Education Secretary Urged to Abandon ‘efforts to Subvert’ Separation of Church and State in American

Education Secretary William Bennett was urged this week to abandon “efforts to subvert” the separation of church and state in American education, and to cease attempts to inject religious values into public schools that “will convert our schools and communities into religious battlegrounds.”

The American Jewish Congress, in a statement issued here, said that only when strict neutrality, in constitutional terms, is enforced “can religious schools enjoy the necessary independence to fulfill their religious mission. And only with neutrality can public institutions provide an atmosphere … free of subtle coercion and feelings of religious isolation.”

The AJC was responding to remarks by Bennett and Attorney General Edwin Meese in separate speeches in Washington last week to the Supreme Council of the Knights of Columbus, a Roman Catholic society for men.

Both Meese and Bennett assailed recent Supreme Court decisions involving the separation of church and state. Bennett focused specifically on the July 1 Supreme Court decision invalidating public school programs that sent public school teachers into parochial schools — and yeshivas — to provide remedial instructions.

The court ruled, in its decision striking down a program in the New York City school system and another similar program in Grand Rapids, Michigan, that such programs forge “a symbolic union of government and religion” that is forbidden by the Constitution.

The loss of the federally financed program in New York was described as devastating to Jewish schools, and the court’s decision was assailed by Orthodox groups. However, the AJC filed friend of the court briefs in the case urging the court to rule the programs unconstitutional.

BENNETT SLAMS SUPREME COURT’S DECISIONS

Bennett, in his remarks, said the Supreme Court’s decision last July and others in the past years seeking to separate church from state had been “misguided attempts to apply neutrality to religion. ” He said the court failed to “reflect sufficiently on the relationship between our faith and our political order.”

That relationship, he added, is “our values as a free people and the central value of the Judaeo-Christian tradition are flesh of the flesh and blood of the blood.” According to the Education Secretary, in other remarks, religious intolerance had now given way to a “new aversion to religion” manifested “in the guise of Constitutional interpretation.”

Bennett declared: “The same Constitution that had protected the rights of religious parents, and under whose aegis a host of religions had found happy accommodation, now became, in the hands of aggressive plaintiffs and beguiled judges, the instrument for nothing less than a kind of ghettoizing of religion.”

HINTS THAT COURT THREATENS RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

Meese, meanwhile, in remarks to the same group earlier in the day, did not mention specifically the court’s decisions, described as severe setbacks for the Administration and its policies. He did suggest that religious freedom in American society had been threatened by the court.

“In its application, the principle of neutrality toward all religions has been transformed by some into hostility toward anything that is religious,” he said. “In order to protect the religious liberty of the American people, this Administration has argued against the idea of religious nihilism as a principle of government.”

Theodore Mann, president of the AJC, said it regretted the statements by Meese and Bennett, and hailed the court’s affirmation of church-state separation. The AJC, Mann asserted, remains convinced that efforts to inject either the Jewish or Protestant or Catholic religious values into the schools will not only deeply offend the numerous other religious groups … but will convert our schools and communities into religious battlegrounds.”

The AJC said that while it supported the right of religious schools to receive publicly-funded remedial education, it did so only as long as it takes place off the premises of religious schools. Local chapters of the AJC are currently engaged in efforts to aid local school districts to restructure programs invalidated by the court so remedial aid “can be provided religious school students in a Constitutional manner.”