INTRODUCTION

The United States poses significant problems for orthodox theories of secularization. While secularization theorists for years anticipated the inevitable demise of religion at the hands of modernization, religious pluralism, and scientific progress, the United States – a modern, religiously pluralistic, and scientifically advanced country if ever there was one – flummoxed their every prediction. In nearly every respect, relative to other modern, Western countries, it is saturated with religion: churches overflowing with congregants, sky-high rates of belief in God, and a public political culture that begins with prayer breakfasts between clergy and politicians, and ends with speeches ritualistically declaiming “God bless America!” “That the reigning theory [of secularization] does not seem to work has become an open secret,” confessed Stephen Warner en route to proclaiming a “new paradigm” for the study of religion that gave American developments pride of place.

Yet in at least one important respect, the United States does in fact approximate the predictions of sociology's classical secularization theorists. America's educational system is extremely – one might say resolutely – secular. In fact, it is secular even in comparison to those other modern, Western countries that otherwise cast America's religiousness in such high relief. Unlike nearly every other Western nation, religious exercises and religious instruction are excluded from American public schools. More striking still, the United States is virtually alone in refusing to provide public support for religious schools; even hypersecular France funds its system of Catholic schools. How did this paradoxical situation come to pass?

American anomalies are often explained by resorting to one American “exceptionalism” or another, yet in this case no obvious candidate suffices. Appeals to national culture might suggest that America's secular educational system reflects a longstanding desire to keep religion voluntary and separated from state support. But American education has not always been so secular. In fact, for most of American history, religious instruction and devotional exercises held a prominent place in American public schools, and it is only since the 1960s that religion and education have experienced such a total divorce. Others have suggested that America's unusual religious diversity required it to adopt “a school system which keeps religious plurality out.” America's high degree of religious pluralism has certainly contributed to considerable contestation over the relationship between religion and education.

The previous part of the book dealt with the dynamics of religion and education under the aegis of the nineteenth-century settlement, focusing on how administrative institutions helped to advance or retard two key secularizing processes, professionalization and religious conflict. As we have seen, the period between 1870 and 1945 saw the slow decline of devotionals in American public schools as religious outsiders and educational professionals took advantage of decentralized administration to implement more secular policies. And it also saw the persistence of religious instruction in Australian schools, as centralized administrative structures stymied efforts either to challenge from without, or to transform from within, the educational policies established in the late nineteenth century.

Part III takes up the story from 1945 onwards, to explain why American and Australian secular settlements diverged in the mid-twentieth century. To do so, it focuses on the process of religious conflict, and how it interacted with the institutional terrain in each country. The dynamics of religious conflict changed significantly at midcentury, as the longstanding Protestant–Catholic divide began to break down in both countries. As it did, new alliances began to form around religious education, generating new political pressures that contributed to the emergence of new settlements in each country. In the United States, the new twentieth-century settlement featured the “strict separation” of church and state, which rejected both public aid to religious schools and public school devotionals. In Australia, by contrast, the new twentieth-century settlement embraced a version of “neutrality” that permitted both public aid (“state aid”) to religious schools and devotional religious exercises in the public schools.

While religious conflict was central to the emergence of both of these settlements, the institutional settings in which religious education policy was renegotiated varied. In the United States, strict separation was promulgated through the courts, which effectively nationalized what had been a fragmented and fundamentally local policy toward religion. Meanwhile, the new Australian settlement was worked out through traditional parliamentary processes, thanks to peculiar features of Australia's electoral institutions.

Part of the reason that settlement change was determined by the courts in the United States, but the legislature in Australia, was that these institutions were differently available to those political forces who were most active in defining the terms of the new settlements.

INTRODUCTION

On 2 March 1898, delegates to Australia's constitutional convention voted to include a section in their new Constitution guaranteeing religious freedom and prohibiting religious establishment. Australia's Section 116 was deliberately modeled on the religion clauses of America's First Amendment in what one Australian legal scholar has termed “a fairly blatant piece of transcription.” Yet despite its nearly identical language, Section 116 has been interpreted vastly differently from its American counterpart. While American courts have read the First Amendment broadly, as creating a “wall of separation” between church and state, the Australian High Court has interpreted Section 116 narrowly, as prohibiting only the “statutory recognition” of a single church. These divergent interpretations have led the courts to play decidedly different roles in defining how secular education would be in each country: while American courts have, since the late 1940s, taken the lead in forging a new secular settlement in education, Australian courts have been only minor players.

Why did the courts play such a central role in the negotiation of America's new secular settlement? In this chapter, I argue that it is because they constituted an accessible institutional target for a concerted, strategic campaign to redefine and nationalize America's religious education policy. In the face of theological division and new ecumenical trends, the divide between Protestants and Catholics that had long structured the politics of religious education began to break down in the mid-twentieth century. At the same time, new players – Jews and civil libertarians – forcefully entered the debate over religion and education in the postwar years. These developments altered the dynamics of religious conflict, destabilizing the established politics of the nineteenth-century settlement and creating room for an assertive campaign for “strict separation” of church and state largely organized by the new players.

INTRODUCTION

In 1938, the eminent comparative educationist Isaac Kandel surveyed the structure and operation of Australian education. He was struck by its “high degree of centralization,” which had commendably “brought facilities for education within the reach of all children of school age.” Nevertheless, Kandel sounded an alarm. “The efficiency attained by centralized control may be purchased at too great a price. A central authority tends to grow by the power which it wields and when such an authority exercises at once the rights to legislate, … to execute, and to judge, the result is inevitably rule by a bureaucracy which imposes its will and ultimately secures uniformity in aspects of the educational process where uniformity is least desirable.”

Kandel was not the first observer – nor would he be the last – to remark upon the highly centralized administration of Australian education, nor to raise concerns about its sclerotic effects on educational practice. Just a year before Kandel published his study, an education conference held in Sydney featured a virtual parade of speakers urging Australians to break the shackles of bureaucratic rule. The Sydney Mail reported, “Behind all the discussions and lectures at the conference was an evident urge to condemn educational methods that are based on rigid centralization.” Australian education at midcentury was, in fact, highly centralized. Under the Australian system, the state education departments coordinated and controlled all aspects of schooling, from staffing and curriculum to teacher training. Despite moves in the last decades of the twentieth century to decentralize administration, to this day Australian education remains remarkably centralized, with power concentrated in state departments and very few real powers delegated to the local level.

This chapter examines how Australia's centralized education system affected the pace and timing of secularization in Australian schools. In contrast to the United States, where devotional Bible reading declined over the first half of the twentieth century, religious instruction persisted, and even became more widespread, in Australian schools. In many states, students in 1960 encountered religion in the curriculum in much the same way that their great-grandparents might have encountered it in 1880; in others, they encountered a more robust religious presence.

One of the advantages of a political-institutional approach is that it can help us make sense of the current flux in American church–state jurisprudence. While strict separation remains the law of the land, it has been challenged on multiple fronts in recent years. The Supreme Court has offered increased protection to religious speech, and has shown a willingness to permit some public displays of religious symbols – though it has not yet endorsed them in the public schools. More dramatically, the Court has steadily retreated from its longstanding prohibition on public aid to religious schools. Increasingly, the Court now holds that indirect supports, such as tax credits and vouchers, may be justifiable. While aid paid directly to the school, of the type provided in Australia, remains unconstitutional, funding schemes that provide benefits indirectly to religious schools are no longer forbidden. These decisions do not require states to instantiate public aid programs, but they do give them the freedom to construct programs that could potentially provide extensive indirect support for religious schools.

Thus, to an important – though still somewhat limited – extent, the Supreme Court has denationalized policy on public aid. Today, voucher programs – nearly all of which include religious schools as eligible voucher recipients – are in place in fourteen states and the District of Columbia. But in returning the voucher question to the states, the Supreme Court has unleashed a torrent of litigation in the state courts. Nearly every existing voucher program is being or has been challenged in state constitutional courts, and in many cases voucher initiatives have been struck down as violations of state constitutional provisions. Further complicating matters, some states have begun to experiment with novel means of financing and organizing education that complicate and undermine traditional understandings of strict separation. In light of these trends, some legal scholars have begun to anticipate a profound transformation in church–state policy. Recent decisions, they claim, may portend “a major substantive departure from existing … Establishment Clause doctrine.”

These changes are explicable in terms of the political-institutional theory advanced in this book. Just as the rise of strict separation as a legal principle during the mid-twentieth century was premised upon favorable political coalitions and a variety of institutional supports that made the development of that doctrine possible, so too is separation's current precarious position attributable to changing political and institutional dynamics.

On 17 June, 1963, the United States Supreme Court banned the devotional reading of the Bible and the saying of the Lord's Prayer in American public schools. Finding that the practices unequivocally constituted “religious exercises,” it declared that they were “required by the States in violation of the command of the First Amendment that the Government maintain strict neutrality, neither aiding nor opposing religion.” The decision, coming on the heels of a decision the previous year prohibiting nondenominational prayers in the public schools, firmly closed the door on nearly two hundred years of religious exercises in American schools. It also fed a strong backlash. Religious and political leaders denounced the decision, school officials around the country defiantly vowed to continue the practices irrespective of the decision, and scores of federal legislators introduced Constitutional amendments to reverse the decision. Nevertheless, these efforts ultimately failed, and within twenty years official Bible reading and school prayer had virtually vanished from schools outside the South, while even in the South their frequency had declined substantially.

Just five months later, half a world away, Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies shocked political observers by announcing in a campaign speech that he intended to begin to provide federal funding for science education, to be made “available to all secondary schools, government or independent, without discrimination.” The proposal represented a marked departure from Australia's longstanding policy, dating to the late nineteenth century, against providing funding to religious schools. Following his reelection, Menzies implemented his proposal over his opponents’ accusations that he was trying to buy Catholic votes. The legislation was “conceived in chicanery, born in duplicity, and nurtured on deceit,” declared the opposition leader; while another Member of Parliament lamented that “the political bribery” the bill represented had “never been surpassed in Australia's history.” Nevertheless, the legislation passed easily, and was quickly followed by a spate of additional subsidies that cemented “state aid” to religious schools as a permanent feature of the Australian educational landscape.

Separated by space but not by time, these two scenes are important moments that heralded the arrival of new secular settlements – that is, relatively stable sets of policies governing the role of religion in particular social domains – in each country. Secular settlements have become an important focus of research on secularization in recent years.

INTRODUCTION

In the nineteenth century, jurisdiction over education shifted from the churches to the state in both Australia and the United States. In the United States, the diverse array of private, denominational, and town schools that prevailed in the early national era were slowly gathered together into a coherent system of “common schools.” In Australia, the mostly denominational system that grew out of the convict garrisons was edged out by a new system of government schools after the colonies were granted responsible government in the 1850s. By 1880, the two nations had settled on remarkably similar secular settlements. The state dominated schooling in both countries, providing free education to all children irrespective of class or religious background. Each nation had erected strong legal barriers against funding for denominational schools (“public aid” or “state aid”), but were remarkably open to religious instruction in the public schools – especially instruction in a “nondenominational” Christianity heavily colored by Protestant assumptions. Yet although their settlements were similar, each nation's system of educational administration differed dramatically. In the United States, common schools were governed through a decentralized network of thousands of local school boards, while in Australia, government schools were run out of highly centralized state ministries of education.

Why did Australia and the United States arrive at nineteenth-century settlements that were so similar in their approach to religious education, yet so different in their administrative structure? I argue that the nearly complete shift in control from church to state in each country was driven primarily by the state-building process. In both countries, an organized campaign, led by actors determined to make education universal and subject to state control, succeeded in relocating the primary responsibility for education from the churches to the state. Yet state-building interacted differently with religious conflict in the two nations, in ways that shaped the administrative structures that ultimately developed. In the United States, the state-building process was driven largely from the bottom up with the avid participation of evangelical Protestant clergy. As a result, it was able to coopt the existing educational infrastructure, leading to an administratively decentralized school system that harmoniously fused state education with a strongly Protestant curriculum.

With state schooling established as the dominant partner in education by 1880, a durable secular settlement had been established in each country with strongly similar characteristics: religion was permitted in public schools, and financial support was barred from flowing to religious schools. Yet, in the United States, the nineteenth-century settlement began to erode almost immediately, particularly in the public schools, where the prevalence of religious devotionals began a slow but steady decline. In Australia, by contrast, the nineteenth-century settlement proved remarkably immune to political or professional challenge until its precipitous reformulation in the 1960s.

Part II of this book examines the divergent fates of the nineteenth-century settlements, and it focuses on how systems of educational administration affected the politics of religion – and hence the trajectory of secularization – between the late nineteenth century and the end of World War II. In so doing, it uncovers important distal trends that set the stage for the transformation of the 1960s. While the events of the 1960s were dramatic, they cannot be understood simply in terms of their immediate historical context. Political processes are often big and slow-moving, with effects that only unfold over extended historical periods. The rise of the twentieth-century settlement likewise depended upon dynamics generated by the unfolding of religious conflict and professionalization over the long term.

These chapters argue that variations in administrative institutions are central to explaining why public school devotionals declined in the United States, but not in Australia. In the United States, the decentralized system of local board control made American education permeable to challenges by Catholics, Jews, and other religious minorities dissatisfied with the pan-Protestant, “non-sectarian” devotionals so central to the nineteenth-century curriculum. These challenges eroded religion's position in the public schools from the bottom up. At the same time, the decentralized development of education also unleashed strong professionalizing dynamics among American educators, ultimately leading to the development and diffusion of new, professional pedagogical ideas that rapidly marginalized religion from the top down. In Australia, by contrast, centralized control over education insulated educational policy from minority challenges, and attenuated professional development among teachers. This contributed to conservatism and stasis in Australian education throughout the early twentieth century, both in general and more specifically in regards to religious policies.

INTRODUCTION

Between 1964 and 1973, the nineteenth-century settlement that banned “state aid” to Australia's religious schools collapsed. A series of federal and state initiatives extended a trickle, then a torrent, of money to Catholic and other religious schools. By 1974, state aid was an accepted part of the Australian educational landscape, formally institutionalized in a new Schools Commission that doled out aid to religious schools on a recurrent per capita basis. The reintroduction of state aid represents the creation of a new settlement decidedly less “secular” than the one that preceded it. Whereas the former had refused any supportive relationship between the state and the churches in education, the new one treated church and state as collaborative partners in educational endeavors, under the banner of “religious neutrality.”

Why was state aid reintroduced in Australia, but not the United States? As in the United States, Australia's new secular settlement emerged thanks to a shift in the dynamics of religious conflict, a coordinated campaign to realize a new secular settlement, and a set of political opportunities made possible by favorable institutional terrain. In Australia, Catholics led the campaign for the new settlement. The dynamics of religious conflict shifted in the 1960s as the longstanding conflict between Catholics and Protestants was replaced by an ecumenical spirit that greatly reduced Protestants’ incentives to oppose state aid. At the same time, a split in the Australian Labor Party (ALP) led to the creation of a new, predominantly Catholic political party. This effectively transformed Catholics into political free agents whose votes were highly sought after, giving them powerful new leverage in federal and state politics.

This unprecedented political opportunity emerged in large part thanks to Australia's electoral institutions. Australia's preference-voting rules produced a relatively flexible party system with real political space for third parties. Catholics took advantage of this flexibility to create their own party in the mid-1950s, and manipulated the features of the preference-voting system to enhance their political influence during the 1960s. The institutional availability of the legislative pathway can be seen when the Australian experience is contrasted with a parallel campaign by Catholics for public aid in the United States.