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It IS no news that a great many educators believe (or profess to believe) that any mention of religion on public-school or university grounds is contrary to the law of the land. Of course, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly held otherwise. It has found that the government (which includes the public schools) is constitutionally required to accommodate religion in certain instances, and that religious speech is included along with every other kind of speech under First Amendment guarantees. In 1984, moreover, Congress passed the Equal Access Act, designed to clarify and confirm the rights of free speech, freedom of association, and the free exercise of religion held by public-secondary-school students. According to Senator Jeremiah Denton, “Equal-access legislation is necessary because school administrators have felt constrained to prohibit . . . voluntary student meetings for such reason that the speech contains religious content”; while Senator Orrin Hatch stated simply that “religious students are being told they cannot meet on the same basis as other clubs.” During a congressional hearing on the Equal Access Act, a witness from the state of Washington testified that “Recently an assembly featuring professional athletes speaking about what has been an important part of their lives and what has made them successful was denied because it was held to be too religious to be held during school hours by the ACLU,” the nationally recognized authority on the subject of religion and the religious impulse. In The Freedom of Religious Expression in Public Universities and High Schools, revised edition (Good News Publishers/Crossways Books, Westchester, Ill. 60153; $5.95), John W. Whitehead argues that this assault is an abridgment of the constitutional rights of students, faculty, administrators, and others, and describes ways in which people so affronted may employ the Equal Access Act to remedy their plight.

In his first two chapters, “A Historical Perspective” and “Accommodating Neutrality,” Whitehead sketches the evolution of a consensus on church-state relations over the past two centuries. Even Thomas Jefferson, he reminds us, who most certainly believed in the separation of the ecclesiastical and governmental establishments, fell considerably short of the modern-day absolutists on the subject: As the first president of the Washington, D.C., school board, he was also the principal author of that city’s first educational plan, in which the Bible and the Watts Hymnal were the chief, if not the only, books available to students. And the Supreme Court, so far from saying that the Constitution requires the government to maintain a strict neutrality between religion and the state, has held repeatedly that such neutrality is itself unconstitutional: that state “indifference” toward religion amounts to a subtle form of hostility. In 1984 the Court, in Lynch v. Donnelly, concluded:

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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It IS no news that a great many educators believe (or profess to believe) that any mention of religion on public-school or university grounds is contrary to the law of the land. Of course, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly held otherwise. It has found that the government (which includes the public schools) is constitutionally required to accommodate religion in certain instances, and that religious speech is included along with every other kind of speech under First Amendment guarantees. In 1984, moreover, Congress passed the Equal Access Act, designed to clarify and confirm the rights of free speech, freedom of association, and the free exercise of religion held by public-secondary-school students. According to Senator Jeremiah Denton, “Equal-access legislation is necessary because school administrators have felt constrained to prohibit . . . voluntary student meetings for such reason that the speech contains religious content”; while Senator Orrin Hatch stated simply that “religious students are being told they cannot meet on the same basis as other clubs.” During a congressional hearing on the Equal Access Act, a witness from the state of Washington testified that “Recently an assembly featuring professional athletes speaking about what has been an important part of their lives and what has made them successful was denied because it was held to be too religious to be held during school hours by the ACLU,” the nationally recognized authority on the subject of religion and the religious impulse. In The Freedom of Religious Expression in Public Universities and High Schools, revised edition (Good News Publishers/Crossways Books, Westchester, Ill. 60153; $5.95), John W. Whitehead argues that this assault is an abridgment of the constitutional rights of students, faculty, administrators, and others, and describes ways in which people so affronted may employ the Equal Access Act to remedy their plight.

In his first two chapters, “A Historical Perspective” and “Accommodating Neutrality,” Whitehead sketches the evolution of a consensus on church-state relations over the past two centuries. Even Thomas Jefferson, he reminds us, who most certainly believed in the separation of the ecclesiastical and governmental establishments, fell considerably short of the modern-day absolutists on the subject: As the first president of the Washington, D.C., school board, he was also the principal author of that city’s first educational plan, in which the Bible and the Watts Hymnal were the chief, if not the only, books available to students. And the Supreme Court, so far from saying that the Constitution requires the government to maintain a strict neutrality between religion and the state, has held repeatedly that such neutrality is itself unconstitutional: that state “indifference” toward religion amounts to a subtle form of hostility. In 1984 the Court, in Lynch v. Donnelly, concluded: