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In the landmark 1962 case Engel v. Vitale, the high court threw out a brief nondenominational prayer composed by state officials that was recommended for use in New York State schools. "It is no part of the business of government," ruled the court, "to compose official prayers for any group of the American people to recite." The following year the court outlawed mandatory daily Bible readings in public schools.
But as the court became increasingly concerned about government support for religious expression, opponents began speaking up. It was one thing to outlaw state-written prayers, they said, but what about a moment of silence? Perhaps reading the Bible as part of a morning devotional was inappropriate, but what about recognition of extracurricular religious clubs? Justice Potter Stewart, writing in 1963, foreshadowed the debates of the 1980s and '90s when he warned that the court was hardly being neutral in its school-prayer decisions. A ban on noncoercive religious exercises in school placed religion "at an artificial and state-created disadvantage," he said.
The case that crystallized church-state separation doctrine, Lemon v. Kurtzman, came in 1971, when the court struck down Pennsylvania and Rhode Island laws that set subsidies for the salaries of parochial school teachers. Referring to earlier cases, the Justices proposed a threefold test to determine the permissibility of government activities that touched the religious realm. First, state action must have a secular purpose. Second, the primary effect of the action must neither advance nor inhibit religion. And finally, there should be no "excessive entanglement" between church and state.
In the 20 years since that ruling, the Lemon test has come under accommodationist fire. With the birth of the Moral Majority in 1979 and the political rise of the religious right, clashes over religious issues that had once been quiet and philosophical became loud and politically explosive. Then, as the composition of the Supreme Court became more conservative in the Reagan and Bush years, expectations began to rise that the accommodationists might get a more sympathetic hearing. Yet many major issues remain in dispute, such as whether voluntary prayer should be allowed in schools, whether government bodies can mount religious displays and whether public funding should be used for church-sponsored social programs.
The most pure and abstract battles remain to be fought over the use of religious symbols in the public arena -- an issue rife with irony in a country ! that stamps its coins with the words "In God We Trust." Later this year the Supreme Court will decide whether to hear an appeal from the city of Zion, Ill., which was ordered by a lower court to scrap the city seal, consisting of a ribbon with the words "God Reigns" and a shield containing a dove, sword, crown and Latin cross. The device was adopted in 1902. The city argues that the seal is mainly a historical artifact, recalling the founding of the city by the Christian Catholic Church.
THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS