Any decision of our Supreme Court on the interrelationship of religion to our American society calls for both restraint and clarity on the part of our religious leaders. Since public order depends upon our acceptance of the Court’s decision on a law until the law itself has been properly changed, we can hardly counsel the contrary. Restraint is a difficult virtue for most men, but we must surely accept the Court’s authority and integrity, and we must admit the subject’s complexity.

Clarity, however, does not violate this restraint. If the McCollum, Engel, and Torcaso judgments establish the pattern in which these new decisions are rooted, those Americans who believe strongly in the religious education of their children must speak up clearly and continually. Both parts of the First Amendment bear personal, as well as judicial, attention.

First, this amendment forbids any “establishment of religion.” Most Protestants, Catholics, and Jews are in total agreement here. But theirs are not the only religions. If the elimination of all mention of God is the ultimate solution to be offered by the Court, is not this practically “the establishment” of another religion, that of secular humanism? This cult, more impressive, in its implications than in its doctrines, has been listed by name in the Court’s decision, Torcaso V. Watkins, 1961, as among the religions “which do not teach what generally is considered a belief in the existence of God.’ To teach the spiritual values and moral imperatives of secular humanism in our public schools is surely as much a violation of the First Amendment as to teach transubstantiation, private interpretation or the Torah.

Secondly, the amendment forbids any interference in the liberty of Americans in respect to the free exercise of their religion. Again, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews uphold this important liberty. There are those among them who want their children to be taught religious values, not only at home and church, but in the school itself. This is increasingly true as the school continues to assume a major, almost an engrossing, role in the whole educational process. They regard the tax-structure by which they support a school system judicially secularized, as an unjust infringement of this liberty.

the outcome of these two developments is in dubious conformity with the two provisions of the First Amendment. To enshrine secular humanism as a quasi-established religion, or to price out of the market the religious liberty of those who seek religious education for their children is to do violence to the interest and longstanding interpretation of this treasured amendment. The latest decisions of the Court intensify, but do not clarify, the issue of our religious pluralism.

What is most needed now is enough American inventiveness to raise our present program of competent public education to a more equitable system, rationally and mutually agreed upon –a system worthy of a nation “under God,” with room for children whose parents want religious education as well as for those whose parents who do not.