This article first appeared in the summer 2005 issue of Faith & Freedom, published by the Institute on Religion and Democracy (www.ird-renew.org).
Over the last half century, most predictions about the future of America’s mainline Protestant religions have been decidedly gloomy. While overall church membership in the United States grew 33 percent between 1960 and 2000 -- due largely to the popularity of evangelical and Pentecostal movements -- the combined membership of the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church, the United Church of Christ and smaller mainline denominations dropped 21 percent. The proportion of Americans now affiliated with these once-dominant churches hovers near the bottom of a 100 year low.
As someone who writes often about both religion and education, I am continually struck by the fact that none of the worried discussions among Protestant leaders about the trend lines for their respective denominations ever considers the promising implications of school choice. While the only justification for any education policy in a pluralistic democracy is the academic well-being of all children, regardless of faith, this controversial reform would nevertheless bestow a remarkable collateral benefit on organized religion.
If public dollars were allowed to follow a student to whatever institution the parent selects, public or private, the economic barrier to parochial schooling would be eliminated. Houses of worship with attached schools or free standing schools with a religious mission could open their doors to pupils from all economic classes without having to worry about providing scholarships or otherwise subsidizing families of modest means.
The immediate upshot is that it would get a lot easier to operate a religious school. By giving every family a reasonable per pupil subsidy for each of its school-age children, either in the form of a voucher or tax credit, school choice would put all parochial schools on a firmer financial footing, at least as far as operating expenses are concerned.
The Catholic Church, with 50 percent of independent schools, would be the most obvious beneficiary of choice, but not the only one. 34 percent of private students now attend non-Catholic, religiously oriented schools, the vast majority of them Protestant, both mainline and evangelical. Many of these are operated by individual churches, much as Catholic parochial schools are associated with regional parishes; others are free standing institutions which depend financially on a variety of Protestant groups, including Adventist, Baptist, Lutheran, Episcopalian, and Quaker organizations.
Of course, the religious consequences of parents being free to pick their children’s schools go far beyond the realm of school finance. With Gallop and other surveys showing that up to half of all American parents would gladly switch their children out of public schools if the government supplied a supporting subsidy, any legislation permitting taxpayer funding of private education would inevitably precipitate a dramatic increase in the demand for Protestant schools.
In the words of former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani, “… you would see a significant number of non-Catholic parochial and private schools develop. You would see many of the Protestant denominations develop parochial schools that would attach to their churches, and you would see private groups putting together schools because the funding would be there for it.”
This rapid growth in the demand for religious schools would have two related and significant consequences for mainline Protestants.
First, it would give many more Protestant children the opportunity for an education which teaches them how to frame secular knowledge within a deeper spiritual context. I do not mean by this merely that more students would be required to memorize Scripture and the salient dates and events of their respective denominations. That is the skeptic’s understanding of a parochial education -- something akin to, but no more than, rote learning.
A religious education at its best works through the spiritual implications of information acquired from a wide variety of subjects -- science, literature, history, and the arts -- and develops the lifelong intellectual habit of maintaining an internally consistent outlook on life. The noble aim of a parochial education is to give young minds the ability to make their faith a vital part of everyday living, not an isolated perspective confined to once-weekly worship services and special religious occasions.
For mainline denominations, the need to make such an education more readily available to their own children cannot be overestimated. A recent study by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago attributes the decline of mainline Protestantism to the failure of churches to intellectually stimulate, and thereby assimilate, their own young.
With each succeeding generation, secular culture has increasingly eroded the basic tenants of Protestant faith and replaced them with a minimalist theology which discounts the importance of the sacraments, the historical accuracy of Biblical witness, the existence of Hell, and even the value of missionary work. Sociologists Benton Johnson, Dean Hoge, and Donald Luidens have famously described this stripped-down theology as “lay liberalism.”
Johnson and his colleagues note the paradox that, while lay liberalism has produced an admirable tolerance in America for religious differences, it has also created an ever stronger skepticism among successive generations of Protestant children that there is anything especially good or important about being a Christian. Having been persuaded by the mass media that “all the religions and philosophies are equally good ways of helping a person find ultimate truth,” large numbers of young churchgoers have never developed the combination of faith and insight, which makes them want to remain active as they grow to adulthood.
Only by providing an education that rises to the challenge of secular culture, creating a rich spiritual dialogue for students that goes beyond a mere 30-to-60 minutes of weekly Sunday school, can Protestant denominations ever give large numbers of youngsters the intellectual strength and stamina to be practicing Christians in the modern world.
And if school choice has the potential to help children develop a resilient faith, it can also provide their parents with the opportunity to frame more of their own lives outside of church in a spiritual context. After all, any educational policy which makes it possible for millions of children to benefit from a parochial education also make its possible for their parents to help with homework that now includes religious subjects, to attend student events which begin with a prayer, and to participate in teacher conferences that incorporate explicit requests for God’s blessing.
This spiritual framing of adult life is needed to remedy the secularizing consequences of a misguided strategic decision by mainline ministers dating back to the early 1960s. Alarmed by lower church attendance and the parallel rise of Christian fundamentalism, they decided to make their respective denominations more “relevant” by supporting a variety of political causes, especially racial integration, welfare programs for the urban poor, and anti-war protests.
As an alternative to the strict orthodoxy and quick-fix messages of the fundamentalist churches, this effort to revive their respective denominations by tackling difficult moral issues was to some degree an extension of mainline Protestantism’s reformist tradition. But unlike earlier eras, when ministers promoted temperance, suffrage, and family stability in the face of industrialization, the newer focus on a liberal social agenda was disconnected from the everyday lives of most parishioners. Instead of making the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost more relevant to the pressing needs and challenges of congregants, church leaders offered up a new and, as it turned out, much less inspiring trinity: what church historian Randall Balmer has aptly described as “peace, justice and inclusiveness.”
Looking forward, Protestant leaders would do well to note that the only modern initiatives which have slowed the decline of mainline congregations -- opening churches to meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and other recovery groups, sponsoring programs to give spiritual meaning to the workplace, and the establishment of pre-school and tutoring programs -- depart noticeably from the political agenda of recent decades, focusing instead on personal and family issues.
Of course, to say that school choice would offer mainline denominations the opportunity to strengthen the faith of their respective followers is not a guarantee that such an opportunity, should it be legislated, would be seized. One editor looking at an early draft of this manuscript noted that many congregations are committed to the same values of inclusiveness and cultural assimilation that public education claims to represent; and, even if some churches could be persuaded to start their own schools, he doubted that the curricula would be any more inspiring than the watered-down instruction that passes for theological insight in many current Catholic and Protestant schools.
Living in the state that probably best epitomizes congregational sympathy for secular educational ideals (Connecticut), I fully appreciate such skepticism. I nevertheless suspect that school choice will inspire some denominations to revive themselves in the ways just suggested; and I believe this for three reasons:
First, many of the goals subsumed under the egalitarian priorities of public education -- especially racial integration and equal opportunity for disabled students -- turn out increasingly to require a spiritual context. According to a study presented to the American Political Science Association by the Manhattan Institute’s Jay Greene and Nicole Mellow, parochial schools are much more successful at integrating black, Hispanic, and other minority students than their public counterparts -- and for a very simple reason. When families chose schools based on a philosophy or mission, their children are more likely to be attracted to each other by interests and beliefs transcending racial differences.
What is true of racial integration also seems to be true for mainstreaming children with physical and moderate emotional handicaps. In Milwaukee, Cleveland, the Englewood Independent School District of San Antonio, Texas, and other communities where children are currently subsidized to attend independent schools, those with special needs are far more likely to take advantage of the opportunity and to select a parochial setting. Of the over 300 independent schools that participate in Florida’s popular McKay Scholarship Bill, which gives education scholarships to parents of moderately disabled children, the vast majority are Catholic or Protestant.
Second, financing a school system that can support a solid academic track within the politically correct façade of inclusiveness and assimilation -- a system that requires elaborate counseling services, a large number of activities and non-academic electives, and a high school curriculum broad enough to rival a small college -- is very costly and in the end probably impossible to sustain, with or without school choice.
In her 2003 book The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke, co-authored with Amelia Warren Tyagi, Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren documents the exploding number of bankruptcies in America, with over 1.5 million filings a year and home mortgage foreclosures, credit card defaults, and car foreclosures all at record levels. Contrary to common belief, these statistics are not the result of too many undisciplined trips to the mall, but the fact that buying a home in the relatively few suburbs with academically acceptable public schools is rapidly becoming an unsupportable financial burden, even for affluent Americans.
Even in my home state of Connecticut, with the strongest teacher union and some of the wealthiest suburbs in America, taxpayers are balking at the price tag of realizing the secular dream of public education. In a special report on Connecticut’s 169 towns and cities, the state’s Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations found that the number of communities able to pass local budgets (which are mostly school budgets) by the beginning of the 2002-2003 fiscal year was “the fewest number since ACIR started tracking these figures.” Just under half of the budgets going to referendum were approved on the first vote.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, school choice is more than just a new method for organizing the education of children -- it represents a fundamentally different idea about the source of human welfare. In saying that the average parent can make better decisions about the needs of his or her child than any school guidance counselor or bureaucratic system, choice affirms the existence of an authority well above and beyond the ideology of professional educators. And in a universe where powerful ideas tend to demand a metaphysical consistency with their neighbors, it seems hard to believe that any religious institution could build a school based on the principle of parental empowerment without at some point asking itself -- and eventually teaching -- what that empowerment really means.
The mainline denominations may not have as much experience in building primary and secondary schools as their Catholic or evangelical brethren, but their historical record for expressing academically the spiritual message of cultural invention remains unequaled. From the founding of American democracy until its solidification at the end of the Civil War, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Methodists, Congregationalists, and Lutherans not only established nearly every domestic college and university, but they did so in a way that established a clear Christian intellectual context for the rising tide of self government. After taking three years of foreign languages, English literature, history, math, and science, the typical undergraduate was expected to spend his entire senior year in a single seminar, usually taught by the president of the school, whose purpose was to help students organize their newly acquired knowledge within a deeper religious framework.
With the coming of school choice, mainline Protestants will be offered a stunning opportunity to reverse the mistakes of the last half-century and begin to rebuild their respective denominations on the firm foundation of every parent’s greatest concern: the welfare of his or her child. Every mainline group may no longer posses the reserves of will, intellect and faith to take full advantage of it; but the spirit of the time will raise long overdue questions and demand needed changes. And many will serve God and their communities in the service of their own children.
Dr. Lewis M. Andrews is Executive Director of the Yankee Institute for Public Policy Inc. at Trinity College, a Connecticut research and educational institute.