Ron Dorfman 1987—Church and state

                           The Church, the State,
                and the Geek in First Grade

                     By Ron Dorfman

(Note:  This article appeared on the op-ed pages of the St.
Louis
Post-Dispatch and the Schenectady (N.Y.)  Gazette in December
1987.)

In the public schools of Philadelphia in the 1940s and '50s, as
in much
of the country, there was in fact an establishment of religion.
The

state legislature had mandated that ten verses of Scripture be
read
aloud every morning.  Ecclesiastes, Psalms, and the Sermon on
the Mount,

as I recall, were big favorites of the teachers, though when it
was my
turn to read I often chose the Book of Ruth.

At Christmas time, we all learned about the Virgin birth and
sang gloria
in excelsis deo, peace on Earth and good will toward men.  At
Easter

I don't think we got any more serious than bunnies and bonnets.
Good
Friday was however a school holiday, which was sufficient
explanation to

me of why it was such a good Friday.

None of this had anything to do with Christian devotion.  I
liked the
music and learned the words, in Latin.

I knew somehow, from a very early age, that the school was an
institution of Christian America and especially in the early
grades I
felt awkward and out of place, rather like Huck Finn feared of
gittin'

sivilized.  All the same my soul would sometimes be seized with
anguish
that I was not a real American like Dick and Jane and Sally and
Spot.

My immigrant parents sent me, after a full day of public school,
to the
school run by our synagogue, where I learned about Esther and
Haman and

Judas Maccabeus, among other heroes and villains.  The teacher
hit me
when I wondered where those people east of Eden had come from
and who

begat them.  Eventually I went through a crisis of faith and
fell away.
But I liked the music and learned the words, in Hebrew.

The point is that I learned a lot of words and a lot of music
and a lot
of things about Them and Us, and about America.  I think I would
not
have learned such things, or not learned them so powerfully and
quickly,
had the public school not had its generic Christian veneer, and
had my
family not been so insistent on my religious training.  And I
think
the conflicts I experienced sharpened my desire and ability to
learn
the ordinary curriculum as well, especially history and
geography and
literature.

Could it really be that the United States was the only nation in
the
world that had never done anything bad?  That other people
weren't as

decent and peaceable as Americans?  That somehow God had indeed
set His
hand upon this nation in preference to others?  Why would He do
such a

thing? Mr. Hagerty, in the sixth grade, finally confessed.  Our
history
lessons had been sugar-coated.  Some day I would learn something
nearer

the truth, he said.  My ninth-grade history teacher skipped the
first

chapter of the textbook because it talked about cavemen and
prehistoric
times.  John Wesley Rhoads, Ph.D., was a fundamentalist and a
namesake

of the founder of Methodism, and he believed there was no
prehistory,
that history began with the Creation and is recorded in the
Bible.  Once

we got to the part of history that had to do with civilization
he really
knew his stuff.

Senior year, the president of our class went to the lectern
during the
weekly assembly to read the required ten verses of Scripture.
It took

a few minutes before the assistant principal -- honest, his name
was
John D. Christman -- realized that the Scripture being read from
was

not the Bible but the Bhagavad Gita, and hustled Stanley off the
stage.
Perhaps Mr. Christman confused it with the Kama Sutra.  In any
case,

the matter passed; in those days you didn't go running to the
ACLU with
every little thing.

The following year I was at the University of Chicago, a
Baptist-affiliated institution in which, it was said, atheist
professors
teach Thomas Aquinas to Jewish students.  Which was more or less
true.  I was a teenage Trotskyite, but by the time I got out of
Grant

McConnell's year-long course on the problem of freedom and order
I was a
born-again and, as it's turned out, lifelong civil-libertarian.
Now I

do go running to the ACLU with every little thing.

But it may be that we've gone overboard trying to exorcise
things like
nativity scenes and Bible readings from the schools.  Some non-
Christian

kids are going to feel left out or threatened or confused. Good.
As
long as teachers don't actively try to indoctrinate or convert

them,
they'll be better off for the experience of alienation.

On the other hand, those village-hall donneybrooks over creches
and
school prayers probably have a salutary effect on the faith of
otherwise

tepid Christians, who are thus made to contemplate the real
religious
significance of totems otherwise taken for granted.

Some years ago, after the first annual Do-It-Yourself Messiah in
Chicago, where the audience becomes a 3,000-voice chorus for
Handel's
great oratorio, I was at a party talking with a Jewish woman who
had

helped organize the event and who had sung in the soprano
section.
"That was fun," she said, "even though I don't believe any of
that

stuff."  Clearly, she hadn't sung it right.  If you sing it
right, you
do believe, at least for the instant, that the Lord God
Omnipotent

reigneth.  I like the music, and I've learned the words, which
are in
English.

It's a conundrum, this business of the sacred in the realm of
the
secular, but one way to begin to puzzle it out is to reflect on
a

Talmudic passage of Joseph Heller's Catch 22.  Lieutenant
Scheisskopf's
wife, outraged at the atheist Yossarian's grotesque depiction of
God's
bungled handiwork on Earth, protests that while she's just as
much an
atheist as he is, "the God I don't believe in is a good God, a
just God,
a merciful God.  He's not the mean and stupid God you make Him
out to
be."

Yossarian calmly urges religious freedom:  "You don't believe in
the God
you want to, and I won't believe in the God I want to.  Is that

a deal?"
Copyright ) 1987 by Ron Dorfman