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Religion and the Schools
| Article
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12955 |
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Section : |
EDITORIAL
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| Issue
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5 / 1987 |
1,092 Words |
| Author
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Morton A. Kaplan
Editor and Publisher |
Federal Judge Brevard Hand's decision that declared secular humanism to be a religion - thus undermining the legitimacy of textbooks in Louisiana schools that expressed that viewpoint - warmed the cockles of the hearts of Southerners who felt that their way of life was being undermined by Supreme Court decisions. Yet it outraged most legal scholars who recognized, as did the judge, that it challenged long-established Supreme Court precedents and declared to be a religion what they think clearly is not.
Unlike Judge Brevard, I do not believe that whether secular humanism is regarded as a religion is central to the issue in dispute. However, I should like to note in passing that it is not necessarily absurd to regard it as a religion, although I do not reach this conclusion myself.
It is not altogether clear what makes a body of belief a religion. If the assertion of a deity is required, then Buddhism, which clearly is a religion, would not be regarded as such. Is a sense of the holy required? Buddhists pray and most secular humanists do not. But then not all believers in a God pray. Deists such as Thomas Jefferson did not pray, except perhaps as a cultural exercise. If religion consists of a body of beliefs concerning the nature of the world and of proper moral behavior, then secular humanism would be a religion. Some regard Marxism as a religion.
To examine this issue from a constitutional perspective, I think we first have to inquire why the First Amendment to the Constitution established freedom of religion and prohibited the federal government from establishing religion. Many Americans had fled to the New World to escape the
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