The Threats and Promises of Religious Freedom

Last updated on: January 14, 2025 at 12:33 pm by Melanie Springer Mock

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The Threats and Promises of Religious Freedom 2025-01-14T12:33:52-08:00 Melanie Springer Mock

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This week I begin my 48th semester as a college instructor at a faith-based institution. (I also taught as a graduate student at state schools, so my total teaching tally is nearer to 60 semesters.) At George Fox University, we are encouraged—required, even—to bring our Christian faith to the classroom, and I have cherished the opportunity to openly express my love for Jesus in the vocational space I’ve inhabited for several decades now.

The integration of my faith with learning has been a vibrant part of my life as a teacher and a scholar; and reading and writing through a lens of faith has also helped me become a better Christian and a better human. I’m grateful for the opportunity to teach in the same institution for so long, and to be challenged each day to grow deeper in my understanding of Jesus alongside an understanding of my discipline.

Still, despite (or maybe because of) the benefits I’ve reaped from working in Christian education, I believe ardently, fiercely, in the freedom of religious expression codified by the Constitution. And because I believe ardently in this, I also am certain that Christian faith has no place in public education.

A neon sign that says Freedom.

Photo credit: Kristina V. of Unsplash

Religious Freedom Faces Threats

There was a time when this seemed an acceptable, perhaps mainstream, position to hold. Even though my fourth-grade teacher taught us scripture memorization at the public school I attended, this was not the norm; by the time I reached high school, in the mid-1980s, we couldn’t have a school-sponsored baccalaureate ceremony, because doing so implied no separation between faith and public education.

Of course those are just anecdotal examples. Damon Maryl has traced the history of church/state separation in public education over the last 60 years, noting that “American education has been governed by a policy of ‘strict separation’ of church and state that formally disallowed both the teaching of religion in public schools, and public funding for religious schools.” Despite occasional attempts to bring (primarily Christian) faith into the public classroom, Maryl writes that it was only more recently that the church/state separation has become fractured completely, thanks to Supreme Court rulings and, I would add, to the concurrent ascendency of Christian nationalism.

So that now, a high school football coach can pray at the 50-yard line alongside his players after a game, and he is heralded a hero by the Christian right. Ryan Waters, state superintendent of Oklahoma public schools, can ask taxpayers for $3 million to assure that every classroom in his state has a Bible, and can order 500 Trump Bibles to be placed in Advanced Placement Government classes. In Louisiana last summer, Governor Jeff Landry decreed that every public school classroom display the ten commandments. And President-elect Trump has vowed to “bring back prayer to public schools,” part of his plan to rebuild public education.

In my hometown, there have been some efforts to erase the wall between church/state separation, especially when an alt-right slate of directors took over the school board, demonized teachers as “indoctrinators,” and used campaign materials that imagined their competitors as satanic. One director consistently read scripture during meetings, and argued for the right of every classroom teacher to have a Bible on their shelves.

The Promise of Religious Freedom

These attempts to demolish the wall between church and state have been troubling to me, not despite my faith, but because of it. As a Mennonite, I learned early and often that the freedom to practice faith apart from state-sponsored religion was sacrosanct, reflected in the stories of early Anabaptist martyrs I heard at home and at church. This martyrdom led Anabaptists in Europe to believe wholly in the need for separation of church and state, and they fled persecution from one church-state, and then others, to practice their religion freely.

My great-grandparents fled Russia for Kansas, hoping to freely express their faith apart from the state’s dictates. They found a place to be the “quiet of the land,” living in insular communities, farming, establishing churches. This worked out pretty well for Mennonites, though my Ph.D. dissertation, about Mennonite conscientious objectors in World War One, tells the story about how the United States did not always live up to its constitutional promises.

On National Religious Freedom Day, it’s important to celebrate those constitutional promises, acknowledging that now more than ever, they still matter. They make it possible for people to worship however they want, unthreatened by the dictates of the state. They make it possible for children to learn without being persuaded by teachers, even well-meaning ones, to follow a faith that is not their own. They make it possible for us to continue living in a plural society, where holding a belief system different than our neighbors does not mean condemnation and death.

After nearly 25 years of working in Christian higher education, I am still not sure how to best integrate my faith in the classroom, although it’s something I work on each and every day. I’m grateful for the opportunity to do this work, but I also know, if I were teaching in a state school, I’d find ways to express my faith, not through vocal prayer or scripture reading, but in how I treated students, in how I respected those different than me, in how I cared for those on the margins.

Because here’s what I know: a faith-based education is not a hail-Mary prayer spoken after a game. It’s not a ten commandments placard, posted to a classroom wall. It’s not a Trump Bible, being used to teach American government. It’s not imposing my faith on others, and demanding that others accept my belief as theirs, too. When we decide that these kinds of faith expressions should be a part of any public school classroom, we are not truly free.

General Christian

Education and Religion

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church/state separation

National Religious Freedom Day

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