Bible Reading and Nonsectarian Schooling: The Failure of Religious Instruction in Nineteenth-Century Public Education

R. Laurence Moore

In the late 1880s Catholic taxpayers in the city of Edgerton, Wisconsin, sued the local school district, asking that teachers in the public schools discontinue the practice of reading selections from the Bible each day. In pressing their case before the Wisconsin supreme court, they argued successfully that Bible reading violated Article 10, Section 3, of the state constitution, which prohibited "sectarian instruction" in the district schools of the state. Proponents of Bible reading in Edgerton sought to counter this argument by raising the issue of legislative intention. Alleging that the practice had continued to prevail "generally" after the adoption of the state constitution, they reasoned that the constitution's framers surely had not meant to prohibit it. Justice William P. Lyon, however, in an observation that merits special attention, rejoined: "we must be permitted to doubt whether the practice [of Bible reading] was ever a general one in the district schools of the state. We are quite confident that it is not so at the present time."1	1
Easily the most neglected issue in the endless discussions about religion in American public schools is the historical question: What constituted general practice in the multitude of school districts across the nation? In contemporary debate, opposing sides seem to agree that the twin Supreme Court cases of Engel v. Vitale, which in 1962 outlawed public school prayer, and Abington School District v. Schempp, which proscribed Bible reading in those schools the following year, overturned practices of classroom religion that had been inscribed in public school systems since the early nineteenth century. Predictably, those who seek restoration of prayer and Bible reading refer nostalgically to allegedly hoary practices "with deep roots in the nation's founding principles," but supporters of the Engel and Abington decisions share the assumption that religious exercises once intruded into every classroom.2 Thus they applaud the actions of the Supreme Court as watershed victories for minority rights over majority practice.	2
Historians have generally been more careful in their assumptions. In a 1912 study of state laws and state supreme court cases during the nineteenth century, Samuel Brown outlined a steady erosion of both "religious tests" and the use of "sectarian" textbooks in the public schools. In 1958 William Kailer Dunn described the substantial secularization that distinguished the public school systems that took shape in the 1840s and 1850s from earlier schools that had been committed to traditional Protestant indoctrination. By the Civil War, Dunn argued, public schools had largely abandoned the doctrinal religious instruction of the sort found in churches and Sunday Schools.3	3
Nonetheless, assumptions about the pervasiveness of Bible reading in public schools have gone largely unexamined. Two important works published in 1970, one by David B. Tyack and the other by Robert Michaelsen, recorded the persistent claims of leading nineteenth-century educators that Bible reading was a key element in teaching morality and general religious principles to schoolchildren.4 They promoted a consensus view among historians that Bible reading remained at the heart of a "generalized Protestantism" that "was part of the common wisdom of the common school." According to F. Michael Perko, "from the early seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries, American schooling was a religious enterprise." More recently, Warren A. Nord, in a thoughtful inquiry into religion and American education, reasserted the substantial secularization characterizing most common schools beginning in the 1830s. What Nord did not examine was how Bible reading itself, which he still assumed to be a general practice, became part of the process of secularization rather than a corrective.5	. . .