National Reform’s Case for Religious Education
ASSUMING that the United States is a Christian nation, the Christian Statesman (National Reform organ) makes the following argument for a complete system of religious education in the state schools:— A republican people has an unquestioned right to teach republican ideas to her future citizens. A Christian nation has the same right to do so that she has to be Christian at all. If she has Christian laws on her statute-books, such as Sabbath laws and laws against blasphemy, she has the right to teach those laws, and the reasons which underlie them, and to prepare her future citizens for yielding an intelligent and loyal obedience to them. If the state maintains prayer in her legislative assemblies, and appoints an annual Thanksgiving day, and employs the oath as an appeal to God in her courts of justice, she has a self-evident right to teach to all her children the whole body of ideas which are involved in these institutions of government. Those who object to such teaching in her schools must also, if consistent, object to these Christian institutions, and favor the program of the secularists who would sweep them all away. In the presence of this natural and unquestionable right of the state, any objection from any church, and any demand that this work be turned over to her clergy, is a sheer impertinence. This is, of course, a straight argument in favor of a union of church and state. That is the form of government in which the Statesman party believes, and that is the end toward which their reform movement is working. But to one who does not believe in such a union, the Statesman's reasoning is a good argument in favor of the elimination of Sunday laws, Thanksgiving proclamations, and other so-called Christian features from the government, since these constitute a foundation upon which misguided reformers are seeking to erect a theocracy, in which there will be no place for freedom of conscience.