Word: schempp
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...some, this idea seems retrograde. Citing a series of Supreme Court decisions culminating in 1963's Abington Township School District v. Schempp, which removed prayer and devotion from the classroom, the skeptics ask whether it is safe to bring back the source of all that sectarianism. But a new, post-Schempp coalition insists it is essential to do so. It argues that teaching the Bible in schools--as an object of study, not God's received word--is eminently constitutional. The Bible so pervades Western culture, it says, that it's hard to call anyone educated who hasn...
...system of education that would leave the student wholly ignorant of the currents of religious thought that move the world society for ... which he is being prepared," Jackson wrote, and warned that putting all references to God off limits would leave public education "in shreds." In the 1963 Schempp decision, the exemption for secular study of Scripture was explicit and in the majority opinion: "Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment," wrote...
DECADES AFTER THE Schempp DECISION, most school administrators, lawsuit-averse by nature, had eliminated almost any treatment of religion. Then during the evangelical renaissance of the 1990s, a theologically conservative North Carolina group called the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools compiled an outline for Bible courses. The curriculums reached the attention of Charles Haynes, a senior scholar at the First Amendment Center, based in Arlington, Va., who favored teaching about religion in school but didn't think what he was looking at passed constitutional muster. He composed a document, The Bible and Public Schools: A First Amendment...
...public saga of Madalyn Murray O'Hair began in June 1963, when the U.S. Supreme Court removed prayer from the public schools. The suit on which the decision was primarily based had been brought by a Philadelphia Unitarian named Ed Schempp. But it soon became apparent that a secondary litigant, whose case had merely been attached to Schempp's, was the one who most desperately wanted the mantle of the era's foremost separator of church and state. Madalyn O'Hair was a heavy woman with a strong voice and jaw who even in repose resembled, as author Lawrence Wright...
...Back in the Schools" reflects deep misunderstanding of what the court actually said. In Engel v. Vitale (1962), it overruled the required daily recitation of a nondenominational prayer composed by a governmental body, the New York State Board of Regents. In 1963's Murray v. Curlett and Schempp v. School District, it overruled school-required reading of Scripture in Maryland and Pennsylvania. All three decisions were based on what the court deemed to be an inescapable reading of the First Amendment's "establishment" clause. Far from being antireligious, the court simply aimed to keep government from interfering with...