Evangelicals Were Against Public Funding for Religious Schools Before They Were For It

The Supreme Court’s Trinity Lutheran decision has me thinking about school vouchers and Blaine Amendments. There’s something very strange at work in current evangelical support for public funding for Christian schools (or, in the case of Trinity Lutheran, public preschools). Let’s take a quick jaunt through history, shall we?

When Horace Mann created the nation’s first public school system in the 1840s, there were many questions about school funding left to be resolved. Until that point, schools operated in a variety of ways—there were private schools, and there were charity schools. (There were also “Sunday schools” for children who worked all week.) Would the government establish its own schools, separate from existing schools, or would it instead provide funding for any institution that educated children?

These questions were, for a time, open and unsettled.

The anti-Catholic sentiment rife in the young nation made many existing schools, including the new “common” schools, uncomfortable places for Catholic children. Additionally, Catholic parents whom worried that their children would lose their culture and their religion and be forced into the dominant Protestant mold of the nation—and indeed, the new “common” schools were explicitly Protestant. So the Catholic leadership requested funds for its own schools.

After all, Catholics argued, their schools were educating children. Isn’t that what the states wanted to provide, through public funding? Education of children? This argument is very similar (if not identical) to the arguments currently made in favor of vouchers. The point is the government funding education, voucher advocates say. Whether the government runs the schools providing that education is unimportant, so long as children are being educated.

Needless to say, the Protestant majority was not convinced.

Yes—that really was the reaction. In a country rife with anti-Catholicism, Catholic requests for public funding for their schools were soundly rejected by the country’s Protestant majority. Nearly forty states passed Blaine Amendments, amending their Constitutions to prevent state monies from going to religious schools—any religious schools.

In the late 1800s, Catholic schools were the most visible religiously affiliated primary and secondary schools. While there were a few Protestant denominations that created their own systems of private schools (such as the Christian Reformed Church and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod), the vast majority of the evangelical Protestant majority was content with the public schools. This is not surprising, given that the public schools were evangelical and Protestant in form and teaching.

Evangelicals were dead-set against public funding for religious schools for well over a century. What changed? Evangelicals began founding religious schools of their own. As long as the conversation was about public funding for other people’s religious schools, evangelicals were against it. When the conversation was about public funding for their won religious schools, evangelicals changed course.

Evangelical voucher advocates are left fighting those pesky Blaine Amendments—amendments enacted by their evangelical forebears—which have in some states blocked vouchers from going to private schools.

After Trinity Lutheran, however, that may change.

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