Tiny Delaware’s big battle against the Supreme Court Bible-reading decision is near its climax. On March 30 the star defense witness is scheduled to appear: Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike.
Previously renowned for crawling out on theological limbs, Pike now is gaining recognition for his support of a constitutional amendment allowing religious ceremonies in public schools. He’s a lawyer as well as a clergyman and has testified before congressional committees.
Delaware Attorney General David P. Buckson vows to enforce the state law requiring five verses of the Bible to be read to pupils each morning. The issue has just that moral tang which should reap political benefits, especially since public sentiment seems to agree with him.
Cynics go further, whispering that Buckson wants to be governor and is using the Bible issue as a halo whose glow may obscure a political problem of Rockefelleresque dimensions: He has been divorced and remarried since he was interim governor for nineteen days in 1961.
Actually, Methodist Buckson has so far avoided moral issues helming the legal defense. When the State Board of Education asked him for a ruling last summer after the federal decision, Buckson said simply that Bible reading “is still the law of Delaware and will remain so” until changed by the General Assembly or the courts.
Since the assembly has enough trouble appropriating money for roads and schools, those who disagreed with Buckson chose the court route. The American Civil Liberties Union began scouting for plaintiffs. In other states, prominent citizens and even ministers have joined the cause. But the Delaware ACLU could come up with only a rather unlikely pair of families with characteristics Buckson hopes may let him win without ever getting into constitutional questions.
One of the two plaintiff couples is Mr. and Mrs. Garry De Young. They have seven children, five of school age, and claim to be agnostics, although De Young put “Protestant” on a teacher application a few years ago. Holder of many jobs, De Young now sells encyclopedias and writes poetry. He says his latest volume—Sex, Church and the Jungle—epitomizes his religious views. He’s quite outspoken, particularly against fundamentalists who he says “subjugate” rather than “communicate” and “base their preaching on the fear of going to hell. If there is a hell it’s right here on earth.”
De Young, in 1956, was the first white student to graduate from still predominantly Negro Delaware State College in Dover. His wife graduated there in 1958. She is a teacher in Middletown, Delaware, where they have an apartment; but they also have a residence in Henderson, Maryland, and De Young’s car has Maryland license plates.
Mrs. De Young faces fines and suspension as state penalties if she refuses to conduct Bible readings in her classes. The couple sends the children to a Presbyterian Sunday school as part of their “cultural development.” Mrs. De Young testified the children aren’t brought up to believe in a personal God, but “I try to teach them to do the good things necessary to live in our society and the bad things not to do.”
The other plaintiffs are Mr. and Mrs. Harry Johns, with three children, all of school age. They are as mum as De Young is voluble, refusing to grant interviews to reporters. They have testified they are Protestants and “adhere to Protestant religious principles” while attending a variety of services, including Catholic and Jewish ones.
Johns, an engineer for International Latex Corporation, said compulsion makes prayer “degrading,” a matter of hollow habit like the national anthem before football games. Besides this, he says, it violates Christ’s teaching on prayer in Matthew 6:5–7. Mrs. Johns said they read the Bible at home.
Attorney for the two families is Irving Morris, Delaware ACLU president and a board member of Temple Beth Shalom in Wilmington. His line of attack is readymade from the previous Supreme Court decision.
So the ingenuity is up to Buckson, who so far has built his case on two legal technicalities:
1. The right to sue—Legal residence is sometimes determined by where taxes are paid. The state tax department has no returns from the Johnses for 1960, 1961, or 1962. The only De Young return on file is for 1963. It was signed only by Mrs. De Young and mailed from their Maryland residence.
2. Lack of injury—Since both families are exposed to the Bible anyway, Buckson maintains exposure to it in school doesn’t disturb the status quo. It’s a matter of individual rights, he says, and in the case of these persons, no rights have been violated.
The case is being heard by a three-member panel named by the U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The head of the panel also headed the circuit court trial that declared Pennsylvania’s Bible law unconstitutional as that case wended its way to the Supreme Court. Buckson has March 30 and one other day to complete the defense.
Back To Washington
A Florida Supreme Court ruling that for the second time upheld a state law requiring Bible reading in public schools apparently will be appealed again to the U. S. Supreme Court. The Florida court on January 29 unanimously confirmed a June 1962 decision that supported the state’s Bible-reading law and other religious practices.
The 1962 ruling was appealed to the U. S. Supreme Court, but the justices ordered a rehearing “in the light of the decision” that struck down Bible-reading and Lord’s Prayer—recitation statutes in Pennsylvania and Maryland.
In its second ruling, the Florida court said that it considered the Florida law requiring Bible reading unlike those of other states and believed it to be legal.
An Idaho law requiring Bible reading in public schools also is the subject of litigation. Six Protestant clergymen and twenty-one laymen filed a suit in the U. S. District Court asking the court to “halt the practice of religious indoctrination in the public schools.”
Still another federal court suit is pending in Pennsylvania, where the American Civil Liberties Union seeks to bar Bible reading in the public schools of the Cornwall-Lebanon Joint District. Last month, members of the Cornwall-Lebanon school board voted to drop a permissive Bible-reading program and adopted instead a resolution requiring each homeroom teacher to devote fifteen minutes each day “to read, or have read, selections from the Holy Bible, and from such other sources as, in the discretion of the administration, best illustrate its literary and historical qualities.”
Under the permissive Bible-reading plan only about 5 to 7 per cent of the teachers in the seven-school system were said to have read the Bible to their classes each day.
An ACLU official said the organization would continue to press its court case against the school board despite the switch.
In Maine, meanwhile, a study group named by the state board of education recommended that public schools cease using the Scriptures for required readings in history and literature. The eight-member group contended that non-sectarian discussion of the Bible is impossible.
A Partisan Proposal?
Will the ban against prayer and Bible reading in public schools become a national political issue?
The question took on a measure of possibility last month when a proposed amendment to the U. S. Constitution that would permit public school devotions was endorsed by the House Republican Policy Committee.
Efforts have been under way for a number of months to force the proposal out of the House Judiciary Committee, which is headed by Democratic Representative Emanuel Celler of New York, a known opponent of the amendment. Some felt the endorsement of the House Republican Policy Committee would enhance chances for rounding up the 218 signatures needed for a discharge petition. In mid-February the petition was still some seventy-five names short of the required total.
Agreement In Neutrality
A House subcommittee studying “shared time” witnessed a rare phenomenon last month: Representatives of the National Catholic Welfare Conference and of Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State expressed similar positions. Both were non-committal.
The subcommittee held three days of hearings on a bill to amend the National Defense Education Act to provide $15,000,000 in federal funds over a three-year period for experimentation in shared time.
An NCWC spokesman said the U. S. Roman Catholic hierarchy has not yet taken an official position. The POAU representative said his organization’s attitude was one of “watchful waiting.”
Republican Representative Peter Frelinghuysen of New Jersey said federal endorsement of shared time might overload available educational facilities. He also declared, however, that he thought NDEA funds could be used for shared time without special legislation.
Shared time, now termed by some of its proponents as “dual school enrollment,” is a program whereby children take some courses in a public school and others in a parochial school.
Race, Religion, And Reflection
Federal aid to parochial schools is not only more theologically sound than the present separation of secular and religious instruction, it’s cheaper.…
Automation, if handled wisely, will result in a two-hour work day and a higher standard of living for everyone, if we don’t fight it.…
Salvation is not an individual matter; it has more to do with a new society than with a redeemed soul.…
These were among numerous views expressed by speakers at the annual meeting of the National Council of Churches’ Division of Christian Education in Cincinnati last month. An estimated 2,000 persons from “nearly 50 Protestant, Anglican and Eastern Orthodox communions” attended.
Race, religion, and reflection were the big three R’s of the convention. Hair shirts were definitely In with most of the speakers, who were constantly urging agonizing reappraisals of all phases of Christian activity. Ironically, the conference was staged against the backdrop of a CORE-NAACP boycott of Cincinnati schools and an address at the University of Cincinnati by Alabama Governor George C. Wallace.
William Stringfellow, New York lawyer and Episcopal layman, charged that Protestants have too long been “irrational with respect to federal aid to church-related schools. He said he believes it legally possible to “design an aid scheme” that would be upheld constitutionally. He declared that the closing of Roman Catholic elementary schools unable to operate without federal aid would “require an enormous expansion of public schools at staggering public expense.”
The Rev. J. Blaine Fister, executive director of the NCC Church and Public School Relations Department, asked that “Dual School Enrollment” replace “Shared Time” in the Christian educator’s lexicon.
Dr. Gerald E. Knoff, executive secretary of the NCC Division of Christian Education, predicted in a news conference that:
—cells will replace conventional church congregations:
—emphasis will shift from Sunday schools to home and family and programmed learning.
Albert Whitehouse, regional director of the United Steelworkers of America, gave delegates something to look forward to in this world with his prediction of a two-hour work day. The union leader, an active Disciples of Christ layman, also implied in his speech that Christ’s tossing the moneychangers out of the temple was his way of expressing contempt of the business community.
A new “inter-faith Citizen’s Bible” was suggested as an innovation for getting Scriptures read—legally—in the public schools. To be published this year by Harper & Row, this modern version of the Bible—it is said to contain the “core” of the Old Testament, the Apocrypha, and the New Testament—could be used in studies about religion, according to Dr. Eli F. Wismer, general director of the Commission on General Christian Education.
From the evangelical viewpoint, perhaps the most disturbing address was that of the Rev. Jitsuo Morikawa, secretary of evangelism of the American Baptist Convention. He described the mission of the Church as follows:
—to be a visible sign—sign and evidence of what God has done for the whole world and an earnest and foretaste of what he will consummate for the whole world at the end of time; and to go to the ends of the earth, across all geographic and social frontiers heralding the good news to all nations, and to all the powerful structures of society.
“There cannot be individual salvation,” he said. “Salvation always implies relations with others and God. It would be more correct to say that salvation has to do with a new society rather than a redeemed individual soul.”
The division’s executive committee had two meetings relating to a change of administrative structure and to a discussion of the Revised Standard Version. The press was not invited to either of these meetings.
Evangelical representation at the conference was negligible. One official of a large evangelical publishing house said he attended in previous years but chose not to go in 1964 because in his opinion the value of the conventions for theological conservatives has steadily diminished.
JAMES L. ADAMS
