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The Pew Research Center - A Resource About Religion in the Classroom

The Pew Research Center’s work on “Religion and Public Life” is available online. It includes articles, raw data and analysis. Consistent with the purpose of this blog to provide K-12 public school teachers in Kentucky with resources about the history of Christianity in the Commonwealth, this post is about an October 3, 2019 article, “Religion in the Public School”[1]. The article summarizes the history of court rulings about the national debate since the mid-twentieth century about religion in the classroom. It considers school prayer, the 1954 inclusion of the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, religion in the curriculum and the rights that students and teachers have to express their personal religious convictions at school. All of these issues are grounded in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. None of these rulings prohibit teaching about religion or using religious texts in the classroom. All of them have been ruled on based on whether the behavior being challenged in court is rooted in the practice of religion being imposed on the students either overtly or by example. This is when a teacher’s freedom to religious expression is allowed to be limited to prevent “a teacher’s coercive potential”[2]. The article explores the tensions that can occur “between the rights of students to engage in religious expression and the rights of other students to be educated in a non-hostile environment”[3]. A law in Kentucky that required public schools to post the Ten Commandments was ruled a violation of the Establishment Clause in the 1980 Stoner v. Graham case. In 2000 the California suit brought by Michael Newdow against the inclusion of “under God” in the Pledge was unsuccessful, not because of its merits or demerits but because of a technicality related to his parental rights. The courts have permitted the study of the Bible in public school curricula when it includes “critical rather than devotional readings and allow[s] open inquiry into the history and content of biblical passages”[4]. When rulings to disallow the teaching of alternative theories to evolution about the origins of the universe such as Intelligent Design or a literal biblical view of a seven-day creation, the basis for the rulings oppose scientific method with faith. In other words, to teach biblical creation in the public school science classroom does violate the Establishment Clause because it relies on faith as the basis for its acceptance. When read in conjunction with the creation accounts from other cultures, however, the Genesis account could legally be included in the curriculum within a literature or social studies classroom, not the biology lab.

The Pew Forum is an excellent resource for learning about religion in the United States. A non-profit think tank, religion is just one of the national issues about which it gathers and analyzes demographic statistics.

By Lesley Barker, PhD


[1] Pew Research Center. “Religion in the Public School” in Religion and Public Life. October 3, 2019. ONLINE at pew.forum.org. ACCESSED 12/1/2020.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

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