ABSTRACT
What, one could ask, especially if one believes that the various Supreme Court decisions have separated religion and education, does religion have to do with public education? Our answer, as we have already begun to explore in the introduction, and will continue to do so throughout the book, is this: quite a lot and for a very, very long time. We often hear this question and are surprised by it, not simply because those Supreme Court decisions are taken at face value and considered a full resolution to the issue but mostly because the very premise of the need for those court decisions, and the need for having multiple, consecutive court decisions on the issue of religion and schooling, already indicates several things. First, that religion was indeed embedded in public education. Otherwise, why would there be a need for court decisions to extricate (extirpate?) one from the other? Second, the very fact that multiple court decisions were necessary to address the persistent presence of religion in education might indicate that court decisions-and particularly Supreme Court decisions-as powerful and important as they are, don’t necessarily resolve an issue once and for all. While the remainder of the book explores the idea that religion-primarily Christianity-still pervades education today, our focus in this chapter is on the long history that entwined Christianity and education such that the need for these Supreme Court decisions arose in the first (and second and third, etc.) place.
