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Pervasively Sectarian Institutions
Research by Jim Allison.
As noted in our treatment of Everson v. Board of Education and
the Lemon v. Kurtzman, the Supreme Court will allow states to
provide some support to religious institutions so long as that
support benefits only the secular aspects of those institutions.
But this raises the issue of whether it is always possible to
separate the religious from the secular for the purpose of public
funding. There is a difference, for example, between funding a
religiously-affiliated welfare agency that does not proselytize
its clients (or otherwise discriminate on the basis of religion),
and a private school that interjects religion into most of its
classes. In the former case one can receive publicly funded
services without being exposed to religious messages; this is not,
however, an option in religious schools.
Institutions that combine the sacred and the secular so
completely that they cannot be separated are called pervasively
sectarian institutions. Generally, it is very difficult for such
institutions to receive public funding. In Meek v. Pittenger
(1975), for example, the Supreme Court held
...that a state loan of secular instructional materials and
equipment to religiously based schools...violated the First
Amendment, largely because "the predominantly religious character
of the schools" meant the sacred and the secular could not be
neatly separated and only the secular aided. The sacred and
secular were so intertwined, the Court ruled, that to aid one was
to aid the other.
It would simply ignore reality to attempt to separate secular
educational functions from the predominantly religious role
performed by many of Pennsylvania's church-related elementary and
secondary schools and to then characterize Act 195 as channeling
aid to the secular without providing direct aid to the sectarian
(Stephen Monsma, When Sacred and Secular Mix: Religious Nonprofit
Organizations and Public Money, p. 33).
Similarly, in Grand Rapids v. Ball (1985), the Court struck down
a Michigan program that provided religious schools with public
school teachers for the purpose of teaching certain secular
classes:
The Court ruled against this program in large part because it
judged religion was being advanced in violation of the second
aspect of the Lemon test. This was true, the Court ruled, since
the pervasively sectarian nature of the schools meant "students
would he unlikely to discern the crucial difference between the
religious school classes and the public school" classes, even if
the latter were successfully kept free of religious
indoctrination. In these circumstances a "symbolic union of
government and religion" would be created that would have the
effect of advancing religion in violation of the establishment
provision of the First Amendment. In short, public money flowing
to "pervasively sectarian" schools runs the danger both of
excessive entanglement of government and religion and of
impermissibly advancing or endorsing religion. (Stephen Monsma,
When Sacred and Secular Mix: Religious Nonprofit Organizations
and Public Money, p. 33).
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