May 2, 2015
For the evangelical businessmen who belonged to
the Gideons International, Inc., selling God was a second calling, if
not their first. Founded by a trio of traveling salesmen at the end of
the nineteenth century, the Gideons made a name for themselves in the
early twentieth by putting millions of copies of the Holy Bible in hotel
and hospital rooms across the nation. During the Second World War, the
organization distributed, with the military’s blessing, a specially
prepared edition of the King James Version of the New Testament and Book
of Psalms to every member of the armed forces. After the conflict, the
group created a new paperback version of this “Gideon Bible” (now with
the Book of Proverbs as well) for distribution at public and private
schools for all students between the fifth and twelfth grades. In the
words of W. L. Hardin, an Atlanta contractor and past president of the
Gideons, their new ministry would help them meet their long-standing
goal “to win men and women for the Lord Jesus Christ” by reaching them
earlier in life. “In the days of their youth, before the evil days
come,” Hardin said in 1946, “the boys and girls of our public schools
may by means of the precious Word of God, come to know Him.”
In
practical terms, the Gideons’ program reflected their roots as
salesmen. Their founders originally considered calling the new
organization the Christian Traveling Men of the United States of America
but abandoned the idea because, as one later noted, “traveling men
don’t have time to use such long names.” So they settled for the simpler
calling card, a name inspired by an Old Testament judge who led a small
band of faithful Israelites to victory over a vastly larger force. But
their identity as on-the-road representatives of business never changed.
Indeed, in its first four decades, only traveling salesmen could join
the Gideons. Even after expanding their ranks to admit a broader range
of businessmen in 1937, this spirit of door-to-door salesmanship still
prevailed. The postwar program to distribute their abridged Bibles to
schoolchildren is perhaps the prime example. In what quickly became a
standard script, a Gideon first contacted a local school board or
principal to win permission. He then spoke to the entire school at a
special assembly, offering an address that an observer characterized as
“evangelical in tone and content, on the advantages of Bible reading.”
After the sales pitch, the Gideons announced that every student–or, in
some cases, every student who provided written permission from a
parent–was welcome to a free paperback version of the New Testament.
Moving from school to school, the Gideons distributed 4.2 million of
their Bibles in the first three years, with ambitious plans to
distribute 25 million in all.
For
the Gideons, their drive to distribute Bibles at public schools seemed a
natural extension of the larger effort to encourage public religion in
the postwar era. While other religious innovations had been relatively
uncontroversial at the time of their creation, the Gideons’ ministry to
schoolchildren sparked a contentious debate. Religion in the public
schools had long been considered a local concern. Communities dominated
by one faith traditionally instituted sectarian prayers or Bible reading
in classrooms with little complaint. More diverse locales often tried
to avoid the issue of religion entirely, but the Gideons brought long
simmering tensions to the forefront. Jewish leaders protested any effort
to place the New Testament in public schools, while Catholic officials
objected because canon law forbade members of their faith from using the
King James Version.”Most children will accept anything free,” noted a
priest in upstate New York, and thus they would inadvertently sin in
taking the gift. In Boston, it became such a widespread problem that the
archdiocese instructed priests to order all Catholic children who had
accepted Gideon Bibles to return them immediately. Even some liberal
Protestants disapproved of the Gideons’ campaign. The editors of the Christian Century
insisted that public schools were simply “not the place” to evangelize,
arguing that Christians had “a duty to respect separation of church and
state in relation to the schools.”
The
objections were strongest in religiously diverse cities and suburbs,
especially in the Northeast. In the fall of 1951, the school board in
suburban Rutherford, New Jersey, inadvertently caused a controversy when
it accepted an offer from the Gideons of Passaic and Bergen Counties to
distribute their version of the Bible to all students in grades five
through twelve in the district. The board printed up permission slips
for children to take home, but when scores of parents protested, it
found itself on the defensive. At its next meeting, the superintendent
of schools, Guy Hilleboe, insisted that “the Gideon Society was not
presenting their own version of the Bible but were merely offering a New
Testament with Psalms and Proverbs of the King James Version” for
families who wanted it. He pointed out that the Gideons had not, in this
instance, been allowed to make a special address at school assemblies,
and principals had been instructed to send the permission slips home
“without comment.” Furthermore, Hilleboe added, the state’s lawyers
assured him that the practice was wholly constitutional.
Despite
these assurances, religious leaders and parents continued to object. A
local priest asserted that, although he believed Rutherford was a “God
fearing town” and he supported the general effort to get “God into the
schools,” the board had made a mistake. The separation of church and
state had to be maintained in schools because the sectarian nature of
the Gideons’ work would assuredly “create tensions.” Likewise, Rabbi
Herman Schwartz argued that even if principals offered no comment on the
program, several teachers had become “salesmen” for the proposal. The
permission slips had also been prepared by school officials, he noted,
and therefore the entire endeavor bore the formal approval of the
district. Parents echoed these concerns. Mrs. E. K. Ingalls, for
instance, reminded the board there had been a similar controversy in
their high school over the state-mandated practice of Bible reading
during morning assemblies. Catholic students there had refused to read
from the King James Version and were castigated by the principal. Was it
“good teaching,” she asked, for a school to say “you will read the St.
James [sic] version or else”? The superintendent recognized “the right
of each child in the Public Schools to use the religion of his choice”
but maintained that the board had done nothing wrong. The district’s
legal counsel double-checked the law andre assured school officials
that they were in the right. The Gideons, the board decided, could
proceed with their evangelism in Rutherford’s schools.
But
before they could begin, a pair of parents filed for an injunction.
Bernard Tudor and Ralph Lecoque, Jewish and Catholic, respectively,
asserted that the Gideon Bible was a “sectarian work of peculiar
religious value and significance to the Protestant faith.” Its embrace
by the schools therefore amounted to an establishment of sectarian
religion. Their complaints quickly drew national attention. The Catholic
diocese and the American Jewish Committee rallied behind them. Notably,
civil liberties organizations did as well. While they still held that
religious invocations at the national level were relatively harmless, in
such local manifestations civil libertarians identified individuals who
felt personally wronged by new religious policies and, more important,
who would serve as plaintiffs in lawsuits against them. In March 1953, a
trial judge in Hackensack heard arguments in Tudor v. Board of
Education of Rutherford and the Gideons International. Leo Pfeffer, a
prominent advocate for the separation of church and state, represented
the plaintiffs. Bringing forth an array of witnesses with expertise in
religion, law, and even child psychology, Pfeffer argued that the school
board displayed an “unconstitutional preference” for Protestantism by
embracing the Gideons and, as a result, infringed on the religious
liberties of Catholic and Jewish children. The trial judge disagreed,
but the New Jersey Supreme Court reversed his opinion in December,
issuing a unanimous decision condemning the school board’s actions as
clear “favoritism” of one faith.
For the
Gideons, it was a stunning blow. Bewildered by the objections to what
they saw as a selfless act of kindness, they were doubly shocked that
the New Jersey Supreme Court had sided against them. (Searching for an
explanation forty years later, the head of the Gideons could only
surmise that “Satan has been and still is vigorously opposed to this
particular program.”) The organization’s leaders instructed local Gideon
camps to hold prayer meetings to determine if they should appeal to the
US Supreme Court. The Gideons’ leaders ultimately decided God wanted
them to do so, but the justices refused to revisit the case in the fall
of 1954. Though disheartened, the Gideons later realized the development
had been a “blessing in disguise” because it meant the lower court’s
ruling would be limited to New Jersey. And so they continued to
distribute their edition of the New Testament in public schools across
the country, discovering that legal and educational responses to their
work varied considerably. In Pennsylvania, the attorney general ruled
that the Gideons’ work was clearly unconstitutional; in Minnesota, his
counterpart found nothing wrong. A suburban school board in Connecticut
reported it had “successfully resisted” the Gideons’ efforts; in Dade
County, Florida, officials believed there was nothing to resist.
By
the late 1950s, the Gideons’ campaign provided vivid evidence of the
varied legal landscape on issues of church and state. A survey of school
systems across the forty-eight states showed that roughly 43 percent of
districts allowed the distribution of Gideon Bibles. Small towns were
most likely to accept the Gideons’ gifts, with 50 percent of communities
with populations under twenty-five hundred doing so. In contrast,
larger cities tended to reject the offer, with only 32 percent of
districts in areas of twenty-five thousand people or more allowing it.
There were regional differences as well. The more rural South and
Midwest proved most amenable to the program, with 55 percent and 50
percent of school systems, respectively, allowing it. In the West, 40
percent of districts sanctioned the practice, while in the more
urbanized Northeast, only 26 percent did so. Regardless of location,
there was always some degree of protest. In districts in the Northeast,
West, and Midwest that allowed the Gideons to distribute their
literature at schools, 33 percent, 32 percent, and 25 percent,
respectively, still reported some form of organized objection. Even in
the overwhelmingly Protestant South, 8 percent of school districts with
Gideons’ programs faced protests of some kind.
As
the controversies made clear, public schools became a contentious site
in the postwar rise of religious nationalism. In the eyes of those
seeking to link piety and patriotism, schools were the obvious place to
begin. Many already employed some type of traditional daily prayers or
organized Bible readings, and often both. In the postwar era, new
practices—such as the addition of “under God” to the Pledge of
Allegiance recited by millions of schoolchildren each morning—had been
adopted with little objection. But as the religious revival moved from
the national level, where vaguely defined ceremonial deism held sway, to
individual schools and districts, it necessarily took forms that were
at once more concrete and more complicated. Educators at the state and
local level required religious programs to be as detailed as the rest of
their curricula, and as a result, they soon found themselves involved
in controversies that national leaders had managed to avoid. While
prominent voices in political and popular culture had encouraged a
return to prayer in general, state-level administrators felt the need to
choose or compose specific prayers for all schoolchildren to recite as
one. Likewise, while religious leaders had urged Americans to turn to
the Bible of their choosing, local educators had to pick a particular
version, invariably offending one sect or another. And so, as they
attempted to channel the “very vague religion” of the Eisenhower era
into specific programs, school officials across the country sparked
local controversies that, in turn, had national ramifications.The
concept of “one nation under God” had seemed a simple, elegant way to
bring together the citizens of a broadly religious country, but at the
local level, as the Gideons had discovered, Americans were anything but
united.
Excerpted with permission from “One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America”
by Kevin M. Kruse. Available from Basic Books, a member of The Perseus
Books Group. Copyright © 2015. This excerpt first appeared on
Salon.com
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