and civil liberties advocates to exclude God and religious sentiment from public schools. Such an effort, these Americans believe, infringes on the First Amendment right to free exercise of religion.

Many civil libertarians and others, meanwhile, voice concern that conservative Christians and others are trying to impose their values on students. Federal courts, they point out, consistently have interpreted the First Amendment’s prohibition on the establishment of religion to forbid state sponsorship of prayer and most other religious activities in public schools.

This debate centers on public schools; very few people are arguing that religious doctrine cannot be taught at private schools or that teachers at such schools cannot lead students in prayer. And even in public institutions, there is little debate about the right of individual students, teachers and other school employees to practice their religion – by, say, praying before lunch or wearing religious clothing or symbols.

Moreover, as a 2019 survey of American teens shows some forms of religious expression are relatively common in public schools. For instance, about four-in-ten public school students say they routinely see other students praying before sporting events, according to the survey. And about half of U.S. teens in public schools (53%) say they often or sometimes see other students wearing jewelry or clothing with religious symbols.

About this report

This analysis, updated on Oct. 3, 2019, was originally published in 2007 as part of a larger series that explored different aspects of the complex and fluid relationship between government and religion. This report includes sections on school prayer, the pledge of allegiance, religion in school curricula, and the religious liberty rights of students and teachers.

The report does not address questions of government funding for religious schools (that is, school vouchers and tax credits) because the schools in question are largely private, not public. For a discussion of vouchers and similar issues, see “ Shifting Boundaries: The Establishment Clause and Government Funding of Religious Schools and Other Faith-Based Organizations .” Because that analysis was published in 2009 and has not been updated, it does not include a discussion of more recent Supreme Court voucher rulings or upcoming cases .

Conflicts over religion in school are hardly new. In the 19th century, Protestants and Catholics frequently fought over Bible reading and prayer in public schools. The disputes then were over which Bible and which prayers were appropriate to use in the classroom. Some Catholics were troubled that the schools’ reading materials included the King James version of the Bible, which was favored by Protestants. In 1844, fighting broke out between Protestants and Catholics in Philadelphia; a number of people died in the violence and several Catholic churches were burned. Similar conflicts erupted during the 1850s in Boston and other parts of New England. In the early 20th century, liberal Protestants and their secular allies battled religious conservatives over whether students in biology classes should be taught Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

The Pillars of Church-State Law

The Legal Status of Religious Organizations in Civil Lawsuits March 2011 Are legal disputes involving churches and other religious institutions constitutionally different from those involving their secular counterparts, and if so, how?

Government Funding of Faith-Based Organizations May 2009 The debate over the meaning of the Establishment Clause.

Free Exercise and the Legislative and Executive Branches October 2008 A look at state and federal statutes that protect religious freedom.

Free Exercise and the Courts October 2007 The courts have grappled with the meaning of the Free Exercise Clause.

Religious Displays and the Courts June 2007 Government displays of religious symbols have sparked fierce battles.

The Supreme Court stepped into those controversies when it ruled, in Cantwell v. Connecticut (1940) and Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing Township (1947), that the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause applied to the states. The two clauses say, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Before those two court decisions, courts had applied the religion clauses only to actions of the federal government.

Soon after the Everson decision, the Supreme Court began specifically applying the religion clauses to activities in public schools. In its first such case , McCollum v. Board of Education (1948), the high court invalidated the practice of having religious instructors from different denominations enter public schools to offer religious lessons during the school day to students whose parents requested them. A key factor in the court’s decision was that the lessons took place in the schools. Four years later, in Zorach v. Clauson , the court upheld an arrangement by which public schools excused students during the school day so they could attend religious classes away from school property. (The new Pew Research Center survey finds that one-in-ten religiously affiliated teens in public school leave the school for religious activities.)

Beginning in the 1960s, the court handed religious conservatives a series of major defeats. It began with the landmark 1962 ruling, Engel v. Vitale , that school-sponsored prayer – even nonsectarian prayer – violated the Establishment Clause. Since then, the Supreme Court has pushed forward, from banning organized Bible reading for religious and moral instruction in 1963 to prohibiting school-sponsored prayers at high school football games in 2000. (The new survey finds that 8% of teens in public school have ever seen a teacher lead the class in prayer, and the same share have ever had a teacher read to the class from the Bible as an example of literature.)

In these and other decisions, the court has repeatedly stressed that the Constitution prohibits public schools from indoctrinating children in religion. But it is not always easy to determine exactly what constitutes indoctrination or school sponsorship of religious activities. For example, can a class on the Bible as literature be taught without a bias for or against the idea that the Bible is religious truth? Can students be compelled to participate in a Christmas-themed music program? Sometimes students themselves, rather than teachers, administrators or coaches, bring faith into school activities. For instance, when a student invokes gratitude to God in a valedictory address, or a high school football player offers a prayer in a huddle, is the school legally responsible for their religious expression?

The issues are complicated by other constitutional guarantees. For instance, the First Amendment also protects freedom of speech and freedom of association. Religious groups have cited those guarantees in support of student religious speech and in efforts to obtain school sponsorship and resources for student religious clubs.

The right of a student or student club to engage in religious speech or activities on school property may, however, conflict with other protections, such as the right of students to avoid harassment. In one case, for example, a federal appeals court approved a high school’s decision to prohibit a student from wearing a T-shirt containing a biblical passage condemning homosexuality. Because the student had graduated by the time the Supreme Court granted his appeal, the Supreme Court ordered the lower court to vacate its ruling and dismiss the case.

In another instance of conflict, some student religious groups want the right to exclude students who do not share the groups’ beliefs, specifically on questions of sexuality. For example, the Christian Legal Society (CLS), which has chapters in many law schools, requires those who serve in leadership positions to agree to a statement that renounces “unbiblical behaviors,” such as engaging in sexual relationships outside of heterosexual marriage. CLS sued a number of law schools after they denied the group official recognition because this leadership policy violated the schools’ nondiscrimination policies. In one of these cases, the Supreme Court ruled against CLS, stating that these nondiscrimination policies were constitutional so long as they were viewpoint neutral and fairly applied to all groups seeking recognition on campus.

As these more recent controversies show, public schools remain a battlefield where the religious interests of parents, students, administrators and teachers often clash. The conflicts affect many aspects of public education, including classroom curricula, high school football games, student clubs, graduation ceremonies.

Prayer and the Pledge

School prayer.

The most enduring and controversial issue related to school-sponsored religious activities is classroom prayer. In Engel v. Vitale (1962), the Supreme Court held that the Establishment Clause prohibited the recitation of a school-sponsored prayer in public schools. Engel involved a simple and seemingly nonsectarian prayer composed especially for use in New York’s public schools. In banning the prayer exercise entirely, the court did not rest its opinion on the grounds that unwilling students were coerced to pray; that would come much later. Rather, the court emphasized what it saw as the wrongs of having the government create and sponsor a religious activity.

The following year, the high court extended the principle outlined in Engel to a program of daily Bible reading. In Abington School District v. Schempp , the court ruled broadly that school sponsorship of religious exercises violates the Constitution. Schempp became the source of the enduring constitutional doctrine that all government action must have a predominantly secular purpose – a requirement that, according to the court, the Bible-reading exercise clearly could not satisfy. By insisting that religious expression be excluded from the formal curriculum, the Supreme Court was assuring parents that public schools would be officially secular and would not compete with parents in their children’s religious upbringing.

With Engel and Schempp, the court outlined the constitutional standard for prohibiting school-sponsored religious expression, a doctrine the court has firmly maintained. In Stone v. Graham (1980), for instance, it found unconstitutional a Kentucky law requiring all public schools to post a copy of the Ten Commandments. And in Wallace v. Jaffree (1985), it overturned an Alabama law requiring public schools to set aside a moment each day for silent prayer or meditation. However, in a concurrent opinion in Wallace, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor suggested that a moment of silence requirement might pass constitutional muster if it had a “secular purpose.” And in a subsequent 2009 case, Croft v. Perry , the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld a Texas law mandating a moment of silence because it determined that, in passing the law, the state legislature had sufficiently articulated a secular purpose.

But while courts have given states some latitude in crafting moment of silence statutes, they have shown much less deference to laws or policies that involve actual prayer. In 2000, for instance, the Supreme Court ruled in Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe that schools may not sponsor student-recited prayer at high school football games.

More sweeping in its consequences is Lee v. Weisman (1992), which invalidated a school-sponsored prayer led by an invited clergyman at a public school commencement in Providence, Rhode Island. The court’s 5-4 decision rested explicitly on the argument that graduating students were being forced to participate in a religious ceremony. The case effectively outlawed a practice that was customary in many communities across the country, thus fueling the conservative critique that the Supreme Court was inhospitable to public expressions of faith.

So far, lower appellate courts have not extended the principles of the school prayer decisions to university commencements (Chaudhuri v. Tennessee, 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, 1997; Tanford v. Brand, 7th Circuit, 1997). The 4th Circuit, however, found unconstitutional the practice of daily prayer at supper at the Virginia Military Institute. In that case, Mellen v. Bunting (2003), the appellate court reasoned that VMI’s military-like environment tended to coerce participation by cadets. The decision was similar to an earlier ruling by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which found unconstitutional a policy of the U.S. service academies that all cadets and midshipmen attend Protestant, Catholic or Jewish chapel services on Sunday (Anderson v. Laird, 1972). For the court, the key element was the service academies’ coercion of students to attend the religious activity.

Most recently, in 2019, the Supreme Court declined to review a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision upholding the firing of a football coach at a public high school for praying on the field with his players after games. However, in a statement accompanying the denial of review, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. (joined by fellow conservative justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh) indicated the high court would be open to reviewing other cases involving similar issues. Alito wrote that the court denied review in this case due to “important unresolved factual questions,” and that “the 9th Circuit’s understanding of free speech rights of public school teachers is troubling and may justify review in the future.”

The Pledge of Allegiance

In 1954, Congress revised the Pledge of Allegiance to refer to the nation as “under God,” a phrase that has since been recited by generations of schoolchildren. In 2000, Michael Newdow filed suit challenging the phrase on behalf of his daughter, a public school student in California. Newdow argued that the words “under God” violated the Establishment Clause because they transformed the pledge into a religious exercise.

The case, Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow , reached the Supreme Court in 2004, but the justices did not ultimately decide whether the phrase was acceptable. Instead, the court ruled that Newdow lacked standing to bring the suit because he did not have legal custody of his daughter. In concurring opinions, however, four justices expressed the view that the Constitution permitted recitation of the pledge – with the phrase “under God” – in public schools.

While the issue never reached the Supreme Court again, it continued to be litigated in the lower courts. In Myers v. Loudoun County Public Schools (2005), the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld recitation of the pledge in Virginia, but a U.S. district court in California ruled the other way in another suit involving Michael Newdow and other parents. However, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2010 reversed the district court decision, ruling that the recitation of the pledge did not constitute an establishment of religion.

School officials and student speech

The courts have drawn a sharp distinction between officially sponsored religious speech, such as a benediction by an invited clergyman at a commencement ceremony, and private religious speech by students. The Supreme Court made clear in Lee v. Weisman (1992) that a clergyman’s benediction at a public school event would violate the separation of church and state. Judges usually reach that same conclusion when school officials cooperate with students to produce student-delivered religious messages. But federal courts are more divided in cases involving students acting on their own to include a religious sentiment or prayer at a school commencement or a similar activity.

Some courts, particularly in the South, have upheld the constitutionality of student-initiated religious speech, emphasizing the private origins of this kind of religious expression. As long as school officials did not encourage or explicitly approve the contents, those courts have upheld religious content in student commencement speeches.

In Adler v. Duval County School Board (1996), for example, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals approved a system at a Florida high school in which the senior class, acting independently of school officials, selected a class member to deliver a commencement address. School officials neither influenced the choice of speaker nor screened the speech. Under those circumstances, the appeals court ruled that the school was not responsible for the religious content of the address.

Other courts, however, have invalidated school policies that permit student speakers to include religious sentiments in graduation addresses. One leading case is ACLU v. Black Horse Pike Regional Board of Education (1996), in which the senior class of a New Jersey public high school selected the student speaker by a vote without knowing in advance the contents of the student’s remarks. The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals nevertheless ruled that the high school could not permit religious content in the commencement speech. The court reasoned that students attending the graduation ceremony were as coerced to acquiesce in a student-led prayer as they would be if the prayer were offered by a member of the clergy, the practice forbidden by Weisman in 1992. (Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who was then a member of the appeals court, joined a dissenting opinion in the case, arguing that the graduating students’ rights to religious and expressive freedom should prevail over the Establishment Clause concerns.)

Similarly, in Bannon v. School District of Palm Beach County (2004), the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Florida school officials were right to order the removal of student-created religious messages and symbols from a school beautification project. The court reasoned that the project was not intended as a forum for the expression of students’ private views but rather as a school activity for which school officials would be held responsible.

Religion in the curriculum

The Supreme Court’s decisions about officially sponsored religious expression in schools consistently draw a distinction between religious activities such as worship or Bible reading, which are designed to inculcate religious sentiments and values, and “teaching about religion,” which is both constitutionally permissible and educationally appropriate. On several occasions, members of the court have suggested that public schools may teach “the Bible as literature,” include lessons about the role of religion and religious institutions in history or offer courses on comparative religion.

Creationism and evolution

Courts have long grappled with attempts by school boards and other official bodies to change the curriculum in ways that directly promote or denigrate a particular religious tradition. Best known among these curriculum disputes are those involving the conflict between proponents and opponents of Darwin’s theory of evolution , which explains the origin of species through evolution by means of natural selection. Opponents favor teaching some form of creationism, the idea that life came about as described in the biblical book of Genesis or evolved under the guidance of a supreme being. A recent alternative to Darwinism, intelligent design, asserts that life is too complex to have arisen without divine intervention.

The Supreme Court entered the evolution debate in 1968, when it ruled, in Epperson v. Arkansas , that Arkansas could not eliminate from the high school biology curriculum the teaching of “the theory that mankind descended from a lower order of animals.” Arkansas’ exclusion of that aspect of evolutionary theory, the court reasoned, was based on a preference for the account of creation in the book of Genesis and thus violated the state’s constitutional obligation of religious neutrality.

Almost 20 years later, in Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), the Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana law that required “balanced treatment” of evolution science and “creation science,” so that any biology teacher who taught one also had to teach the other. The court said the law’s purpose was to single out a particular religious belief – in this case, biblical creationism – and promote it as an alternative to accepted scientific theory. The court also pointed to evidence that the legislation’s sponsor hoped that the balanced treatment requirement would lead science teachers to abandon the teaching of evolution.

Lower courts consistently have followed the lead of Epperson and Edwards. As a result, school boards have lost virtually every fight over curriculum changes designed to challenge evolution, including disclaimers in biology textbooks. One of the most recent and notable of these cases, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005), involved a challenge to a Pennsylvania school district’s policy of informing high school science students about intelligent design as an alternative to evolution. After lengthy testimony from both proponents and opponents of intelligent design, a federal district court in Pennsylvania concluded that the policy violates the Establishment Clause because intelligent design is a religious, rather than scientific, theory.

Kitzmiller may have been the last major evolution case to make national headlines, but the debate over how to teach about the origins and development of life in public schools has continued in state legislatures, boards of education and other public bodies. In 2019, for instance, policies that could affect the way evolution is taught in public school (often by limiting discussion of “controversial issues”) were introduced and in some cases debated in several states, including Arizona, Florida, Maine, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Virginia.

Study of the Bible

Courts have also expended substantial time and energy considering public school programs that involve Bible study. Although the Supreme Court has occasionally referred to the permissibility of teaching the Bible as literature, some school districts have instituted Bible study programs that courts have found unconstitutional. Frequently, judges have concluded that these courses are thinly disguised efforts to teach a particular understanding of the New Testament.

In a number of these cases, school districts have brought in outside groups to run the Bible study program. The groups, in turn, hired their own teachers, in some cases Bible college students or members of the clergy who did not meet state accreditation standards.

Such Bible study programs have generally been held unconstitutional because, the courts conclude, they teach the Bible as religious truth or are designed to inculcate particular religious sentiments. For a public school class to study the Bible without violating constitutional limits, the class would have to include critical rather than devotional readings and allow open inquiry into the history and content of biblical passages.

Holiday programs

Christmas-themed music programs also have raised constitutional concerns. For a holiday music program to be constitutionally sound, the courts maintain, school officials must ensure the predominance of secular considerations, such as the program’s educational value or the musical qualities of the pieces. The schools also must be sensitive to the possibility that some students will feel coerced to participate in the program (Bauchman v. West High School, 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, 1997; Doe v. Duncanville Independent School District, 5th Circuit, 1995). Moreover, the courts have said, no student should be forced to sing or play music that offends their religious sensibilities. Therefore, schools must allow students the option not to participate.

Multiculturalism

Not all the cases involving religion in the curriculum concern the promotion of the beliefs of the majority. Indeed, challenges have come from Christian groups arguing that school policies discriminate against Christianity by promoting cultural pluralism.

In one example, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals considered a New York City Department of Education policy regulating the types of symbols displayed during the holiday seasons of various religions. The department allows the display of a menorah as a symbol for Hanukkah and a star and crescent to evoke Ramadan but permits the display of only secular symbols of Christmas, such as a Christmas tree; it explicitly forbids the display of a Christmas nativity scene in public schools.

Upholding the city’s policy, the Court of Appeals reasoned in Skoros v. Klein (2006) that city officials intended to promote cultural pluralism in the highly diverse setting of the New York City public schools. The court concluded that a “reasonable observer” would understand that the star and crescent combination and the menorah had secular as well as religious meanings. The judicial panel ruled that the policy, therefore, did not promote Judaism or Islam and did not denigrate Christianity.

In another high-profile case, Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum v. Montgomery County Public Schools (2005), a Maryland citizens’ group successfully challenged a health education curriculum that included discussion of sexual orientation. Ordinarily, opponents of homosexuality could not confidently cite the Establishment Clause as the basis for a complaint, because the curriculum typically would not advance a particular religious perspective. However, the Montgomery County curriculum included materials in teacher guides that disparaged some religious teachings on homosexuality as theologically flawed and contrasted those teachings with what the guide portrayed as the more acceptable and tolerant views of some other faiths. The district court concluded that the curriculum had both the purpose and effect of advancing certain faiths while denigrating the beliefs of others. The county rewrote these materials to exclude any reference to the views of particular faiths, making them more difficult to challenge successfully in court because the lessons did not condemn or praise any faith tradition.

Rights in and out of the classroom

At the time of its school prayer decisions in the early 1960s, the Supreme Court had never ruled on whether students have the right of free speech inside public schools. By the end of that decade, however, the court began to consider the question. And the results have made the rules for religious expression far more complex.

Rights of students

The leading Supreme Court decision on freedom of student speech is Tinker v. Des Moines School District (1969), , which upheld the right of students to wear armbands protesting the Vietnam War. The court ruled that school authorities may not suppress expression by students unless the expression significantly disrupts school discipline or invades the rights of others.

This endorsement of students’ freedom of speech did not entirely clarify things for school officials trying to determine students’ rights. Tinker supported student expression, but it did not attempt to reconcile that right of expression with the Supreme Court’s earlier decisions forbidding student participation in school-sponsored prayer and Bible reading. Some school officials responded to the mix of student liberties and restraints by forbidding certain forms of student-initiated religious expression such as the saying of grace before lunch in the school cafeteria, student-sponsored gatherings for prayer at designated spots on school property, or student proselytizing aimed at other students.

After years of uncertainty about these matters, several interest groups devoted to religious freedom and civil liberties drafted a set of guidelines, “Religious Expression in Public Schools,” which the U.S. Department of Education sent to every public school superintendent in 1995. The department revised the guidelines in 2003, placing somewhat greater emphasis on the rights of students to speak or associate for religious purposes. The guidelines highlight these four general principles:

Students, acting on their own, have the same right to engage in religious activity and discussion as they do to engage in comparable secular activities.
Students may offer a prayer or blessing before meals in school or assemble on school grounds for religious purposes to the same extent as other students who wish to express their personal views or assemble with others. (The new survey finds that 26% of religiously affiliated teens in public school say they often or sometimes pray before eating lunch.)
Students may not engage in religious harassment of others or compel other students to participate in religious expression, and schools may control aggressive and unwanted proselytizing.
Schools may neither favor nor disfavor students or groups on the basis of their religious identities.

A case decided by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals underscores the difficulties that school officials still can face when students exercise their right to religious expression on school property. In this case, gay and lesbian students in a California high school organized a Day of Silence, in which students promoting tolerance of differences in sexual orientation refrained from speaking in school. The following day, Tyler Harper, a student at the school, wore a T-shirt that on the front read, “Be Ashamed, Our School Has Embraced What God Has Condemned,” and on the back, “Homosexuality Is Shameful, Romans 1:27.” School officials asked him to remove the shirt and took him out of class while they attempted to persuade him to do so.

The Court of Appeals, in Harper v. Poway Unified School District (2006), rejected Harper’s claim that the school officials violated his First Amendment rights. Judge Stephen Reinhardt, writing for a 2- 1 majority and citing Tinker, argued that students’ constitutional rights may be limited to prevent harming the rights of other students. He concluded that the T-shirt could be seen as violating school policies against harassment based on sexual orientation.

Writing in dissent, Judge Alex Kozinski asserted that the school’s sexual harassment policy was far too vague and sweeping to support a restriction on all anti-gay speech. He also argued that the school district had unlawfully discriminated against Harper’s freedom of speech. By permitting the Gay and Lesbian Alliance to conduct the Day of Silence, Kozinski said, the district was choosing sides on a controversial social issue and stifling religiously motivated speech on one side of the issue.

Harper petitioned the Supreme Court to review the appeals court decision. But Harper graduated from high school, and the case took a different turn. The Supreme Court, in early 2007, ordered the lower court to vacate its ruling and dismiss the case on the grounds that it had become moot.

Harper highlighted a tension – one that may yet recur – between the rights of students to engage in religious expression and the rights of other students to be educated in a non-hostile environment. The Supreme Court eventually may clarify school officials’ power to suppress speech as a means of protecting the rights of other students. For now, cases like Harper illustrate the difficulties for school officials in regulating student expression.

Rights of parents

Parents sometimes complain that secular practices at school inhibit their right to direct the religious upbringing of their children. These complaints typically rest on both the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment and the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause, which forbids the state to deprive any person of “life, liberty or property without due process of law.” The Supreme Court has interpreted them as protecting the right of parents to shape and control the education of their children. When they object to certain school practices, the parents often seek permission for their children to skip the offending lesson or class – to opt out – rather than try to end the practice schoolwide.

The first decision by the Supreme Court on parents’ rights to control their children’s education came in Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), which guarantees to parents the right to enroll their children in private rather than public schools, whether the private schools are religious or secular. In West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), the court upheld the right of public school students who were Jehovah’s Witnesses to refuse to salute the American flag. The students said the flag represented a graven image and that their religion forbade them from recognizing it. The court’s decision rested on the right of all students, not just those who are religiously motivated, to resist compulsory recitation of official orthodoxy, political or otherwise.

Of all the Supreme Court rulings supporting religious opt-outs, perhaps the most significant came in Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), which upheld the right of members of the Old Order Amish to withdraw their children from formal education at the age of 14. The court determined that a state law requiring children to attend school until the age of 16 burdened the free exercise of their families’ religion. The Amish community had a well-established record as hardworking and law-abiding, the court noted, and Amish teens would receive home-based training. The worldly influences present in the school experience of teenagers, the court said, would undercut the continuity of agrarian life in the Amish community.

In later decisions, lower courts recognized religious opt-outs in other relatively narrow circumstances. Parents successfully cited religious grounds to win the right to remove their children from otherwise compulsory military training (Spence v. Bailey, 1972) and from a coeducational physical education class in which students had to dress in “immodest apparel” (Moody v. Cronin, 1979). In Menora v. Illinois High School Association (1982), the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Illinois High School Association was constitutionally obliged to accommodate Orthodox Jewish basketball players who wanted to wear a head covering, despite an association rule forbidding headgear. The Menora case involves a narrow exception from the dress code, rather than a broader right to opt out of a curriculum requirement.

A great many school districts, meanwhile, have recognized the force of parents’ religious or moral concerns on issues of sexuality and reproduction and have voluntarily provided opt-outs from classes devoted to those topics. Under these opt-out programs, parents do not have to explain their objection, religious or otherwise, to participation by their children. On other occasions, however, parental claims that the Constitution entitles them to remove their children from part or all of a public school curriculum have fared rather poorly.

The issue of home schooling is a good example. Before state legislatures passed laws allowing home schooling, parents seeking to educate their children at home were often unsuccessful in the courts. Many judges distinguished these home schooling cases from Yoder on the grounds that Yoder involved teenagers rather than young children. The judges also noted that Yoder was concerned with the survival of an entire religious community – the Old Order Amish – rather than the impact of education on a single family. Indeed, in virtually all the cases decided over the past 25 years, courts have found that the challenged curriculum requirement did not unconstitutionally burden parents’ religious choices.

The most famous of the cases is Mozert v. Hawkins County Board of Education (1987), in which a group of Tennessee parents complained that references to mental telepathy, evolution, secular humanism, feminism, pacifism and magic in a series of books in the reading curriculum offended the families’ Christian beliefs. The school board originally allowed children to choose alternative reading materials but then eliminated that option.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the county’s favor on the grounds that students were not being asked to do anything in conflict with their religious obligations. Furthermore, the court said, the school board had a strong interest in exposing children to a variety of ideas and images and in using a uniform series of books for all children. Because the books did not explicitly adopt or denigrate particular religious beliefs, the court concluded, the parents could insist neither on the removal of the books from the schools nor on their children opting out.

The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reached a similar conclusion in a case involving a public high school in Massachusetts that held a mandatory assembly devoted to AIDS and sex education. In that case, Brown v. Hot, Sexy, and Safer Productions (1995), the court rejected a complaint brought by parents who alleged that exposure to sexually explicit material infringed on their rights to religious freedom and control of the upbringing of their children. The court concluded that this one-time exposure to the material would not substantially burden the parents’ freedom to rear their children and that the school authorities had strong reasons to inform high school students about “safe sex.”

More recently, parents and students have, on religious liberty and other grounds, sued school districts that accommodate transgender students by allowing them to use bathroom and locker facilities that match their current gender identity rather than their sex at birth. Some parents and students argue that the new arrangements violate their religious liberty rights because the school policy forces them to accommodate a set of moral and religious beliefs they disagree with.

So far, however, federal courts have sided with school districts that have accommodated transgender students. For instance, in Parents for Privacy v. Dallas School District No. 2, a federal district court dismissed a suit against Oregon’s Dallas school district, stating that accommodating transgender students does not impinge on the religious rights of other students or their parents. And in 2019, the Supreme Court declined to review Doe v. Boyertown Area School District, letting stand a 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling upholding a Pennsylvania school district’s policy to accommodate transgender students.

Rights of teachers and administrators

Without question, public school employees retain their rights to free exercise of religion. When off duty, school employees are free to engage in worship, proselytizing or any other lawful faith-based activity. When they are acting as representatives of a public school system, however, courts have said their rights are constrained by the Establishment Clause.

This limitation on religious expression raises difficult questions. The first is what limits school systems may impose on the ordinary and incidental expression of religious identity by teachers in the classroom. Most school systems permit teachers to wear religious clothing or jewelry. Similarly, teachers may disclose their religious identity; for instance, they need not refuse to answer when a student asks, “Do you celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah?” or “Did I see you at the Islamic center yesterday morning?”

At times, however, teachers act in an uninvited and overtly religious manner toward students and are asked by school administrators to refrain. When those requests have led to litigation, administrators invariably have prevailed on the grounds that they are obliged (for constitutional and pedagogical reasons) to be sensitive to a teacher’s coercive potential.

In Bishop v. Aronov (1991), for example, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a set of restrictions imposed by the University of Alabama on a professor of exercise physiology. Professor Phillip Bishop had been speaking regularly to his class about the role of his Christian beliefs in his work and had scheduled an optional class in which he offered a “Christian perspective” on human physiology. The court recognized the university’s general authority to control the way in which instruction took place, noting that Bishop’s academic freedom was not jeopardized since he retained the right to express his religious views in his published writing and elsewhere.

In Roberts v. Madigan (1990), a federal district court similarly upheld the authority of a public school principal in Colorado to order a fifth-grade teacher to take down a religious poster from the classroom wall and to remove books titled “The Bible in Pictures” and “The Life of Jesus” from the classroom library. The court also backed the principal’s order that the teacher remove the Bible from his desktop and refrain from silently reading the Bible during instructional time. The court emphasized that school principals need such authority to prevent potential violations of the Establishment Clause and to protect students against a religiously coercive atmosphere.

That much is clear. What is less clear is how public school systems should draw the line between teachers’ official duties and their own time. That was the key question in Wigg v. Sioux Falls School District (8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, 2004), in which a teacher sued the South Dakota school district for refusing to allow her to serve as an instructor in the Good News Club (an evangelical Christian group) that met after school hours at various public elementary schools in the district.

A federal district court ruled that the teacher, Barbara Wigg, should be free to participate in the club but said the school district could insist that the teacher not participate at the school where she was employed. The appellate court affirmed the decision but went further in protecting the teacher’s rights, concluding that the school district could not exclude her from the program at her own school. The court reasoned that once the school day ended, Wigg became a private citizen, leaving her free to be a Good News Club instructor at any school, including the one where she worked. The court ruled that no reasonable observer would perceive Wigg’s after-school role as being carried out on behalf of the school district, even though the club met on school property.

In general, then, the courts have ruled that public schools have substantial discretion to regulate the religious expression of teachers during instructional hours, especially when students are required to be present. The courts have also ruled, however, that attempts by schools to extend that control into non-instructional hours constitute an overly broad intrusion on the teachers’ religious freedom.

Religious activities and the principle of equal access

Over the past 20 years, evangelical Christians and others have advanced the rights of religious organizations to have equal access to meeting space and other forms of recognition provided by public schools to students. These organizations have consistently succeeded in securing the same privileges provided by public schools to secular groups.

Their victories have not been based on a claim that religious groups have a right to official recognition simply because they want to practice or preach their religion; instead, these cases have been won on free-speech grounds.

Whenever public schools recognize student extracurricular activities (for example, a student Republican club or an animal rights group), the schools are deemed to have created a forum for student expression. The constitutional rules governing the forum concept are complicated, but one consistent theme is that the state may not discriminate against a person or group seeking access to the forum based on that person’s or group’s viewpoint. In a now-lengthy line of decisions, the Supreme Court has ruled consistently that religious groups represent a particular viewpoint on the subjects they address and that officials may not exclude that viewpoint from a government-created forum for expression or association.

The first major decision in this area was Widmar v. Vincent (1981), , in which the Supreme Court ruled that the University of Missouri could not exclude from campus facilities a student group that wanted to use the school’s buildings for worship and Bible study. The university had refused the group access, asserting that the Establishment Clause forbade the use of a public university’s facilities for worship. The court rejected this defense, ruling that the university had allowed other student groups to use university property and that the complaining group could not be excluded on the basis of its religious viewpoint.

The Supreme Court later extended Widmar’s notion of equal access to nonstudent groups. They, too, should have access to public space, the court said. Despite the decision in Widmar, however, some public high schools continued to refuse access to student religious groups. Those schools took the view that prayer and Bible reading in public schools were constitutionally impermissible, even if wholly student initiated. At least one court of appeals has upheld that argument.

Congress responded by passing the Equal Access Act of 1984. As a condition for receiving federal financial aid, the law required that public secondary schools not discriminate on the basis of religion or political viewpoint in recognizing and supporting extracurricular activities. This law has benefited a variety of student organizations, from gay and lesbian groups to evangelical Christian clubs.

In 1985, a year after Congress passed the equal access law, school officials in Omaha, Nebraska, refused a student request for permission to form a Christian club at a public high school. The club’s activities included reading and discussing the Bible and engaging in prayer. The students filed suit under the Equal Access Act, and the school officials responded that allowing such a club in a public school would violate the Establishment Clause.

In the court case, Board of Education v. Mergens (1990), the Supreme Court upheld the Equal Access Act. The 8-1 majority reasoned that high schools were indistinguishable from universities for purposes of equal access to public facilities. Because there were many student groups devoted to different and frequently opposing causes, the court determined that no reasonable observer would see the school’s recognition of a religious group as an official endorsement of the group’s religious views.

The limits of Widmar and Mergens were later put to the test in Rosenberger v. University of Virginia (1995) and Good News Club v. Milford Central School District (2001). In Rosenberger, the Supreme Court held 5-4 that the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment required a state university to grant the same printing subsidy to an evangelical journal that it made available to all other student journals. The dissenters argued, unsuccessfully, that state financial support for a proselytizing journal violated the Establishment Clause. In Good News Club, a 6-3 majority held that the Free Speech Clause prohibited an elementary school from excluding an evangelical Christian program for children from the list of accepted after-school activities.

These equal access decisions have led to new controversies in the lower courts. In Child Evangelism Fellowship of Maryland v. Montgomery County Public Schools (2006), for instance, a federal appellate court extended the equal access principle to fliers that schools distributed to students to take home for the purpose of informing parents about after-school activities. For years the county had distributed fliers for children’s sports leagues and activities like the Boy Scouts. But it refused to distribute fliers for the after-school programs of the Child Evangelism Fellowship of Maryland, which are not held on school property. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held that the county’s flier distribution policy was unconstitutionally discriminatory.

The presence of student religious groups in public schools has raised one additional issue. At times these groups insist that their officers make specific religious commitments, such as accepting Jesus Christ as savior and maintaining sexual abstinence outside of heterosexual marriage. As a result, some students are excluded from joining the group or from its leadership ranks. In Hsu v. Roslyn Union Free School District No. 3 (1996), the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held that the federal Equal Access Act gave students in an evangelical Christian group the right to maintain religious criteria for office. The court said the school’s policy against religious discrimination by student groups was unenforceable in this instance.

The issue arrived at the Supreme Court in 2010 in a case involving a public law school’s decision to deny official recognition to the Christian Legal Society (CLS), a nationwide, nondenominational organization of Christian lawyers, judges and law students. Although the case, Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, involved just one law school (the University of California, Hastings College of Law), other law schools around the country also had been sued by the organization for similar reasons. By the time the Supreme Court agreed to hear Martinez, lower federal courts in different cases had ruled both for and against the organization.

The case centered on Hastings’ policies toward student organizations. Student groups that are officially recognized by Hastings enjoy certain privileges, including access to school facilities and funding. But CLS membership requirements effectively bar non-Christians from becoming voting members and non-celibate gays and lesbians from assuming leadership positions, which conflicts with the law school’s stated policy of requiring registered student groups to accept any students as members. After Hastings refused to exempt CLS from the policy – known as the “all-comers” policy – the group sued, claiming the policy violated its First and 14th Amendment rights to free speech, expressive association and freedom of religious expression. A federal district court and the Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit sided with Hastings, and CLS appealed to the Supreme Court.

The case was widely viewed as a contest between the right of free association and nondiscrimination policies. In its ruling, however, the court did not resolve any broad questions raised by this conflict. Instead, the 5-4 majority handed down a narrowly tailored decision that upheld the specific policy of Hastings Law School – the “all-comers” policy – as long as it is applied in an evenhanded manner.

Writing for the high court’s majority, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that Hastings’ policy requiring officially registered student groups to allow anyone to join does not unconstitutionally discriminate against groups with particular viewpoints or missions. Quite the contrary, she wrote, the policy is completely neutral since it requires all organizations to open their membership and leadership to all students. Ginsburg argued that it is CLS that wants an exemption from the policy and thus threatens its neutrality. Moreover, she wrote, an “all-comers” policy is reasonable for an educational institution because it encourages all groups to accept and interact with students who hold diverse views. Finally, Ginsburg noted that even though the Christian Legal Society has been denied official recognition by the law school, the group can, and still does, freely operate on campus and is even allowed to use school facilities to hold meetings.

Writing for the dissent, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. argued that by affirming Hastings’ policy, the majority sacrificed core First Amendment principles in favor of political correctness and armed “public educational institutions with a handy weapon for suppressing the speech of unpopular groups.” In addition, Alito asserted, the majority overlooked certain evidence demonstrating that Hastings had singled out CLS because of its beliefs. Prior to the lawsuit, he said, many officially recognized groups on the Hastings campus – not just CLS – had membership requirements written into their bylaws that were discriminatory. Justice Alito also disputed the majority’s contention that CLS, even without official recognition, can still effectively operate on campus, noting that the administration has ignored requests by the group to secure rooms for meetings and tables at campus events.

This report was written by Ira C. Lupu, F. Elwood and Eleanor Davis Professor Emeritus of Law at George Washington University Law School; David Masci, Senior Writer/Editor at Pew Research Center; and Robert W. Tuttle, David R. and Sherry Kirschner Berz Research Professor of Law & Religion at George Washington University Law School.

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The Role of Religion in Public Education Essay

Introduction, the role religion in public education.

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The extent and presence of religion in communal schools is a contentious and difficult issue. The latest advance by public educators to do away with religion in school programs may confirm to be injurious towards developing coaching of students. The US government has tried to interpret the proper link between public schools and religion for many years. The role of religion in public schools has been highly debated. This paper explores the roles played by religion in public education. Due to the significance of these roles; it supports the idea that religious schools should receive public aid.

Religion has played an important role in public education by collectively joining people of diverse nationalities, culture, languages and creed. It has integrated these people together on the grounds of what they share and endeavor to achieve jointly. Moreover, it has allowed students from diverse cultures to develop a union of purpose and spirit that celebrates and appreciates their diversity. This has promoted civil unity from which religious harmony is certain to grow. Besides, religious education has significantly contributed towards developing an informed and integrated society that enhances unity in diversity. Therefore, religious schools should be supported.

In expounding the role of religion in communal education, it is imperative to mention that the advantages of a consistent teaching program in the lessons attached to religion should be appreciated. A plural, open, historically informed, interdisciplinary and intercultural teaching on religion in communal schools is in line with global development agenda.

Additionally, it is a concept that is gaining popularity and significance throughout the world. The role of religion in education is a significant human need which all students should be aware of if they are to be considered educated. Hence, schools that embrace religion should receive public aid.

Religion plays a significant role in expounding the origin of the world. It is difficult to teach literature, philosophy or history without comprehending religion and its effects in the contemporary society. Efforts to secularize the past distort power that created the planet in which we live in. Providing elective lessons in world religions or lessons to study bible stories and how they affect literature is absolutely correct towards good quality education.

However, teaching a particular religious principle or providing prayer in a specific religious tradition is completely a different issue. In public schooling, the enforced practice of a specific religion, or the training of certain religious practices is inappropriate. If all schools could provide religious courses where students would study religion instead of being instructed with religion, then such schools should be supported by the public.

Religious education promotes spirituality by instructing the public on how to interact with environment around them, and allowing spirituality to direct their individual growth. Religious education helps the public to appreciate that they are equal in the world which may be perceived as an enormous kingdom that motivates fear.

Hence, religion helps students to understand the ways they can boost their morals in society and also employ their personal talents and self worth. Therefore, religious education plays a vital role of promoting morality in public schools and for this reason, religious schools ought to be supported. Religious education helps the public in understanding different convictions, what they accept as true as well as how and why this has influenced history. It is impossible to learn and understand our neighbors without comprehending their religious beliefs. Therefore, schools that include religion in their study programs should be encouraged.

Religious education plays an important role in allowing schools to teach courses that are intellectually essential to develop educated population. These include literature, mathematics, history, arts, languages, sciences and social studies. These subjects constitute the unrefined resources which can be used by the future generation to model the vision of a democratic system and their careers. Consequently, schools that include religion in their curriculum ought to receive public aid.

Inclusion of religious education in school curricula has promoted social justice and respect for environment among students. This has been achieved by encouraging religious education that embraces common values promoted by every religion such as human exploration for the implication and the integrity of service to other people.

In addition, religious education provides students with a learning program that discusses religion in its broadest meaning. This form of education has allowed students to engage with several religious backgrounds in a manner that encourages them to develop their moral dimensions and personal wellbeing.

Religious education enhances a reasonable approach towards learning and teaching various elements that are valued by society. It offers the public an opportunity to understand itself better and develop a wider social acceptance of other people. By instructing students on the function of religion in society, an integrated, multi-traditional program in religious study forms a crucial component of a well structured and inclusive education.

Religious education offers an opportunity for students to develop a disciplined approach that will empower them to appreciate a universal humanity in religious multiplicity. It forms a context in which students can improve their individual perception and the way they perceive other people, deepen their potential for sympathy and ultimately reflect seriously on challenges facing religious concerns.

Religion plays a crucial aspect of human undertaking that students ought to learn. Religious study programs provide students with relevant and significant discipline of knowledge. Religion plays an important role in public education by promoting specific concerns, founded on the general conviction that societal problems originate from lack of religious faith. This can only be rectified through a specific interpretation of religion. The knowledge, appreciation and understanding of the extent of our textured and rich religious multiplicity are mirrored in school curriculums.

Religion is not restricted towards various cultures in society. It is also concerned with origins and traditional practices of various communities in society. Therefore, religious education is crucial, though it cannot be regarded as an exclusive foundation of ethical values.

There is increasing fear concerning the universal deterioration of ethical standards in the world, the increasing crime rates and evident lack of value for human life. These are important areas of concern. Religious education provides the basis for moral restoration. It is also a major resource designed for clarifying ethics, morals, and developing respect for other people.

To recap it all, it is worth mentioning that religion has played vital roles in public education. For instance, it has assisted students to develop acceptable societal morals alongside contributing towards the well being of society in general. As a matter of fact, religion has been instrumental in reducing crime rate. Therefore, it is important for the public to support schools that include religion in their curriculum.

Duncan, Ann & Jones, Steven. Church-state issues in America today . Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2008.

Fraser, James. Between church and state: religion and public education in a multicultural America . New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

Nord, Warren. Religion and American education: rethinking a national dilemma . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.

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Should Religion Be Taught in Schools

Table of contents, the case for teaching religion, concerns about bias and indoctrination, promoting critical thinking and civic engagement, the separation of church and state, striking a balance.

Haynes, C. C. (2011). Teaching about Religion in National and State Social Studies Standards. Religion & Education, 38(3), 215-232.
Jackson, R., & Miedema, S. (2007). Religion and Education around the World: Comparative and International Perspectives. Springer.
Kerr, D., & Ingvarson, L. (2017). Teaching Religion in Public Schools: European Perspectives. Routledge.
Lipka, M. (2021). What Americans Know About Religion. Pew Research Center.
Noddings, N. (2011). Education and Democracy in the 21st Century. Teachers College Press.

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The Role of Religion in Public Education Essay
Therefore, religious education plays a vital role of promoting morality in public schools and for this reason, religious schools ought to be supported. Religious education helps the public in understanding different convictions, what they accept as true as well as how and why this has influenced history. It is impossible to learn and understand ...
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Religion in Schools

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Religion in Schools: Is There a Place for It? Pros and Cons

Introduction

Why Should Religion Be Taught in Schools?

Regions & Countries

Religion in the Public Schools

About this report

The Pillars of Church-State Law

Prayer and the Pledge

The Pledge of Allegiance

School officials and student speech

Religion in the curriculum

Creationism and evolution

Study of the Bible

Holiday programs

Multiculturalism

Rights in and out of the classroom

Rights of students

Rights of parents

Rights of teachers and administrators

Religious activities and the principle of equal access

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The Role of Religion in Public Education Essay

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