Checker’s No Thomas Jefferson

In a letter to the Gadfly, “Tarek’s No Martin Luther,” Checker Finn demonstrates just why Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation” between church and state is an essential foundation of public education and of schools supported with public, taxpayer funds.

Finn tells us that he is “a long-time booster” of the idea of religious charter schools — so much so that he has publicly committed himself to it in the pages of Education Week in the past.

But he has a problem with the unsigned argument put forward on behalf of religious charter schools in a previous Gadfly. The religious charter school cited in the piece — Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy — was of the Islamic faith. Finn has nothing against “that faith per se,” he quickly assures us, and he “assumes” that Ziyad Academy is not a “fundamentalist madrassas.” But he has a problem nonetheless.

Finn says his problem lies here: one of the strongest arguments of school choice critics is that it will lead to balkanization, a destruction of our common civic culture, as marginal, anti-social groups sponsor Klan schools and witchcraft schools. While Ziyad Academy is not, he accepts on faith, their functional equivalent, he believes it will make many Americans queasy. Far better if the prototypes of religious charter schools “carried names like Martin Luther (or Martin Luther King), John Wesley, Notre Dame, and Brandeis.”

There are New York City public schools that already carry the names of Martin Luther King and Brandeis. They do not teach the religious faiths of either of these great Americans, but the powerful civic contribution of each to American democratic traditions and practices. These schools do not hide the role of religious faith as powerful inspirations of the civic visions of King or Brandeis, but they understand that their can be — and are — many different sources for democratic civic culture, some religious and some secular.

Indeed, a vital component of both men’s contribution to American democratic civic faith was a pluralist ethic of religious toleration that would not allow them to single out one faith community, however unpopular at a given historical moment, for discriminatory treatment. Like Jefferson before them, both King and Brandeis recognized that once the state decides which religions it will support and which it will refrain from supporting, it has begun a process that leads to the establishment of a sectarian government, violative of freedom of individual conscience, and a politicized faith, dependent upon the state for its vitality.

For as certainly as even a moderate, non-fundamentalist Islamic public school will make Finn and others uneasy, a fundamentalist Baptist public school, a traditionalist Catholic public school, an ultra-orthodox Jewish public school, a Mormon public school and so on will make other Americans — perhaps many more Americans — equally uneasy. By what reasonable criteria can one decide that public support should be withheld from a moderate Islamic school, but not from an extreme Christian or Jewish one? And who gets to decide when a religious school is moderate enough for public support?

The democratic civic culture which can best withstand Balkanization is one that respects the plurality of sincere religious and ethical belief by separating it from the decision-making power of the state. And that is as true of public charter schools, as it is true of public district schools.

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