ABSTRACT
In the run-up to Christmas 2015, the fresh breeze of secularism blew through a Kentucky school where, following complaints from some parents, a production of A Charlie Brown Christmas reportedly removed biblical references in order to comply with US federal laws designed to protect educational institutions from religious interference. As a state school superintendent confirmed “[t]he U.S. Supreme Court and the 6th Circuit are very clear that public school staff may not endorse any religion when acting in their official capacities and during school activities” (Reuters 2015). In the land of the free, Christmas plays cannot be explicitly religious, or at least must not contain biblical references so long as the state enforces this partition. Despite some secularist rhetoric, the porous nature of this partition has long been in evidence in the work of figures like Alexis de Tocqueville in the nineteenth century and Robert Bellah in the twentieth. Both offer accounts of how American civil religion is embodied in apparently secular symbols such as the presidency, the flag and the Pledge of Allegiance (see Bellah 1967). But why does the placement of the Peanuts symbols and brand not provoke similar reactions about indoctrination into forms of secularism or consumerism? Is it simply that Charlie Brown and his pals present no religious ordering of the world? One might imagine that the ensuing ‘outrage’ from parents and some media outlets (Fox News Insider 2015) can be justified as a post-secular response: religion is making a comeback, and public institutions had better adjust to this revisionist religiosity. I certainly hope that the post-secular is not reduced to a kind of reactionary agitation, partly because reported outrage is rarely a secure ground for meaningful dialogue, but also because the post-secular is more complex than any revivalism. Nevertheless, as I will go on to argue, the post-secular can be identified as a context in which the question of the relations between religion and education can, indeed must, be asked, and so these debates about the place of the Bible and festivals in publically funded institutions suggest that we cannot maintain the simplistic secular separationism that is present in the idealized secular republic.
