U.S. Supreme Court Rules Against Using Public Schools for Religious Instruction

The Supreme Court today decided, eight to one, that use of public school time and public school property for religious instruction ##y an inter-faith religious council is unconstitutional, notwithstanding the fact that acceptance of the instruction is voluntary.

The ruling, with Justice Stanley F. Reed dissenting, was made in the case of Mrs. Vashti McCollum, wife of a college professor in Champaign, Illinois, who said ##he was an atheist, and who contended that the system of religious teaching in effect in Champaign schools, though voluntary, caused embarrassment to her 12-year-old son because he alone in his school room did not take the instruction.

Religious instruction in this case is furnished by a Protestant-Catholic-Jewish council which provides the teachers and pays their salaries. The court ruled that this system violates the principle of separation of church and state. The representative of the Jewish faith dropped out of the council and classes in the Jewish religion were stopped in the last few years because of the very small number of Jewish pupils in Champaign.

Justice Hugo L. Black wrote the majority opinion, based on a case decided by the Court last year, which upheld the grant of tax funds to buses for parochial schools. In this decision it was declared that the state not only cannot aid any religion but cannot aid all religions.

Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote a separate, but concurring opinion, somewhat more vigorous in its assertion of the principle of separation of church and state, and was joined by the three justices who, with him, dissented in the bus case. They argued that in the McCollum case a minority was subjected to indirect compulsion through the pressure of conformity.

“Separation means separation, not something else,” said Justice Frankfurter. Declaring it is the “Court’s duty to enforce” the American principle of separation “in its full integrity,” the opinion stated that “the public school is at once the symbol of our democracy and the most pervasive means for promoting our common destiny. In no activity of the state is it more vital to keep out divisive forces than in its schools, to avoid confusing, not to say fusing, what the constitution sought to keep ?strictly apart.”

Justice Reed argued that the issue did not involve establishment of a religion, but was merely another evidence of the presence of religion in many American institutions, such as chaplains in the Army. So long as no discrimination is practised, he said, the instruction is not unconsitutional.