Introduction

It is often posited, following the various 20th-century court decisions separating Church and State-and, more specifically, religion and educationthat the relationship between religion and education in the United States has long been settled and that religion is in fact absent from the halls of public education and its discourses. The more facile and histrionic strand of assertion here runs along the lines of former governor (erstwhile political pundit and perpetual presidential candidate) Mike Huckabee’s assertion, in the wake of the school shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, that one of the reasons for the massacre was God’s absence in public schools. That’s a lot to unpack in terms of justification and the contradictions of belief in an allpowerful but apparently easily hamstrung God-as in, if your God is transcendent, why is civil law so effective in adjudicating Him out of spaces-but for our purposes this sentiment and its attendant assumptions stand nicely as a metonym for one side of an often passionate, and we might say largely under-considered, debate. The contrasting viewpoint, in this regard, generally focuses on persistent cases of prayer in schools or on athletic fields skirting the grayer areas of decisions like Lee v. Weisman or Doe v. Santa Fe.1 And while we find it interesting (and perhaps troubling) that establishment and exercise issues persist in the hallways of American education-vouchers applied to religious schools that teach Young Earth creationism in Louisiana, say, provide fodder for further analysis elsewhere-we aim to move to the side of such debates.