There is a growing notion that government has the duty to inspect, register, and certify religion as it does meat.

Too many civil libertarians are fighting a rearguard action against an enemy no longer present. Thirty and 40 years ago and longer-the danger seemed

to be the overdominance of religious groups. And

we went to war, not to the tune of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," but chanting words from the First Amendment-"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." For us, "separation of church and state" was a battle cry meaning "Stop the Catholic Church!" Or, for some, "Stop all the churches." Even today some libertarians seem more solicitous for the rights of anti-Semites, homosexuals, and pornographers than they are for the rights of religious bodies to live their chosen model of the good life as guaranteed by the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. In fact, only now are we beginning to recognize that government intervention in religious affairs is the largest, most nebulous, pervasive, and portentous religious-freedom issue of our day.

February, 1981, is a significant date in our growing awareness. On that date, groups representing more than 90 percent of organized religion met in Washington, D.C. The 280 delegates made the conference the most inclusive gathering of religious representatives in the nation's history! Why the meeting of such diverse bodies as the National Council of Churches, the U.S. Catholic Conference, the Synagogue Council of America, the National Association of Evangelicals, the Lutheran Council in the U.S.A., and the Southern Baptist Convention all sponsors-and the Mormons, Salvation Army, Seventh-day Adventists, Christian Scientists, Unitarians, and a number of other unaffiliated bodies? Because of a common concern about government intervention in religious affairs.

At the beginning of the conference the chairman, William P. Thompson, chief executive officer of the United Presbyterian Church, listed 17 areas in which national or state governments have been intervening in religious activities or institutions. Some interventions have been halted by the courts; others are still going on. Some may seem minor or even justifiable, but cumulatively they form an ominous pattern. Among the 17 issues were:

1. Regulation of religious fund-raising.

2. Lobbying disclosure requirements of religious bodies thought to be trying to influence legislation.

3. Regulation of curriculum content and teachers' qualifications in private religious schools.

4. Requirements that church-related colleges institute coeducational sports, hygiene instruction, and dormitory and off-campus residence facilities that they may consider morally objectionable.

5. Threats to such colleges and even theological seminaries to cut off loans or other aid to students if the schools do not report admissions and employment dates by race, sex, and religion, even though the schools receive no direct government aid.

6. Sampling surveys of churches by the Bureau of the Census, requiring voluminous reports, though the Bureau admitted it had no authority to do so.

7. Grand jury interrogation of church workers about internal affairs of churches.

8. Use by intelligence agencies of clergy or missionaries as informants.

9. Subpoenas of ecclesiastical records by parties in civil and criminal suits.

10 Placing a church in receivership because of complaints by dissident members of alleged financial mismanagement. 11. Withdrawal of tax exemption from various religious

Dean M. Kelley is director of religious and civil liberty for the National Council of Churches in the United States.

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groups for alleged "violation of public policy."

12. Definition of what is "religion" or "religious" activity by courts or administrative agencies, contrary to the long-standing definition by churches.

13. Redefinition by courts of ecclesiastical polities, so that hierarchical churches are "congregationalized," while "'connectional"' churches are deemed hierarchical, contrary to their own self-definition.

14. Denying to church agencies or institutions the exemptions afforded to "churches," thus in effect dismembering the churches.

When Government Intervention Is Legitimate

The conference did not assume that government regulation or intervention is never necessary or justifiable; in fact, the concluding paper was entitled "When Is Governmental Intervention Legitimate?" The answer is, When necessary to protect public health and safety (narrowly defined, and not including such amorphous quantities as "public order, good, or morals").

The conference sought to correct the common notion that government knows best and can order the affairs of life better than individuals and private groups can if left to their own devices. Certainly religious groups over the centuries have done at least as well as governments in envisioning and embodying the good life. They invented and initiated general education long before there were public schools, and now the public authorities are trying to tell them how to educate? They pioneered in health care of the poor and aged long before there were public hospitals, and now the public authorities are trying to tell them how to care for people's health needs?-especially when the public institutions of education and health care often fail to live up to the very standards public authorities seek to impose on private agencies?

Private and church-related schools, hospitals, homes, and other institutions usually do as good a job as public institutions. Sometimes they do better, sometimes worse, but the very meaning of better and worse is precisely what government-except in the most obvious matters of health and safety-is not equipped to determine!

A good example is the Amish. Their mode and measure of education have been criticized by state departments of education as not preparing their children to survive and compete in the modern world. But that is exactly what they do not want to do, believing as they do that the modern, technological, materialistic culture is the very opposite of the good life! They want to live a simple agrarian communal life permeated by religious values, and it is for that that they train their children. And they do a pretty good job of it.

The ideal education is one in which the younger generation learns by doing alongside the older generation, thus gaining the knowledge and skills necessary for successful living. Modern society has provided special environments with full-time teachers who try to import a little of the "real" world into the classroom. But the Amish, who were teaching all their members to read and write back in the sixteenth

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century, when there was neither public nor private general education, already have the ideal educational arrangement of life apprenticeship in the "real" world. They educate successfully, with no felons or public dependents. And the public authorities want them to substitute artificial classrooms for that real-life experience!

It is true that not many Amish youngsters become nuclear physicists or want to, or know what that is. But they may be just as well off for that lack. It depends on what one believes the good life to be. And that is precisely the question that the government cannot decide, nor can all the citizenry voting en masse. Civil libertarians can get enthusiastic about the rights of alternate life-styles-of flower children or homosexuals or feminists or environmentalists with their solar-heated, organic-nature communes-but not about the like rights of religious alternative life-styles. The most untraditional alternative life-style going today is the Amish! Private school educators seem to aspire to shape their schools as much like conventional public schools as possible-all, that is, but the Amish, who want their educational process to be as much unlike the conventional model as possible.

Real civil libertarians, it seems to me, should be solicitous for the rights of religious bodies to live out their chosen model of the good life in maximum freedom. But the libertarian image still seems to be antireligious and, specifically, anti-Catholic. Whatever justification there may have been for that concept and strategy 30 or 40 years ago, I submit that it is no longer justified.

The Roman Catholic Church today shows little of the aggressive, autocratic, triumphalist pretensions of a Cardinal Spellman (or when it does, they are soon deflated or disregarded by a very independent laity). The other churches are even less assertive in requiring serious discipleship (or when they do try to assert themselves, no one takes them very seriously, because they don't take themselves very seriously).

Much of the vigor and vitality in American religious life today is in the smaller, newer groups: The Pentecostals. charismatics, evangelicals, and the new religious movements often stigmatized as cults. They are the very ones of whom society is least tolerant-for the ironic reason that they are the ones for whom religion makes a real difference! If they were more placid and conventional in their beliefs and behavior they would get along a lot better—and make a lesser contribution to the health of the nation!

Ultimate Definitions

Vigorous and effective religion, I believe, is of great secular importance to society. The function of religion is to explain the meaning of life in ultimate terms to its adherents. If society does not contain within itself the means for such expression, it will be vulnerable to the maladies of meaninglessness that are increasingly prevalent today: disorientation, anxiety, resentment, bitterness, guilt, despair, vagabondage, various addictions, derangements, escapisms, and even some forms of crime and suicide. Because these may threaten the survival of society itself, it is

of secular importance to society that thriving, effective religious organizations provide that function.

Governments have tried to ensure that function by "establishing" one or more churches to do the job. Unfortunately, the very act of establishing a religion tends to disqualify it for meeting the religious needs of those most needing help: the have-nots, the poor and oppressed of the population. After centuries of costly trial and error it was discovered that governmental help to religion is no real help at all in getting the function of religion performed. So the founders of our nation tried a heroic experiment, and the only workable strategy for the public and the state with respect to religion: to leave it alone.

But now for 200 years we have been struggling with the fascinating riddle of what it means to leave religion alone. It means-among other things—that the government may not espouse, sponsor, promote, support, hinder, or inhibit any religion, all religions, or prefer one religion over another, nor may it become "excessively entangled" with religion. Thus the Establishment Clause has become well defined, but often at the expense of the second clause of the First Amendment: "or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

Expansionist Government

The problem of the moment, as I see it, is no longer resisting the encroachment of expansionist churches, but resisting the encroachment of expansionist government. Too many militant civil libertarians are still fighting the battles of the 1950s, obsessed with the Establishment Clause to the neglect of the Free Exercise Clause. What is the difference? 1. Several federal circuit courts have studied whether public high school students can meet before or after class for religious study, discussion, or prayer on the same basis as other student groups do for nonreligious purposes. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that where a public university has created a "limited public forum" of this kind, religious interests cannot be disadvantaged because of the content of their speech. Two circuit courts have ruled that the same principle does not apply at the high school level, and the Supreme Court has declined to rule in these cases. A third case has now arisen in Pennsylvania, Bender v. Williamsport, and it will be interesting to see which clause of the First Amendment prevails. Will sponsorship by the school of extracurricular religious activities be seen as establishment of religion? Or will the court really focus on the religious liberty rights of the students?

2. Minnesota had enacted a law permitting parents who incur expenses for their children's education to deduct a limited amount of those expenses from their state income tax. This arrangement was challenged by the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union on the ground that it was an establishment of religion. But the federal district court, circuit court, and Supreme Court all found that it was not an establishment of religion, since it included expenses of public as well as private religion. No tax money was paid to parochial schools, and parents acted as a buffer between the government and the schools benefiting from the tax deduction.

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This decision, Mueller v. Allen, allows room for the free exercise of religion without significantly increasing the danger of establishment. Few, if any, parents are going to send their children to parochial school strictly because of the limited relief provided by this deductibility. It is also significant that the Supreme Court refused to base its decision upon the proportion of families benefited by the deduction. To send their children to parochial school was the parents' free choice and constitutionally should not turn on a head count of religious affiliations.

It seems to me that civil libertarians should encounter the danger of the moment-government encroachment—in this area as they have in others. They should take alarm at the growing notion that government has the duty to inspect, register, and certify religion as it does meat. They should be distressed that any citizens' group, but especially a religious one, should be expected, nay, required, to register with and report to public officials if they want a tax exemption, if they want to solicit contributions from the public, or if they want to influence legislation.

These absurd requirements, supposedly designed to prevent or expose fraud or manipulation, have produced elaborate bureaucracies that demand voluminous reports from private groups (thus distracting them from their own work) and that build elaborate files that nobody looks at. And all this they do without in the least inconveniencing groups that really engage in fraud or deception, because they can readily falsify their reports with little danger of detection, since bureaucrats normally view their function as compiling forms and filing them, not using them for any ultimate purpose. And there are already laws against fraud that can be used against those who are defrauding. So 99 percent of law-abiding groups are burdened with onerous and unnecessary and pernicious reportage without unduly deterring the one percent of miscreants the system was designed to catch!

I call it pernicious, above and beyond its bother and futility, because it encourages in the executive branch, the legislative, and even the judicial, as well as in the public at large, the notion that it is appropriate, prudent, even necessary, for the government to ride herd on these groups to prevent supposed dangers of fraud and sharp practice, which, of course, it doesn't.

Hanky-Panky: The Price We Pay

But what if government didn't do all this inspection and regulation? What unimaginable evils might befall? Think of the scandals of the Pallottine Fathers, the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago, Jonestown, and all that! But a moment's reflection might remind us that, notorious as they were, and even if as bad as alleged to be, such scandals comprise a tiny fraction of total religious activities.

The Founders knew when they wrote the First Amendment that some hanky-panky might go on in the name of religion. That is the price of freedom. But they were willing to pay that price and take that risk. Are we less confident in the importance of freedom than they?

May/June, 1984

emy's Satellite School program (CLASS)—originating in Prospect Heights, Illinois and an unknown number have designed their own programs. Most homeschoolers are, in LaFountain's words, **flouting the law,” since CLASS does not seek state approval.

Paul Lindstrom, Christian Liberty's superintendent, says that CLASS now has 3,650 families with 7,000 youngsters in the program nationwide, an increase of 61 percent in one year. Dr. Raymond Moore, of the Hewitt Foundation, says his organization has 15,000 home-schoolers listed in its files. Moore estimates that at least 250,000 youngsters nationwide study at home. His figure is based on known local home schools and is extrapolated into the national schoolage population.

"Home schooling is a stabilizing effect" in my children's lives, Mrs. Carle says, explaining her reasons for taking the five older youngsters still at home out of the public schools nearly three years ago. In public school, she remarked, "Mother tells them one thing, and the teacher another. Who do the children believe?" Mrs. Carle told of an elementary teacher whose lifestyle, she feels, is leading older girls astray. But though parents have complained to the public school authorities, nothing can be done to correct the after-hours behavior of this popular schoolteacher.

"We have a Christian heritage that is important to us," says Maxine Carle. "Our children don't get that heritage in school." Her husband, Stuart, agrees. "God is taken away from our children" in the public schools, he told the Rockland CourierGazette. "Our children are getting taught to do their own thing."

Like several parents interviewed by LIBERTY, a relatively minor but frustrating incident, coupled with learning of the availability of home schooling, precipitated the Carles' pulling their three elementaryaged and two high-school-aged children out of public school in 1981. Jamie, then in grade 7, was behind in his math, and his mother went to see the principal to try to correct the situation. Though the principal treated her cordially, she got nowhere in trying to get Jamie the help he needed.

parents' decision. On national norms, his arithmetic skills stood at grade level 6.2 when he entered CLASS in grade 7 in late fall, and at grade level 6.8 in the spring. But vocabulary and composition areas zoomed from grade level 7.3 to 10.2, and his language skills sprouted from grade level 6.6 to 9.7 in the same period. The other Carle children have shown similar gains.

About that time the Carles went to hear a mother talk on Christian Liberty Academy. This was "exactly the thing" we wanted, Maxine Carle remembers. It sounded "so positive." They enrolled the children in CLASS at once. Bonny and Joshua, now also in the program, have never been to school outside their home.

Jamie's lowa Tests of Basic Skills for that first year seem to confirm the wisdom of his

Public school superintendent William Sternberg, of Rockland, Maine, does ng make a case for the academic superiority public school over home instruction. Be argues that group schooling, whether ablic, private, or parochial, supplies necesary "socialization," "social contacts,or "social development." No opportunit parent can provide, claims Sternberg, equal to one hundred and twenty-five 8- to 13-year-olds lumped together in one setting five and three-quarter hours a day," affording many "spontaneous experiences" not possible at home.

But a Maine father, who chooses not to be identified for fear of harrassment, strongly disagrees. "We were brainwashed," he said of his experience with his two juniorhighers now in their fourth year of home schooling, “into thinking our children had to be in school for their social develop ment." He and his wife say that the youngsters have social contact with other children five days a week, including church and youth activities two or three times weekly.

The Carles likewise feel that their children get adequate social contact. The three older youngsters are now spending at least one day a week hammering nails or painting with the volunteer crew at their Baptist church's new sanctuary-classroom-gymnasium complex. When not working, they are playing basketball with other teens in the church's new gym. The entire family attends some church activity several times a week.

lost in Nebraska three years ago.

Paul Lindstrom reports that very few of his parents have encountered legal harrassment, though many states do mandate official supervision of home schools—a practice that CLASS avoids simply by not reporting to authorities. The Carles, for example, have refused to permit public school personnel to supervise their school. Though the local superintendent has referred the matter to the state attorney general, no word has been heard from that office in the two years since. Lindstrom says that about 100 of some 2,600 CLASS families were threatened during the 19821983 school year. Only three, in Texas, came to court (all were won by CLASS). Lindstrom concedes that several cases were

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ne Dartment of Education's for be use provided parents dles such as demonstrating they are "qualified" to teach the DeNicolas were refused permission by their local board to educate at home. They then applied directly to the state for approval, but in the interim, district superintendent Hartland Cushman had the DeNicolas hauled into court on truancy charges. The judge dismissed the case because the state had by then overruled Cushman's local board. Cushman has even more aggressively pursued the DeNicolas this school year by tying up their home-school application at the local level, preventing direct appeal to the state. Cushman has again had the DeNicolas arrested, and the judge is trying to mediate.

Esther White, Dixfield, Maine, is a Seventh-day Adventist who has chosen home instruction for her youngsters, several of whom are now in high school. She says, "If I had to give one qualification for my ability to teach my children, I would have to answer that it is that I am their mother."' Though she wrote as part of a formal application for home schooling in which she intends to design a program around Rod and Staff (Mennonite) curricula, her reasons express the feelings of many home-school parents: The government has no right, either from a constitutional or Biblical position, to insist on monitoring a parents' home-education program beyond the restraints of ordinary child-abuse laws.

Dr. Raymond Moore supports the right and the advisibility of parents such as the Carles, the DeNicolas, and the Whites to teach at home. "If a parent can read and write, speak clearly," and keeps a "systematic house," then home schooling may be the best course, he said. In fact, it is a "slap in the parent's face to suggest that the State [can] out-parent most fathers and

Eric E. Wiggin is a full-time free-lance writer in Rockland, Maine.

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