That is not an Establishment (capital E) of religion as contemplated by the First Amendment.
Would it matter than if in Mercer County (I’m making these numbers up) 97% of people were Christians, 2.8% atheists, and 0.2% other? Can a government not simply recognize and reflect the values of an overwhelming majority of the community when, again, there is no force applied to the minority?
No. Not this government. That’s not how it works. You don’t get to say, “hey, we’re going to turn our public schools into churches” because 97% of the people in town are Christian. Not even if 100% are Christian. The government is not in the business of religious education. And just because non-Christians aren’t being dragged to church doesn’t mean force is not being applied to them - for one thing, their tax dollars are going toward this religious education - again, expressly prohibited in our Constitution.
I’m seriously a little flummoxed that this even needs to be explained - and I’m no Constitutional scholar. This is elementary stuff.
As I understand it, yes is it how it is understood.
“Establishment of religion” entails a good bit more than just government saying: “Thou shalt be Christian.” A government “establishes” a religion as the official religion anytime it puts the mechanics of government behind the process of encouraging the people it governs to be a part of that religious body. Publicly funded schools are one potentially vital organ for doing that very thing.
I always suggest to people who have trouble seeing that something the government is doing is a violation of the establishment clause that they change the religions involved and see how they would feel about the situation in that case. So, for example, if this town in West Virginia wasn’t doing “Bible Study” classes, but instead was teaching a class on “The Book of Mormon”, and because of the make-up of the local populace, 95% of the students in the school signed up for that. If you’re not a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, but are, say, a Baptist instead, you might be a teensy unhappy with this situation, especially when your daughter comes home from school shunned by her schoolmates for the fact she didn’t sign up for the course. After all, that shunning is precisely what makes this an example of establishment of religion: pressure by society, enhanced by government action, to become a member of the one acceptable religion.
When I lived in Bristol, VA, a school in the county on the other side of the line (Sullivan County, TN) instituted something called ‘release time’ in the middle of the school day. You could take a Bible class in the classroom that was taught by a local pastor, or you could go outside and goof off while the class was being taught.
The fiction was that anybody could teach a class at that time, but in advance of the second year, some other group (I think it may have been Wiccan, but I’m not sure) applied to teach their class in that time slot as well. And of course, all the good Christians of Sullivan County said, no, we can’t have witchcraft being taught in our schools! So they pulled the plug on ‘release time’ before the second year.
See, they weren’t discriminating!* The first year, they didn’t discriminate, because anyone could have taught a class during release time. (Not their fault* that only the fundies were ready to teach a class.) And the second year, there was no release time program, so how could that be discrimination!
That is a fair description of how it used to be in England: the CoE was the established church, to which the majority of the population belonged, with no compulsion on non CoE believers to attend CoE churches.
Snarky makes a good point. It’s important, in these debates, to distinguish between “this is how I interpret clause X of the constitution” and “this is the current jurisprudence regarding clause X of the constitution.” For the latter, it’s the Lemon Test, whether we agree with it or not.
The Church of England is still the established church in England (though no longer in Wales).
Yes, I was referring to Ultra Vires’s dial arguments thT the majority of the community were Christian and there was no compulsion, so it was acceptable under the Establishment Clause.
That’s exactly how the established CoE operated at the time the First Amendment passed. The majority of the English population supported the C of E, and there was no compulsion on non-CoE to attend. That’s what the model for establishing a church was. The fact that the situation in his school seems to parallel the C of E example strengthens the argument that it’s a breach of the Establishment clause, which protects religious minorities.