The separation of religion and state is a fundamental principle of American constitutional democracy, but agreement over the proper relationship between God and Caesar is a far from settled matter. The concern of the framers of the Constitution for religious freedom is reflected in the First Amendment, which prohibits Congress from making laws respecting the establishment of religion or restricting the free exercise of religious beliefs. The language employed is enigmatic, reflecting the delicate balance that the Constitution seeks to strike among the individual, the state and religion. The mosaic of religious groups in colonial America and the concern by the Founders to protect their religious freedom was “one of the forces that ultimately led to the adoption of a secular Constitution that included specific mention of free exercise and disestablishment” (Pfeffer, 1977: 13).

As the branch of government whose responsibility it is to decide the constitutionality of federal and state laws that challenge the relationship between religion and the state, the judiciary is faced with the unenviable task of adjudicating disputes that fall within the language of the First Amendment. Since the 1940s, when it first began applying the religion clauses to the states, the Court has ruled on the constitutionality of prayer and Bible reading in public schools, government assistance to parochial schools as well as general issues of what the state may legitimately demand from an individual without impinging on the free exercise of his or her religious beliefs. The aim of the Court has been to strike a balance between respect for the role of religion in American public life while prohibiting state preference for any religious faith. It is hardly surprising, then, that the fruits of its labors have been greeted with less than unanimous satisfaction from the competing interests of religious and non-religious groups. To expect anything more would be to discount the complex question of what limits the Constitution places on religion as a moral and educational component in our public and social order.

Rarely in American politics is there a confluence of events that creates a dramatic clash of issues. The Texas textbook controversy and two recent federal court cases pitted opposing interest groups against each other—with illuminating results.

The Religious Right and Censorship

Protestant evangelicals and other fundamentalist Christians share a common belief in the inerrancy of the Bible and a constellation of attitudes based on localism, conventional moral standards, traditionalist family values, and vocal “Americanism” (Guth, 1983, p. 64). Traditionally, evangelical and fundamentalist church members and their leaders have been among the least politically active groups in America. These sects are dominated by adherents who are more rural and less wealthy than other nonfundamentalists, and are led by conservative, nonpolitical pastors. The many fundamentalist denominations are congregationally based, and historically have remained quite separate as a result of infighting and rivalry over interpretation of scripture.

By the mid-1970s, however, government policies on affirmative action, Supreme Court decisions on abortion, civil rights and school prayer, and social movements among women, gays and anti-war protestors threatened fundamentalists' traditional beliefs and values. Fundamentalist leaders began to speak out, reflecting their followers' fears. Groups began to appear that translated fundamentalist values into rhetoric and then into political action. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker, Oral Roberts, James Robison, Rex Humbard and others took their message to vast audiences as their church services and religious talk shows began appearing on hundreds of television stations. As the evangelists' audiences grew, the content of the shows grew more political, as the preachers urged their viewers to act on their beliefs.

An implicit understanding, seldom bluntly articulated, has come apart. The federated sovereign states, nearly four centuries in building since the first European colonizations, are grappling with a dilemma not only in institutional processes and structures but also about consensus on dominant ideology.

Nothing illustrates the strange unraveling of federalism's implicit and pragmatically informal truce better than the present Great Textbook Controversy. In essence, it is a new states' rights fuss about super states versus small states versus a national insistence on uniform high standards in public education.

Public educational institutions have long represented the American Dream to our nation of newcomers and ever-mobile population. The First Amendment's No Establishment “Wall” meant that parents of diverse value systems could build a new community consensus around common needs at the school. By mid-twentieth century the U.S. high school had become the most important rite of passage into full U.S. citizenship and adulthood. No wonder, then, that each “blow” to the most cherished and legitimizing institution of individual communities has aroused such emotion. The local high school was the way into the great continental economy and culture.

In 1920, John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner reported the results of an experiment with an eleven-month old infant, “Albert B” (Watson and Rayner, 1920). Their study of this single subject was methodologically flawed and produced ambiguous results. Nevertheless, it became the psychology textbook classic case of conditioned emotional responses. With the exception of Pavlov's dogs, probably no story has been cited more often than that of “Little Albert.”

I was led to the Little Albert story as the result of an earlier study of genetics textbooks. Some years ago, I began work on a history of the “nature-nurture” controversy. One aspect of this project involved an analysis of textbook treatments of the genetics of intelligence. I had expected to find a rough continuity of views from the 1920s until the late 1970s, when the effects of the Cyril Burt scandal should have been fully felt in genetics texts. (The claim of a high heritability for I.Q. was supported primarily by Burt's [fabricated] studies of separated identical twins. Leon Kamin identified serious problems with Burt's results in 1974, although actual fraud was not proved until 1979 [see Kamin, 1974; Hearnshaw, 1979].)

Who has the right and responsibility to determine the content of education about foreign affairs? Should the Department of Education (DOE) seek to influence what the schools and universities teach? These questions are the subject of a smoldering debate sparked by the regional office of the DOE in Denver, Colorado. Answers to them would tell us a great deal about the environment for making foreign policy.

There can be no doubt that in the United States, knowledge of foreign policy problems is extremely low. Surveys regularly show that in comparison to students overseas, American students lag in their awareness of other cultures. In a study of 30,000 10- and 14-year-olds in nine countries, undertaken by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Americans ranked next to last in their comprehension of foreign cultures. According to a recent New York Times poll, 44 percent of Americans questioned did not know that the Soviet Union and the United States were allies during World War II. Only 14 percent of American respondents in the same poll were aware that the United States had joined Britain, France and Japan in the invasion of Russia to fight the Bolshevik forces in the civil war of 1917 (“Flawed,” 1986). While there is also ignorance in the Soviet Union and other countries about the United States, the place to tackle the problem of provincialism is at home.

It is widely asserted that socialist economies are equalitarian. The distinguished Yale political scientist Charles E. Lindblom labels this proposition undeniable:

It is in communist provision of … some degree of equality in the distribution of income and wealth that the communist claim to approximate the humanitarian vision … seems undeniable. On these fronts communist systems have to be credited with great accomplishments, on the whole probably greater than those of the polyarchies [capitalist democracies] (Lindblom, 1977, p. 226).

Lindblom's influential work, Politics and Markets: The World's Political Economic Systems, expresses the conventional wisdom in academic circles that communist regimes trade freedom and economic prosperity for a leveling of economic benefits, and that capitalist nations opt for freedom and economic prosperity at the sacrifice of equality. Capitalism achieves higher economic growth rates by providing individual incentives for work, productivity, initiative, and enterprise; these incentives necessarily entail inequalities. Socialism, by eliminating private ownership of the means of production, achieves a leveling of wealth and income.

Homelessness is an issue which has emerged as an important one, locally and nationally, over the last six years in a classic “agenda setting” fashion. Public awareness has increased, and public policies developed (at every level of the political system), as the number of homeless persons has increased, and changed character to include more young people, women and children, and intact families. This awareness has been stimulated by events as different as the Community for Creative Non-violence in Washington, D.C. inviting members of Congress to join them in sleeping overnight on outside vents and steam grates to “experience” homelessness to now-annual surveys by the U.S. Conference of Mayors of member cities to gauge the seriousness of the problem and to undergird the requests of increasingly desperate mayors for assistance. The U.S. Congress finally passed the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act in July, 1987, to make $355 million available to states and cities under 15 different program elements, after six years of cutting federal outlays for assisted housing by a cumulative 60 percent from what it would have been based on an FY 1981 baseline budget.

Local government reactions to homelessness have been quite varied. Los Angeles passed an ordinance in December, 1987, at the request of its Venice Beach residents, prohibiting overnight sleeping on beaches. New York City initiated a policy of street “sweeps” intended to forcibly remove and treat 500 of the most severely mentally ill people on the city streets in the next year.

The monograph, Biotechnology: Public Policy and the Social Sciences—Critical Needs in Teaching and Research [Biotechnology], emphasizes the need for social scientists to increase their participation in public policy regarding biotechnology through research, teaching and policy recommendations. The authors (Robert H. Blank, Lynton K. Caldwell, Thomas C. Wiegele, and Raymond A. Zilinskas) persuasively argue that critical issues are at stake here. Although scientific methodology and definitions underlie important choices regarding biotechnology, we face issues that go beyond scientific inquiry and expertise. Recombinant DNA research raised concerns in the late 1970s, which were sufficiently addressed through the NIH guidelines. Now commercial developments in biotechnology are posing other quite significant social and ethical issues. The idea that nonscientists should become actively involved in science policy is not new, but the message bears repeating. It has been standard practice in our society for technical experts to claim exclusive authority in broad areas of decision-making involving technical matters. Only recently, for example, have we begun to insist upon full disclosure from our doctors, and reclaim the right to make important decisions about our own lives and bodies. Technical experts cannot fully address ethical and social concerns. Moreover, in the area of biotechnology, experts have strong interests, both intellectual and financial; they are not likely to make unbiased decisions. These choices properly belong to the political realm.